One of the biggest moments from Tuesday’s US Senate debate in Texas was about high school sports. For months Sen. Ted Cruz and other Republicans have charged that Democratic Rep. Colin Allred wants to allow “boys in girls’ sports”—citing, among other things, a vote he cast last year against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which aimed to defund school sports programs that allowed transgender athletes to compete as a gender other than what they were assigned at birth. Republican outside groups have been spending almost unfathomable sums of money on this line of attack. A recent New York Times story found that they had spent at least $65 million on various anti-trans ads in key states. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown alone has been targeted by $37 million in anti-trans attacks.

If you are a supporter of trans equality, the line about boys playing girls sports is not technically true, because it rests on a false and malicious premise—opponents are misgendering people who do compete. But everyone in either camp understands who and what this is about, and what exactly Republicans in Washington would like to do about it.

In the last week, Allred, a supporter of the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, has begun to push back in a more aggressive, though sometimes confusing, way. On Friday he responded to the deluge with a direct-to-camera ad in which he says he doesn’t support “boys in girls sports or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.” And on Tuesday night, the former NFL linebacker used his past work experience to flip the issue back on Cruz. After Cruz unspooled a long list of votes where Allred appeared to show a troubling degree of support for trans rights, Allred shot back:

I stand here as a proxy for millions of Texans who are sick and tired of this act. When Cruz starts talking about teen sports, you gotta watch out because the only position he ever played was left out. I’m not trying to be mean, senator, but sit this one out please. Listen, I don’t support boys playing girls sports. I don’t. What I think is that folks should not be discriminated against. And what Sen. Cruz should try to explain to you is why he thinks they should. But ultimately what he’s trying to do is a little game called distraction, to distract you from his record of abandoning us when we need him most. Of not being here when we need him. That’s what he’s trying to do. And that’s why he’s spending so much time on this.

These, in a nutshell, are the two competing theories of what might now be the closest Senate race in the country: Cruz says Allred is a liberal; Allred says Cruz is a loser.

Allred, as my colleague Serena Lin reported earlier this month, is running a far different campaign than Beto O’Rourke did in 2018. O’Rourke was willing to say just about anything and go anywhere. Allred is a lot more cautious about his message, but spending a lot more money on television ads to get it out there. He is pushing a far more centrist set of policies when it comes to the federal government’s role on the southern border.

But Allred can also draw from an even richer list of things that Cruz has done in the last six years to piss people off. While Cruz returned to the subject of trans rights frequently during the debate, Allred spoke again and again about the inherent smallness of the man standing next to him—painting the junior senator as AWOL, a coward, and a lackey.

Twice at the debate, Allred brought up Cruz’s very specific whereabouts on January 6th, 2021, in what felt like an obvious attempt to emasculate the former Princeton debate champ. Here’s one of those moments:

The officers locked all the doors we barred the doors the president walks through to deliver the State of the Union with furniture that we usually use to hold paper, and I texted my wife Ally—who was seven months pregnant with our son Cameron and at home with our son Jordan, who wasn’t yet two—‘Whatever happens I love you.’ And I took off my suit jacket and I was prepared to defend the house floor from the mob. At the same time after he’d gone around the country lying about the election, after he’d been the architect of the attempt to overthrow that election, when that mob came, Senator Cruz was hiding in a Supply Closet. 

“And that’s okay—I don’t want him to get hurt by the mob, I really don’t,” Allred said with a smile. But, he added, “This election is accountability.”

Cruz shook his head during all of this, but Allred was correct: Cruz did hide out in a supply closet. In fact, the anecdote comes from Cruz’s own book, Justice Corrupted.

“He’s never there for us when we need him,” Allred said at another point, linking the insurrection to another infamous episode in Cruz-lore. “When the lights went out in the energy capital of the world, he went to Cancun. On January 6th, when a mob was storming the capital, he was hiding in a supply closet. And when the toughest border security bill in a generation came up in the United States Senate, he took it down. We don’t have to have a senator like this.”

As these exchanges make clear, this line of attack is not neatly partisan or left-right. Allred is hoping to appeal to at least some people who agree with Cruz on transgender equality. He needs the votes of some people who are demanding harsher policies on the southern border, and has adjusted his messaging accordingly. But above all, he is banking that Democrats might just flip this seat if enough people can put aside their differences, and agree on one thing: Ted Cruz is kind of a loser, right?

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.

Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.

Musk’s paid referral strategy has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data.

So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts. 

It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:

Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.

This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.” 

His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)

Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.

This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.

It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:

Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.

After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.

Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)

This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.

The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.

Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.

Musk’s paid referral strategy has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data.

So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts. 

It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:

Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.

This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.” 

His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)

Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.

This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.

It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:

Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.

After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.

Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)

This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.

The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.

When large numbers of migrants, seeking an escape from poverty and dangerous conditions back home, began arriving in a small industrial city in southern Ohio a while back, they brought with them their own set of peculiar beliefs concerning pets.

“They hated domesticated animals and had little use for ‘critters’ that weren’t for eating,” one former resident would later write of the newcomers. The author recounted the story of a migrant who had threatened to feed a relative’s pet steak laced with antifreeze. It was strongly implied that the same man had previously murdered a neighbor’s dog. Local authorities fielded complaints about yet another migrant who kept slaughtering chickens in his backyard and carving them up, right on the spot.

All of this might be an accepted part of the culture where those migrants came from, but to “the established middle class of white Ohioans,” the author argued, the new arrivals “simply didn’t belong.” They had too many children, and they kept bringing even more people with them—many of them needing jobs and housing—as part of an extended chain migration. “[M]any parts of their culture and customs met with roaring disapproval,” the author wrote. The analysis fixated on the “racialness” of the newcomers, who, in the eyes of townies, had brought to the Midwest the habits of Black people from the Deep South.

The author, you may have guessed, was Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and the influx of migrants who threatened hallowed Midwestern values were his relatives. It was his Papaw, James Vance, the senator recounted in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, whose belligerence preceded the untimely passing of a neighbor’s dog. The elder Vance had arrived in Kentucky as a teenager from Eastern Kentucky, where, in his grandson’s account, he faced the possibility of prosecution for his “affair” with a 13-year-old girl (Vance’s Mamaw) and of retribution from her family. 

Vance, who in recent weeks has falsely smeared Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, as a group of cat-abducting “illegal aliens” straining resources and threatening the health and safety of the community, told a different kind of migration story in his book. The outsiders who were drawn to the area by its surplus of industrial jobs, though foreign in their ways, were not “villains,” he wrote: “They were just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way.”

Hillbilly, which chronicles Vance’s tumultuous upbringing in the southern Ohio city of Middletown, where he lived off and on with a mother who suffered from drug addiction, and his elderly Mamaw, made Vance a star when it was published in 2016. As Vance has inched to within a coin toss of the vice presidency, and undergone a political evolution from center-right Trump critic to MAGA warrior, the book and its characters have continued to feature prominently in his message. At his Republican National Convention address in July, Vance pointed to the story of his family, and its ancestral cemetery in Kentucky, as evidence that the United States is “not just an idea,” but a “homeland” for his people.

“The notion of being separated from everyone and everything I loved was terrifying,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly, explaining why he had once covered for his mother’s behavior. “So I shut my mouth, told the social workers everything was fine, and hoped that I wouldn’t lose my family when the court hearing came.” One of the book’s only real policy prescriptions was to roll back regulations on foster-care, so that people without formal accreditation—like his Mamaw—could more easily assume guardianship in complicated family situations.

But at the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Vance used the now-familiar story of his mother’s drug use, which did compel her to live apart from her children for long periods, as justification for a mass deportation program that could separate children from their parents. “I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and has gotten clean,” Vance said at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. “I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels.”

And he offered a defense of his attacks on Haitians with legal status who were drawn to Ohio by work and community—like the Vances long ago—and planted their roots. “You’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” he said. “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed.” In Springfield, Vance took the heroic story of his Middletown hillbillies, and flipped it on its head.

It’s not that Vance lets his “people” off easy. If you’ve read Hillbilly, the pathologizing of Haitians in Ohio, and fear-mongering about their social mores would sound familiar. In his memoir, the senator depicts a regional culture that was, in his estimation, ill-equipped for 21st-century society. 

Vance went after his Scots-Irish “hillbillies” hard. Places like Middletown had too many people who were “immune to hard work,” he wrote. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”

When they did work, it was largely in name only. Vance described timing his own co-workers’ bathroom breaks during a summer job. It was “impossible to fill” a warehouse position “with a long-term employee.” He feared these people’s lifestyles would “make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” The culture of the white working-class “encourages social decay,” he concluded, and many of the area’s residents were a drain on public resources—people who “gamed the welfare system.” 

“I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about,” Vance wrote. “Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole.”

Like the earlier generation of Middletown residents, who watched the hillbilly migration with suspicion, Vance also resorted to racializing the behavior he witnessed. “Bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs,” he concluded.

Vance believed the problems facing communities like Middletown, and by extension Springfield, were a product, in part, of intergenerational trauma and abuse that was endemic to his maternal grandparents’ Appalachian Scots-Irish culture. Most of his family lore “involved the kind of violence that should land someone in jail,” he wrote. His Papaw, the Kentucky migrant, “could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat,” in the words of Vance’s Uncle Jimmy. Vance’s Mamaw once lit his Papaw on fire. 

And while Vance has singled out recently-arrived Haitians as bad drivers, dangerous experiences on the road form a recurring subplot of his book. His grandfather was a habitual drunk driver who would “leave his car on the road, or even sideswipe a telephone pole as he maneuvered.” His grandmother, in Vance’s recounting, may have been worse behind the wheel: “Mamaw was trying to merge onto the highway after a brief stop for gas,” he writes. “She didn’t pay attention to the signs, so we found ourselves headed the wrong way on a one-way exit ramp with angry motorists swerving out of our way.” Young JD once crawled into the backseat while his mother was driving, hoping that wearing two seat belts at once would save him from what seemed like an inevitable crash.

Vance’s criticism of his neighbors in southern Ohio was part of what made the book such a hit among liberal audiences in 2016. Here was a man from Trump Country, validating the judgment of outsiders. As Vance’s Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, said in August, “JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley millionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.”

The difference is that the violent drunks lighting each other on fire are, in Vance’s narrative, the spiritual heart of America. They were the foundation to his idea of a homeland, and they still are.

“Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics,” Vance wrote. “[M]y people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes,” he continued, referring to an incident back in Kentucky, in which a man accused of rape was taken from a jail and killed before he could face trial.

There’s nothing they can’t do to lose that kind of acceptance. There’s nothing the Haitians can do to gain it. Some migrant families must be separated, so that other migrant families are not. You could call all of this hypocrisy if you want, but that would elide what’s really happening. If someone considers themselves the heir of the Southern Bourbons, and waxes nostalgic for the immigration crackdowns of the 1920s, you don’t have to try too hard to square what makes the Scots-Irish lovable sinners and Caribbean transplants an existential threat. The answer is barreling down on you. It’s practically running you off the road.

By the time he endorsed former President Donald Trump in late August, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid had long ceased to be a functioning campaign. He had collapsed in the polls, failed to qualify for the ballot in many states, and basically stopped doing events.

Yet, in death, his campaign found new life—as a way to game the democratic process for his favored candidate.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt.

After dropping out, Kennedy sued to be removed from the ballot in deep red states, and swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, where his presence might take votes away from Trump. But he fought to stay on the ballot in blue states. He continued to encourage people in those places to vote for him for a time, even though he was endorsing Trump. In New York, Kennedy sued to be put back on the ballot. When his effort there was unsuccessful, he appealed to the US Supreme Court—which ruled against him.

One state was happy to accommodate RFK Jr.’s bit of gamesmanship. In North Carolina, a lower court removed Kennedy from the ballot in early September, only for the notoriously partisan North Carolina Supreme Court to step in to “protect voters’ fundamental right to vote their conscience and have that vote count.” The high court ordered the State Board of Elections to restore Kennedy to the ballot. But ballots were already printed. There was also the matter of state law: Early voting by absentee ballot was scheduled to begin on September 6. 

As Mark Joseph Stern explained at Slate, Kennedy had announced that he was suspending his campaign a day after the state’s deadline for removing a candidate from the ballot and only submitted a request to get off the ballot five days after the Trump endorsement. He acted with all the tact and urgency of a man with a dead bear cub in his trunk.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt. It lost two full weeks of early voting because the state supreme court found a special Kennedy Clause in its constitution. 

Finally, after a fairly heroic effort by state and county workers, ballots were set to start being mailed out to in-state voters on September 24. Then, just as the window opened again, Hurricane Helene slammed it shut again.

The storm, which smashed through Florida and southern Appalachia this weekend, caused catastrophic destruction which affected communities are only beginning to take stock of. It washed out roads, knocked out power, killed at least 130 people, and flooded scores of communities. And with that immediate hit, came a number of logistical ripple effects.

Importantly, the US Postal Service announced that it was suspending operations in a number of North Carolina zip codes, and temporarily shuttering post offices in 39 Western North Carolina communities. In the immediate term, that means that people in those areas will have difficulty sending and receiving mail, and the USPS will have difficulty processing it. It is hard enough to simply move around.

As Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board in Wake County (which includes the capital, Raleigh) explained on X, any long-term complications with the delivery and mailing of absentee ballots because of Helene could have an impact well outside the storm’s footprint. Residents who have temporarily relocated, or been displaced, or are simply attending college in a different part of the state, for instance, might be counting on a home county in the affected area to mail them an absentee ballot.

It is not a good idea, while people are struggling to access water and other basic supplies, to try to game out what something actually means for the election. (It is mostly a pointless exercise even when they aren’t.) Although absentee voting surged during the pandemic election of 2020, it fell off in 2022 and residents do not rely on mail ballots the way people in, say, Arizona do. But it goes without saying that weeks of delays in violation of state statutes, followed by a once-in-a-century storm, will have simply made things logistically harder for people than they otherwise would have been or should have. 

Residents will have a far shorter window for early voting than they were supposed to have—and that the law says they should have—because of RFK and the state supreme court. That window will now get even shorter because of the storm. Acts of God may be unavoidable, but shameless acts of partisanship are perhaps not.

By the time he endorsed former President Donald Trump in late August, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid had long ceased to be a functioning campaign. He had collapsed in the polls, failed to qualify for the ballot in many states, and basically stopped doing events.

Yet, in death, his campaign found new life—as a way to game the democratic process for his favored candidate.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt.

After dropping out, Kennedy sued to be removed from the ballot in deep red states, and swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, where his presence might take votes away from Trump. But he fought to stay on the ballot in blue states. He continued to encourage people in those places to vote for him for a time, even though he was endorsing Trump. In New York, Kennedy sued to be put back on the ballot. When his effort there was unsuccessful, he appealed to the US Supreme Court—which ruled against him.

One state was happy to accommodate RFK Jr.’s bit of gamesmanship. In North Carolina, a lower court removed Kennedy from the ballot in early September, only for the notoriously partisan North Carolina Supreme Court to step in to “protect voters’ fundamental right to vote their conscience and have that vote count.” The high court ordered the State Board of Elections to restore Kennedy to the ballot. But ballots were already printed. There was also the matter of state law: Early voting by absentee ballot was scheduled to begin on September 6. 

As Mark Joseph Stern explained at Slate, Kennedy had announced that he was suspending his campaign a day after the state’s deadline for removing a candidate from the ballot and only submitted a request to get off the ballot five days after the Trump endorsement. He acted with all the tact and urgency of a man with a dead bear cub in his trunk.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt. It lost two full weeks of early voting because the state supreme court found a special Kennedy Clause in its constitution. 

Finally, after a fairly heroic effort by state and county workers, ballots were set to start being mailed out to in-state voters on September 24. Then, just as the window opened again, Hurricane Helene slammed it shut again.

The storm, which smashed through Florida and southern Appalachia this weekend, caused catastrophic destruction which affected communities are only beginning to take stock of. It washed out roads, knocked out power, killed at least 130 people, and flooded scores of communities. And with that immediate hit, came a number of logistical ripple effects.

Importantly, the US Postal Service announced that it was suspending operations in a number of North Carolina zip codes, and temporarily shuttering post offices in 39 Western North Carolina communities. In the immediate term, that means that people in those areas will have difficulty sending and receiving mail, and the USPS will have difficulty processing it. It is hard enough to simply move around.

As Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board in Wake County (which includes the capital, Raleigh) explained on X, any long-term complications with the delivery and mailing of absentee ballots because of Helene could have an impact well outside the storm’s footprint. Residents who have temporarily relocated, or been displaced, or are simply attending college in a different part of the state, for instance, might be counting on a home county in the affected area to mail them an absentee ballot.

It is not a good idea, while people are struggling to access water and other basic supplies, to try to game out what something actually means for the election. (It is mostly a pointless exercise even when they aren’t.) Although absentee voting surged during the pandemic election of 2020, it fell off in 2022 and residents do not rely on mail ballots the way people in, say, Arizona do. But it goes without saying that weeks of delays in violation of state statutes, followed by a once-in-a-century storm, will have simply made things logistically harder for people than they otherwise would have been or should have. 

Residents will have a far shorter window for early voting than they were supposed to have—and that the law says they should have—because of RFK and the state supreme court. That window will now get even shorter because of the storm. Acts of God may be unavoidable, but shameless acts of partisanship are perhaps not.

On a quiet Saturday morning in June, a few days before their deadline to collect signatures for a referendum to enshrine the right to an abortion in the Arizona Constitution, Sandy Adler and three friends from Stand Indivisible AZ were standing with clipboards and literature by the entrance to a park in Scottsdale, waiting for the last stragglers to come in.

The four women—Adler, Julie Karcis, Sandy Kravetz, and Barrie Stachel—had been hitting up acquaintances and staking out friendly businesses for months. After the state supreme court reinstated an 1864 territorial law that banned abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, Stachel brought her petition sheets to a house party and collected 25 signatures in half an hour. When Adler showed up at a coffee shop where they often gathered signatures on Sundays, there was a line of people waiting to sign. She kept a stack of petitions in her car, just in case, she told me. Karcis, a notary public, had begun making house calls to bring forms directly to supporters who could not otherwise meet up. 

“We go where the signature is,” Adler said.

By the final weekend, they were running into the sort of problem that any organizer would be glad to have: So many people had already signed that it was becoming harder to find people who hadn’t. In July, Arizona for Abortion Access, the non-partisan coalition that’s leading the referendum campaign, showed up at the secretary of state’s office with 823,685 signed petitions—a record for a citizen-led ballot initiative in Arizona, and well more than double the threshold to get on the ballot. (To put that number in perspective, it’s nearly two-thirds of Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs’ winning vote haul two years ago.)

“[Republicans] are going to try and pull shady maneuvers and scams to get their way. We know to expect the unexpected when it comes to our opposition. We are seeing them out lying about what the measure does, and we’ve seen that in other states.”

The crew from Stand Indivisible was one small part of a movement of more than 7,000 volunteers who fanned out across the state after the campaign kicked off last August. They camped out at tattoo parlors, bookstores, and trailheads; a climbing gym; a crystal shop; and even, organizers boasted, a bunco club for retirees in Bullhead City. The stakes are huge in a state of more than 7 million people, where the repeal of the territorial law this spring left a newer 15 week-ban on the books, and exceptions only for medical emergencies. If Proposition 139, which guarantees the right to an abortion until the point of fetal viability, passes in November, Arizona will become at least the fifth state to adopt such protections by popular vote since the US Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade in 2022.

But the ballot measure could also have ripple effects in the state’s volatile politics. Abortion is likely to play a significant role in the fight for control of the state legislature, where Republicans hold both chambers by one-seat margins, and Democrats are aiming to capitalize on a groundswell of voter enthusiasm for the amendment. Donald Trump has claimed that, in jettisoning Roe, the Supreme Court had merely freed states to experiment with the laws that best fit. Arizona offers a glimpse of what that looks like on the ground: A determined grassroots movement is taking the initiative to restore a constitutional right—while restrictionists, after finally winning the prize they always wanted, have thrown everything at the wall to try to stop them.

Arizona’s abortion politics has shifted dramatically over the last few years, as years of hard-line conservative governance clashed with post-Roe electoral realities. Not long before the Dobbs ruling in 2022, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law banning all abortions after 15 weeks, with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. But the state had never repealed the earlier law from 1864, which banned all abortions, period, except to save the life of the mother. That law was unconstitutional under Roe. But after Dobbs, many Republicans wanted it enforced. Kari Lake, the 2022 nominee for governor who is now the party’s candidate for US Senate, called it a “great law” and believed that Arizona would be “paving the way and setting course for other states to follow.”

Instead, the state supreme court granted an injunction that blocked the 1864 law for nearly two years. When the state supreme court finally upheld the territorial law this spring and the near-total ban went into effect, abortion opponents flailed. Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court had made the law constitutional again, said he was opposed to it. Lake said she was now against the law, denied she had ever supported it, and sometimes still sounded like she was for it. Republicans in the legislature initially blocked efforts to overturn the statute—even gaveling out of session to avoid taking up a repeal bill. Eventually, the legislature did throw out the old law, but with almost every Republican voting against it. By making the 15-week ban the standalone law, they managed to produce an outcome that plenty of Republican leaders claimed they wanted, but which rank-and-file members had mostly opposed at every step of the way.

“I think that if the last couple of months have demonstrated anything to Arizona voters, it is that politicians and judges cannot be entrusted with this very important issue,” Cheryl Bruce, campaign manager for Arizona for Abortion Access, told me, when we met at the group’s office above a coffee shop in Phoenix.

“There is still an extreme ban on the books, and there will be an extreme ban here in Arizona until we pass this ballot measure.”

Supporters of abortion rights briefly tried to gather signatures for a ballot initiative in 2022, but the short timeline between the Dobbs ruling and the midterms doomed the effort. A coalition of major groups including Planned Parenthood, the Latino organizing powerhouse Living United for Change Arizona (LUCHA), and SEIU affiliate Healthcare Rising, committed millions of dollars to get a proper campaign underway in 2023. But as reproductive rights referenda won big in places like Ohio and Michigan, opponents have stepped up their efforts to stop them.

“They are going to try and pull shady maneuvers and scams to get their way,” Bruce predicted in June. “We know to expect the unexpected when it comes to our opposition. We are seeing them out lying about what the measure does, and we’ve seen that in other states. But ultimately voters, I think, can discern what is and is not true and support this issue very broadly.”

Anti-abortion Republicans in Arizona have tried a variety of methods to defeat the referendum. The Arizona Mirror reported in April that Republicans in the legislature were considering putting their own, far more restrictive abortion referendum on the ballot that would be in competition with the citizen-led initiative. A group called It Goes Too Far, which is backed by the right-wing Center for Arizona Policy, led a “Decline to Sign” campaign during the signature drive, with little success. After the signature deadline, the anti-abortion organization Arizona Right to Life sued to stop the referendum from appearing on the ballot, arguing, unsuccessfully, that the law’s wording “misrepresents the initiative’s effect.” And in perhaps the most cynical twist, a Republican-dominated legislative committee, which was responsible for drafting “impartial summaries” of ballot initiatives for voter guides, used the term “unborn human beings” to describe fetuses. A Maricopa County court forced the panel to change its wording in July, but last month, the state supreme court ruled that the language could remain. 

The attempts to undercut the abortion-rights amendment have coincided with a broader effort to make it harder for organizers to get citizen-driven initiatives on the ballot in future elections, after a wave of successes in recent years that raised the minimum wage, and guaranteeing in-state tuition for non-citizens. Another voter question this year, which was placed on the ballot by Republican legislators, would require organizers for proposed constitutional amendments to collect signatures from at least 15 percent of the gubernatorial electorate in each legislative district. Currently, organizers are required to collect the equivalent of 15 percent of the statewide electorate, but without regard to individual districts.

The Arizona referendum is officially non-partisan. The recent successes in Michigan and Ohio—and the defeat of anti-abortion measures in deep-red Kansas and Kentucky—suggest an undercurrent of support for reproductive rights that often cuts across political affiliation. And Arizona is not the only state with an abortion amendment on the ballot this fall. Voters have a chance to guarantee a right to abortion until viability in Nebraska (which currently bans abortions after 12 weeks), and Florida and Missouri (which currently ban abortion entirely). In South Dakota, which also has a total ban, a referendum would restore abortion access for the first trimester, with some exceptions in the second trimester.

Bruce believes that in a notoriously purple state like Arizona, supporters “have a more expansive opportunity here to really run the margin up on what any partisan candidate is going to be able to achieve.” 

A recent survey from Fox News found that voters approved of the Arizona amendment by a three-to-one margin—with 50 percent of Republicans saying they’d vote for it. But that surge in support among Republicans and independents who often support them has not bled over into the ranks of Republican elected officials. While a handful of Republicans broke ranks to repeal the territorial law, no Republican legislator has so far come out in support of the measure to protect abortion until viability. In fact, one of the three Republican votes for repeal in the state house, Tim Dunn, argued in a statement at the time that scrapping the territorial statute was necessary in order to stop the referendum from passing:

“Should this pre-Roe law remain in effect, I firmly believe more lives will be lost over time. The public backlash would result in codifying disturbing and unlimited abortions in the Arizona Constitution, which is something that I cannot allow to happen.”

Democrats, who ran hard against abortion restrictions in 2022 and defeated the author of the 15-week abortion ban in a key swing district, see an opportunity to draw a clear partisan line. The party is hammering the issue in nearly a dozen targeted races across the state. When I dropped by a local Democratic field office in a Phoenix shopping center earlier this year, a few dozen volunteers crowded into the space for a morning canvas tied to the anniversary of the Dobbs decision. There were signs on the wall of the cramped front room for the ballot question, and stacks of clipboards for Deborah Howard, a Democrat running for state house in a key swing district, with scripts advising volunteers to bring up the issue.

“When I was collecting signatures to get on the ballot, my spiel was, ‘Hi, I’m Deborah Howard, and I’m running to be your representative at the state capitol, and I have the Arizona Abortion Access Initiative—would you like to sign it?,’” she told me. “And people ran out the door. That’s when they unlocked their screen door. They came out, they signed the initiative, and once they were done with that, they would look at me, and they’d go ‘And what are you doing? And who are you?’ 

One of the unknown variables was how the legislature’s repeal of the near-total 1864 ban would affect the campaign. The campaign for a tossup state senate seat in LD2, which extends through the suburbs north of Phoenix, offers a test case. There Judy Schwiebert, a Democratic state representative, is facing the incumbent Republican, Shawnna Bolick, who cast a vote to repeal the 1864 law but also gave a floor speech asking voters not to sign petitions for the initiative, signed onto an amicus brief calling for Roe to be overturned, and co-sponsored a 2021 bill that would have made abortion a capital crime. (In a twist, Bolick’s husband, Clint, is a state supreme court justice who had sided with the majority in voting to uphold the territorial ban.) 

Schwiebert told me she was “concerned that when we repealed it, that that would take the air out of the issue.” 

But so far, that hasn’t come to pass, she said—because while voters wanted the legislature to repeal the law, they really wanted abortion to be out of the legislature’s hands. 

“I have found that people at doors don’t want this to be a political issue,” Schwiebert said. “They want this to be an issue that is protected in our Constitution….They’ve seen it be a political football for too long, they want it to be a personal decision.”

On Wednesday night, as prosecutors prepared to unveil a five-count criminal indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting and receiving illegal foreign campaign contributions and doing favors for the government of Turkey, the first-term Democrat released a statement accusing investigators of a vast conspiracy of their own.

“When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system,” Adams said, in a taped address recorded somewhere in Gracie Mansion, he “put the people of New York before party and politics.” The investigation and subsequent criminal charges, Adams implied, were an act of retribution from on high. “I have been facing these lies for months,” he said, “since I began to speak out for all of you.”

Adams—who has proclaimed his innocence of all charges—suggested he was being prosecuted by the Biden regime, in other words, simply because he spoke the truth about immigration.

That is false at the most elemental level. According to the New York Times, the investigation began before Adams was mayor, “and continued in secret until this past fall.” Adams’ big break with the Biden administration over the migrant crisis—which ultimately led to him traveling to Mexico to encourage residents to stop coming to “Puebla York”—came well after he took office. (At first, Adams preferred to criticize Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for busing tens of thousands of migrants to the city, although Abbott did not actually start sending buses until after Adams had incorrectly blamed him for it.) 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story.

To the extent the investigation and the city’s handling of the influx of migrants are linked at all, it is in the way that Adams’ focus on the investigation has directly affected his ability to do his job. When the FBI raided his fundraiser’s home last November, Adams was on his way to a long-awaited meeting at the White House. According to the indictment, the aide placed five phone calls to the mayor before answering her door. Adams canceled his White House meeting and returned to New York to manage the fallout.

Still, a lack of factual foundation has never stopped the New York Post, which laundered Adams’ excuse with the splashed words “I am a target” in extra-large print on its cover.

Others have since picked up the Adams line. “It sounds like if you don’t fall in line with the Biden family or this White House or this administration or the top Democrats, your life can be ruined,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox and Friends on Thursday, conveniently eliding the Justice Department’s recent prosecution of the President Biden’s son.

Trump-backing hedge funder Bill Ackman, never one to say nothing when saying something is an option, expressed his support for Adams’ “bravery” on immigration and added, “I am that much more skeptical when indictments are announced against someone whose views are not welcomed by the party in charge.”

On Thursday night, at a press conference at Trump Tower, Trump himself made the comparison as directly as he could. Per Politico:

I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city, and the federal government should pay us, and we shouldn’t have to take them. And I said: You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year. And I was exactly right. Because that’s what we have—we have people that use the Justice Department and the FBI at levels that have never been seen before.

This is not correct in almost any way. For one thing, many of the migrants that Adams has complained about have come to the United States as asylum seekers. Their particular legal status has made the job more logistically difficult for bureaucrats. But Trump is driving at something important: The Adams indictment is a particularly sour one for the right because the story Adams has been telling for more than a year is one that many conservatives are betting their electoral fortunes on in 2024.

Although Adams is a Democrat who has endorsed Harris, he represents something powerful for the MAGA movement—a leader of a diverse and largely Democratic-voting city who turned into JD Vance when faced with an influx of migrants. Like Vance, Adams has said that newcomers are driving up violent crime in a community where violent crime has actually been going down. Like Vance, he has treated the arrival of migrants as an existential threat to a way of life. If the arrival of new residents did not slow, he said at a town hall last year, they “will destroy New York.” Adams is the highest-profile case of what these conservative really believe—that once you experience what they’ve experienced, you’ll realize what they realize. It’s that old Barry Goldwater saying: Deep down, you know he’s right. 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story—one that also says something important about this political moment. Because so many of its biggest figures have themselves been indicted, the MAGA movement requires a tortured logic to keep going. When the state is coming after you for civil or criminal offenses, it must be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something right. This belief in a vast conspiracy is the bedrock of Trump’s third campaign.

But the Adams indictment—like many of the lawsuits and criminal cases that Trump has ended up as the defendant in—actually suggests a far less paranoid alternative: When the state is coming after you for accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of favors from a company controlled by the Turkish government, it might be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something wrong.

The problem for Trump, and Adams, is that lots of people see through this. You don’t have to conjure up images of a plotting and sinister Joe Biden to figure out why the mayor who asked to be paid in Bitcoin, got city jobs for his friends and family, and spent much of his waking hours holding court in the back of a restaurant ended up in someone’s legal crosshairs. From the day he took office—31 years after God told him he would—Adams has walked around with a big flashing sign saying “investigate me.” No one was really surprised the indictment happened. People were placing bets on when it would drop. Adams might still beat the charges, or turn up exculpatory evidence—perhaps after he remembers the six-digit passcode to that cellphone the feds seized way back when. But there’s no point casting around for a sinister explanation if he doesn’t. Because despite what Adams and Trump might say, sometimes a crook is just a crook—and a crime is just a crime.

On Wednesday night, as prosecutors prepared to unveil a five-count criminal indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting and receiving illegal foreign campaign contributions and doing favors for the government of Turkey, the first-term Democrat released a statement accusing investigators of a vast conspiracy of their own.

“When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system,” Adams said, in a taped address recorded somewhere in Gracie Mansion, he “put the people of New York before party and politics.” The investigation and subsequent criminal charges, Adams implied, were an act of retribution from on high. “I have been facing these lies for months,” he said, “since I began to speak out for all of you.”

Adams—who has now proclaimed his innocence of all charges—suggested he was being prosecuted by the Biden regime, in other words, simply because he spoke the truth about immigration.

That is false at the most elemental level. According to the New York Times, the investigation began before Adams was mayor, “and continued in secret until this past fall.” Adams’ big break with the Biden administration over the migrant crisis—which ultimately led to him traveling to Mexico to encourage residents to stop coming to “Puebla York”—came well after he took office. (At first, Adams preferred to criticize Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for bussing tens of thousands of migrants to the city, although Abbott did not actually start sending buses until after Adams had incorrectly blamed him for it.) 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story.

To the extent the investigation and the city’s handling of the influx of migrants are linked at all, it is in the way that Adams’ focus on the investigation has directly affected his ability to do his job. When the FBI raided his fundraiser’s home last November, Adams was on his way to a long-awaited meeting at the White House. According to the indictment, the aide placed five phone calls to the mayor before answering her door. Adams canceled his White House meeting and returned to New York to manage the fallout.

Still, a lack of factual foundation has never stopped the New York Post, which laundered Adams’ excuse with the splashed words “I am a target” in extra-large print on its cover.

Others have since picked up the Adams line. “It sounds like if you don’t fall in line with the Biden family or this White House or this administration or the top Democrats, your life can be ruined,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox and Friends on Thursday, conveniently eliding the Justice Department’s recent prosecution of the President Biden’s son.

Trump-backing hedge-funder Bill Ackman, never one to say nothing when saying something is an option, expressed his support for Adams’ “bravery” on immigration and added, “I am that much more skeptical when indictments are announced against someone whose views are not welcomed by the party in charge.”

On Thursday night, at a press conference at Trump Tower, Trump himself made the comparison as directly as he could. Per Politico:

I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city, and the federal government should pay us, and we shouldn’t have to take them. And I said: You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year. And I was exactly right. Because that’s what we have—we have people that use the Justice Department and the FBI at levels that have never been seen before.

This is not correct in almost any way. For one thing, many of the migrants that Adams has complained about have come to the United States as asylum seekers. Their particular legal status has made the job more logistically difficult for bureaucrats. But Trump is driving at something important: The Adams indictment is a particularly sour one for the right because the story Adams has been telling for more than a year is one that many conservatives are betting their electoral fortunes on in 2024.

Although Adams is a Democrat who has endorsed Harris, he represents something powerful for the MAGA movement—a leader of a diverse and largely Democratic-voting city who turned into JD Vance when faced with an influx of migrants. Like Vance, Adams has said that newcomers are driving up violent crime in a community where violent crime has actually been going down. Like Vance, he has treated the arrival of migrants as an existential threat to a way of life. If the arrival of new residents did not slow, he said at a town hall last year, they “will destroy New York.” Adams is the highest-profile case of what these conservative really believe—that once you experience what they’ve experienced, you’ll realize what they realize. It’s that old Barry Goldwater saying: Deep down, you know he’s right. 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story—one that also says something important about this political moment. Because so many of its biggest figures have themselves been indicted, the MAGA movement requires a tortured logic to keep going. When the state is coming after you for civil or criminal offenses, it must be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something right. This belief in a vast conspiracy is the bedrock of Trump’s third campaign.

But the Adams indictment—like many of the lawsuits and criminal cases that Trump has ended up as the defendant in—actually suggests a far less paranoid alternative: When the state is coming after you for accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of favors from a company controlled by the Turkish government, it might be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something wrong.

The problem for Trump, and Adams, is that lots of people see through this. You don’t have to conjure up images of a plotting and sinister Joe Biden to figure out why the mayor who asked to be paid in Bitcoin, got city jobs for his friends and family, and spent much of his waking hours holding court in the back of a restaurant ended up in someone’s legal crosshairs. From the day he took office—31 years after God told him he would—Adams has walked around with a big flashing sign saying “investigate me.” No one was really surprised the indictment happened. People were placing bets on when it would drop. Adams might still beat the charges, or turn up exculpatory evidence—perhaps after he remembers the six-digit passcode to that cell phone the Feds seized way back when. But there’s no point casting around for a sinister explanation if he doesn’t. Because despite what Adams and Trump might say, sometimes a crook is just a crook—and a crime is just a crime.

Not long after Eric Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in June 2021, a lot of people who are paid to be smart about such things began to speculate about what was next. 

A Wall Street Journal columnist asked if “Manchin-Adams” was “the future of the Democratic party.” Bret Stephens predicted in the New York Times that “Eric Adams is going to save New York.” Lis Smith, the oft-quoted Democratic consultant, told Politico he was “a voice we really need in the Democratic Party right now.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invited Adams to speak to the group to offer messaging tips. President Joe Biden invited him to the White House, and Ron Klain, the president’s then-chief-of-staff, told a reporter their campaigns were “not dissimilar.” Adams called himself “the Biden of Brooklyn.”

Columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects.

“It’s probably foolish to think a NYC mayor will successfully translate into being a national political figure, but I still think Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden?’” Nate Silver wrote on Twitter in 2022.

“He’s going to be good at getting media attention,” Silver continued, “and he has a chance of carving out a niche that’s different from what other Democrats are offering.”

Well, he’s certainly carved out a niche. On Thursday, after months of intensifying speculation, federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced that Adams had been indicted on five counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams has proclaimed his innocence and has vowed to stay in office while he fights the charges. But we’re now long past the point of anyone talking about his presidential prospects. 

Adams was a convenient figure in 2021 and early 2022—not because of what he actually represented, but because of what they imagined he forestalled. The Biden set, who harbored chips on their shoulders from the 2020 presidential primary—when the Times had endorsed two different senators instead of him—saw a chance to stick it to the elitist progressives who had scorned him, and re-stake their claim as the true tribunes of the Democrats base. People who believed that the protests against police had simply gone too far, saw, in the elevation of an ex-Republican ex-cop, a chance to restore the natural balance of power.

There was always a lot of projection to this picture of Adams. In the general election, he had faced token opposition from a Republican who lived in a studio apartment with 15 cats; it was not clear why Democrats who were arguing over how to beat Republicans should fixate on a Democrat who had never really had to.

The mayoral primary was hardly the proxy contest that national Democrats wanted it to be, either. Adams prevailed by a few thousand votes in a ranked-choice election over a moderate sanitation commissioner. It was an interesting election if you were interested in urban politics, the growing divide between homeowners and renters, the enduring influence of the New York Post, and the voting trends of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and outer-borough Chinese-American small-business owners. But the politics of an election in a one-party city did not neatly map onto Super Tuesday—and Eric Adams was hardly the champion anyone claimed.

According to the indictment, Adams’ alleged corruption dated back to his time as Brooklyn borough president, when he “began building relationships with foreign nationals who were seeking to influence him.” While the depth and details of his alleged entanglement with foreign moneymen was not known during the campaign, the idea that Adams’ relationships with unseemly businesspeople and fixers would lead to his downfall was always there. It wasn’t exactly a huge shock that this is who Eric Adams was. Even Andrew Yang saw this coming:

My opponent has achieved the rare trifecta of being investigated for corruption at the city, state, and federal levels. New Yorkers want a clean break from the politics of the past and we will elect new leadership, indebted only to the people, on June 22. #NYCMayoralDebate pic.twitter.com/OUGKUJWUep

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) June 3, 2021

Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Adams’ three years of governance is that there is, at the moment, astonishingly little New York City government to speak of. The police commissioner resigned in September amid an investigation related to nightclubs. The feds just raided the offices of his interim replacement. Two former fire chiefs were just indicted. The schools chief announced his forthcoming resignation less than a month into the school year, after the FBI seized his phones. The sheriff is being investigated. The city’s chief counsel recently resigned. The health commissioner stepped down. The libraries were part-time for a year because Adams invented a recession. The mayor seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time personally scuttling minor neighborhood improvements with the help of his top-deputy—a vocal opponent (like Adams) of the separation of church and state who has claimed, somewhat plausibly, to have not ridden the subway in 40 years. Basic services don’t work anymore. Adams gave a key to the city to Diddy. In 2023.

The only people who really ate good in Adams’ New York were the cops. The NYPD’s communications department doubled to a whopping 86 staffers, who got to work churning out low-budget Michael Bay films about their raids on student protesters. Police overtime for subway patrol went from $4 million when Adams took office to $155 million. He returned a sense of impunity to the force. Recently, he praised the NYPD for its “restraint” after a cop shot another cop at a subway station, along with three other people—one of whom now has brain damage.

As it happens, columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects for their own causes. The idea that Adams might someday run for president features prominently in the unsealed indictment. During one of his frequent trips to Istanbul, according to prosecutors, an unnamed Turkish businessman agreed to illegally donate at least $50,000 to Adams’ mayoral campaign, “believing that ADAMS might one day be President of the United States and hoping to gain influence.” (Those contributions ultimately fell through, after the businessman’s “legal troubles in Turkey and the United States became more public.”)

The people hyping Eric Adams as the future were always selling a bill of goods. We just didn’t realize it was so literal.

Not long after Eric Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in June 2021, a lot of people who are paid to be smart about such things began to speculate about what was next. 

A Wall Street Journal columnist asked if “Manchin-Adams” was “the future of the Democratic party.” Bret Stephens predicted in the New York Times that “Eric Adams is going to save New York.” Lis Smith, the oft-quoted Democratic consultant, told Politico he was “a voice we really need in the Democratic Party right now.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invited Adams to speak to the group to offer messaging tips. President Joe Biden invited him to the White House, and Ron Klain, the president’s then-chief-of-staff, told a reporter their campaigns were “not dissimilar.” Adams called himself “the Biden of Brooklyn.”

Columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects.

“It’s probably foolish to think a NYC mayor will successfully translate into being a national political figure, but I still think Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden?’” Nate Silver wrote on Twitter in 2022.

“He’s going to be good at getting media attention,” Silver continued, “and he has a chance of carving out a niche that’s different from what other Democrats are offering.”

Well, he’s certainly carved out a niche. On Thursday, after months of intensifying speculation, federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced that Adams had been indicted on five counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams has proclaimed his innocence and has vowed to stay in office while he fights the charges. But we’re now long past the point of anyone talking about his presidential prospects. 

Adams was a convenient figure in 2021 and early 2022—not because of what he actually represented, but because of what they imagined he forestalled. The Biden set, who harbored chips on their shoulders from the 2020 presidential primary—when the Times had endorsed two different senators instead of him—saw a chance to stick it to the elitist progressives who had scorned him, and re-stake their claim as the true tribunes of the Democrats base. People who believed that the protests against police had simply gone too far, saw, in the elevation of an ex-Republican ex-cop, a chance to restore the natural balance of power.

There was always a lot of projection to this picture of Adams. In the general election, he had faced token opposition from a Republican who lived in a studio apartment with 15 cats; it was not clear why Democrats who were arguing over how to beat Republicans should fixate on a Democrat who had never really had to.

The mayoral primary was hardly the proxy contest that national Democrats wanted it to be, either. Adams prevailed by a few thousand votes in a ranked-choice election over a moderate sanitation commissioner. It was an interesting election if you were interested in urban politics, the growing divide between homeowners and renters, the enduring influence of the New York Post, and the voting trends of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and outer-borough Chinese-American small-business owners. But the politics of an election in a one-party city did not neatly map onto Super Tuesday—and Eric Adams was hardly the champion anyone claimed.

According to the indictment, Adams’ alleged corruption dated back to his time as Brooklyn borough president, when he “began building relationships with foreign nationals who were seeking to influence him.” While the depth and details of his alleged entanglement with foreign moneymen was not known during the campaign, the idea that Adams’ relationships with unseemly businesspeople and fixers would lead to his downfall was always there. It wasn’t exactly a huge shock that this is who Eric Adams was. Even Andrew Yang saw this coming:

My opponent has achieved the rare trifecta of being investigated for corruption at the city, state, and federal levels. New Yorkers want a clean break from the politics of the past and we will elect new leadership, indebted only to the people, on June 22. #NYCMayoralDebate pic.twitter.com/OUGKUJWUep

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) June 3, 2021

Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Adams’ three years of governance is that there is, at the moment, astonishingly little New York City government to speak of. The police commissioner resigned in September amid an investigation related to nightclubs. The feds just raided the offices of his interim replacement. Two former fire chiefs were just indicted. The schools chief announced his forthcoming resignation less than a month into the school year, after the FBI seized his phones. The sheriff is being investigated. The city’s chief counsel recently resigned. The health commissioner stepped down. The libraries were part-time for a year because Adams invented a recession. The mayor seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time personally scuttling minor neighborhood improvements with the help of his top-deputy—a vocal opponent (like Adams) of the separation of church and state who has claimed, somewhat plausibly, to have not ridden the subway in 40 years. Basic services don’t work anymore. Adams gave a key to the city to Diddy. In 2023.

The only people who really ate good in Adams’ New York were the cops. The NYPD’s communications department doubled to a whopping 86 staffers, who got to work churning out low-budget Michael Bay films about their raids on student protesters. Police overtime for subway patrol went from $4 million when Adams took office to $155 million. He returned a sense of impunity to the force. Recently, he praised the NYPD for its “restraint” after a cop shot another cop at a subway station, along with three other people—one of whom now has brain damage.

As it happens, columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects for their own causes. The idea that Adams might someday run for president features prominently in the unsealed indictment. During one of his frequent trips to Istanbul, according to prosecutors, an unnamed Turkish businessman agreed to illegally donate at least $50,000 to Adams’ mayoral campaign, “believing that ADAMS might one day be President of the United States and hoping to gain influence.” (Those contributions ultimately fell through, after the businessman’s “legal troubles in Turkey and the United States became more public.”)

The people hyping Eric Adams as the future were always selling a bill of goods. We just didn’t realize it was so literal.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.”

The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works.

It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed.

Like a lot of unfathomably wealthy people who have the resources to harvest their own beef, Zuckerberg now reportedly considers himself a “libertarian.” He has spent a lot of time in recent years attempting to cultivate a personal brand as a sort of happy-go-lucky #GirlDad. His new politics are not as ominous or viscerally off-putting as the red-pilled divorced energy of Elon Musk. But they are a politics. Deciding that you no longer want to advocate for a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform is as political as the act of advocating for it was. Responding to years of conspiracy theories and personal attacks from conservative politicians by cultivating closer relationships with them is a political tactic. According to the report, Zuckerberg twice talked to Donald Trump by phone this summer, while his new Republican political attache has sought to reassure the ex-president that Zuckerberg has no plans to spend money shoring up election infrastructure this year. It does not really get more political than a pleasant phone call with a man who tried a coup.

Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview. In that sense, at least, he and Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a “digital public square” where you can find everything but reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech—including criticism of him.

The truth is there is no such thing as an apolitical oligarch. Zuckerberg’s fortune came from a monopolistic enterprise that’s been used to foment ethnic cleansing and collectively unlearn a century-and-a-half of germ theory. His wealth is sustained and protected by political structures, and his spending and strategic priorities can make or break communities, newsrooms, and democratic norms. When he puts his foot down, you notice it. But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.”

The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works.

It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed.

Like a lot of unfathomably wealthy people who have the resources to harvest their own beef, Zuckerberg now reportedly considers himself a “libertarian.” He has spent a lot of time in recent years attempting to cultivate a personal brand as a sort of happy-go-lucky #GirlDad. His new politics are not as ominous or viscerally off-putting as the red-pilled divorced energy of Elon Musk. But they are a politics. Deciding that you no longer want to advocate for a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform is as political as the act of advocating for it was. Responding to years of conspiracy theories and personal attacks from conservative politicians by cultivating closer relationships with them is a political tactic. According to the report, Zuckerberg twice talked to Donald Trump by phone this summer, while his new Republican political attache has sought to reassure the ex-president that Zuckerberg has no plans to spend money shoring up election infrastructure this year. It does not really get more political than a pleasant phone call with a man who tried a coup.

Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview. In that sense, at least, he and Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a “digital public square” where you can find everything but reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech—including criticism of him.

The truth is there is no such thing as an apolitical oligarch. Zuckerberg’s fortune came from a monopolistic enterprise that’s been used to foment ethnic cleansing and collectively unlearn a century-and-a-half of germ theory. His wealth is sustained and protected by political structures, and his spending and strategic priorities can make or break communities, newsrooms, and democratic norms. When he puts his foot down, you notice it. But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.

In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was buoyed by victories in the “blue wall” states of the Upper Midwest, and a few narrow wins in the South and Southwest. But it was easy to forget that he also picked up another electoral vote in a state where Democrats had been shut out since 2008—Nebraska, a reliably red state that has apportioned its electors by congressional district since 1992. The second district, which includes much of Omaha, is an electoral-college curiosity that was offset by Trump’s victory in the second congressional district of Maine—a reliably blue state that also splits its electoral votes.

This year is different. Thanks to reapportionment following the 2020 census, winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would only get Kamala Harris to 269 electoral votes—an Electoral College tie—and not 270. And because an Electoral College deadlock would be broken by a House of Representative roll-call in which each state delegation gets one vote, an Electoral College tie is effectively an Electoral College loss for Democrats. A win in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina would still put Harris over the top, but the easiest path to 270 is simply to hold onto what Nebraskans refer to as “the blue dot.” Which is why this time, Republicans aren’t satisfied with Nebraska and Maine canceling each other out; they are currently trying to change the rules at the last minute to take Omaha’s vote for themselves.

Trump supporters, and his campaign itself, have been talking about changing Nebraska’s rules for a while. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk held a rally in the second district earlier this year to try to pressure the legislature to make a change, and Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said at the Republican National Convention that he believed the state might still take action. Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has signaled his openness to calling a special session if Republicans in the unicameral legislature can prove they have the votes. But this largely theoretical exercise took on a more concrete tone this week, after NBC News reported South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had traveled to Nebraska on behalf of the Trump campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers on the matter. And according to the Washington Post, Trump himself spoke with a Republican state senator by phone during the meeting to make his case directly.

This might seem a little late in the game to make such a major change to the Electoral College, but that’s the point: This is only happening because it’s so late in the game that Maine, because of its own state laws, can no longer change its own rules in response. It’s hard to come up with any justification for the Electoral College in the year 2024, but the Nebraska gambit makes a mockery of an already broken and deeply undemocratic system.

It’s hardly a done deal. Pillen has said he won’t call a special session unless legislators demonstrate they have a filibuster-proof majority, and as Nebraska Democrats have pointed out, they don’t have the votes right now. According to the Nebraska Examiner, there’s at least one key holdout with a conflicting professional interest—Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who is reportedly considering running for mayor of Omaha next year. He might want to avoid being known in Omaha as the guy who made Omaha irrelevant. In one of the world’s least reassuring statements, a spokesperson told the Examiner Thursday that McDonnell was opposed to any change “as of today.”

Whether Nebraska changes the rules or not, though, Graham’s gambit, and the pressure from the Trump campaign, offers an ominous glimpse of a future that looks a lot like the recent past. One of the dominant storylines following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was the pressure campaign he and his allies mounted on individual Republican officeholders all the way up until January 6. Trump, for instance, invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House and called Republicans in Wayne County to try to pressure them to oppose the certification of Detroit’s election results. He asked Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find” a few thousand votes that would put him over the top. Graham, as it happens, also talked to Raffensperger after the election, in a conversation that the election official considered part of a pressure campaign. (Graham denied any ill intention and was investigated but not charged by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office as part of its probe of 2020 election interference.) I don’t think I need to get into how Trump pressured Mike Pence. 

This is what November and December will look like if Trump loses at the ballot box: a drumbeat of urgent phone calls with Republicans lawmakers and officeholders in which the Republican candidate tries to cajole them into enabling his desired outcome, whether through legal or extra-legal means. If he doesn’t have the votes on Election Day, he will simply try to “find” them—in legislatures, on boards of supervisors, and in judges’ chambers. 

Then again, if Trump does get his way in Lincoln, it just might mean he never has to do any of that.

In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was buoyed by victories in the “blue wall” states of the Upper Midwest, and a few narrow wins in the South and Southwest. But it was easy to forget that he also picked up another electoral vote in a state where Democrats had been shut out since 2008—Nebraska, a reliably red state that has apportioned its electors by congressional district since 1992. The second district, which includes much of Omaha, is an electoral-college curiosity that was offset by Trump’s victory in the second congressional district of Maine—a reliably blue state that also splits its electoral votes.

This year is different. Thanks to reapportionment following the 2020 census, winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would only get Kamala Harris to 269 electoral votes—an Electoral College tie—and not 270. And because an Electoral College deadlock would be broken by a House of Representative roll-call in which each state delegation gets one vote, an Electoral College tie is effectively an Electoral College loss for Democrats. A win in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina would still put Harris over the top, but the easiest path to 270 is simply to hold onto what Nebraskans refer to as “the blue dot.” Which is why this time, Republicans aren’t satisfied with Nebraska and Maine canceling each other out; they are currently trying to change the rules at the last minute to take Omaha’s vote for themselves.

Trump supporters, and his campaign itself, have been talking about changing Nebraska’s rules for a while. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk held a rally in the second district earlier this year to try to pressure the legislature to make a change, and Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said at the Republican National Convention that he believed the state might still take action. Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has signaled his openness to calling a special session if Republicans in the unicameral legislature can prove they have the votes. But this largely theoretical exercise took on a more concrete tone this week, after NBC News reported South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had traveled to Nebraska on behalf of the Trump campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers on the matter. And according to the Washington Post, Trump himself spoke with a Republican state senator by phone during the meeting to make his case directly.

This might seem a little late in the game to make such a major change to the Electoral College, but that’s the point: This is only happening because it’s so late in the game that Maine, because of its own state laws, can no longer change its own rules in response. It’s hard to come up with any justification for the Electoral College in the year 2024, but the Nebraska gambit makes a mockery of an already broken and deeply undemocratic system.

It’s hardly a done deal. Pillen has said he won’t call a special session unless legislators demonstrate they have a filibuster-proof majority, and as Nebraska Democrats have pointed out, they don’t have the votes right now. According to the Nebraska Examiner, there’s at least one key holdout with a conflicting professional interest—Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who is reportedly considering running for mayor of Omaha next year. He might want to avoid being known in Omaha as the guy who made Omaha irrelevant. In one of the world’s least reassuring statements, a spokesperson told the Examiner Thursday that McDonnell was opposed to any change “as of today.”

Whether Nebraska changes the rules or not, though, Graham’s gambit, and the pressure from the Trump campaign, offers an ominous glimpse of a future that looks a lot like the recent past. One of the dominant storylines following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was the pressure campaign he and his allies mounted on individual Republican officeholders all the way up until January 6. Trump, for instance, invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House and called Republicans in Wayne County to try to pressure them to oppose the certification of Detroit’s election results. He asked Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find” a few thousand votes that would put him over the top. Graham, as it happens, also talked to Raffensperger after the election, in a conversation that the election official considered part of a pressure campaign. (Graham denied any ill intention and was investigated but not charged by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office as part of its probe of 2020 election interference.) I don’t think I need to get into how Trump pressured Mike Pence. 

This is what November and December will look like if Trump loses at the ballot box: a drumbeat of urgent phone calls with Republicans lawmakers and officeholders in which the Republican candidate tries to cajole them into enabling his desired outcome, whether through legal or extra-legal means. If he doesn’t have the votes on Election Day, he will simply try to “find” them—in legislatures, on boards of supervisors, and in judges’ chambers. 

Then again, if Trump does get his way in Lincoln, it just might mean he never has to do any of that.

Arizona’s fourth legislative district, located in the suburban heart of Maricopa County, might be the ultimate bellwether in the ultimate bellwether state. And this fall, the stakes are impossibly high, not just at the presidential level—where polls show Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a dead heat—but all the way down the ballot. Republicans control both chambers of the legislature by just one vote. In Arizona, where each legislative district elects two representatives, control of the state house could come down to Democrats’ efforts to flip one seat and hold another in this district that includes parts of Phoenix and Scottsdale.

In their quest to hold onto the legislature, Republicans have turned to a member of a famous Arizona family—Pamela Carter, older sister of the original Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter. On the campaign trail, the candidate Carter has talked up her work as a successful entrepreneur and a record of academic accomplishment, and boasts of having “my family’s full support” for her state house run. But a review of her record and past statements tells a much different story: In contrast to the fourth district’s moderate profile, Carter is a fervently anti-abortion minister who has been “blessed with end-time revelation” and who has made confusing claims about her past. And one notable member of her family is not on board—her famous sister, an advocate for reproductive rights.

“On her website, Pam claims to have her ‘family’s full support,'” Lynda Carter said in a statement to Mother Jones. “I have known Pam my entire life, which is why I sadly cannot endorse her for this or any public office.” 

Pamela Carter has offered an inconsistent accounting of her educational background. Her page at Ballotpedia states that she “earned a master’s degree in Communications and Biblical studies and attended Arizona State University,” which a spokesperson for the elections site confirmed was based on an informational survey that was “verified by the candidate.” “I was raised in Scottsdale, went right here to Arcadia High, ASU, and I just love our city,” she said on a podcast in 2022. This is technically true. Carter did attend ASU, and she does also have a master’s degree. But the reality of her resume is a bit more complicated.

According to an ASU spokesperson, Carter was at one point enrolled at the university, but did not graduate. Instead, according to her LinkedIn page and other interviews, she attended an unspecified bible college in Kansas City, Missouri, and later received a master’s degree in “communications and media studies” from the Primus University of Theology, a Phoenix-based institution that affirms in its mission statement that “life begins at conception.” (One of the prerequisites for admission is that you order a copy of the founder’s book.) Primus, which aims to prepare its students “for their Ministry calling,” is not accredited by any agency recognized by the Department of Education. Instead, it cites the approval of the University Accreditation Association, which evaluates institutions on their adherence to “biblical truths.” Its degree programs are “designed for the specific and singular purpose of qualifying individuals for Christian Ministry.”

But Carter has also described that degree differently in different contexts. Her campaign website during her unsuccessful 2022 campaign for Scottsdale city council said she held a “Master’s Degree in Business and Communications,” a claim she also repeated that year in an interview on a local podcast. In another video that year, she boasted of having a “master’s degree in theology, as well as in mass communications.” A current campaign biography states that “I received my master’s degree in Communications and Biblical studies.”

“On her website, Pam claims to have her ‘family’s full support,'” Lynda Carter said . “I have known Pam my entire life, which is why I sadly cannot endorse her for this or any public office.” 

Carter, who did not respond to requests for comment, has leaned into her biography during her run for office, arguing that her business experiences give her an advantage in the political realm. Foremost among those ventures was Jon Cole Systems, a gym she once owned with her ex-husband, the powerlifter Jon Cole. Newspaper ads for the fitness center sometimes featured Lynda Carter, touting the benefits of Cole’s “TOTAL WOMAN” workout program. 

“It was the largest [gym] in the nation at the time,” Pamela Carter boasted in a 2022 interview, in which she suggested that working people struggling to find housing in Scottsdale needed to hustle as hard as she had when she owned two homes and was helping to run the business in the 1970s.

For a few years, the gym was a major success, with clients such as the Green Bay Packers and members of the Phoenix Suns. But it soon went downhill. The company pursued Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1982, and was sold for $60,000 the next year, according to an Arizona Republic report in 1983. The couple divorced around the same time.

After the gym business fell through, Carter went on to a long career as a Christian wellness influencer, pitching the gospel alongside weight-loss and nutrition tips. She moved to California and hosted a fitness show called “Get in Shape with Pamela Carter” (on the Trinity Broadcasting Network) and another program on CBN called “Fit for Life.”

“I was one of the first and only, that I know, to actually use weights and aerobics to Christian gospel music,” she said in 2022. 

Eventually, after moving to Kansas City in the 1990s to attend Bible college, Carter started a ministry of her own, mixing divine revelation with health and wellness. Ravished Heart Communications Ministries International, which she launched with her second husband, Bruce, after a 50-day prophetic encounter in 2002 in which “the Lord revealed Himself to Pamela as her Messianic Bridegroom,” sold $12 self-help tapes that promised to help followers “lose weight” and defeat “food addiction.” “[Y]ou will learn how to increase your metabolism through Biblical eating habits and get the most out of your workouts. Pamela will also teach you how to overcome and break strongholds emotionally and spiritually that keep you compulsively addicted to overeating,” one two-part series promised. Another tape included a “one-hour prayer session” in which Carter “prays for you to be set free from [food] addiction.”

The ministry aimed to make an impact not just in the Christian dieting space, but in mass media. Carter asked her followers for donations so she could work in Hollywood as an “intercessor”—essentially an activist prayer warrior—and she produced her own content, including a lengthy interview with a woman who claimed that her daughter had been resurrected from the dead; and a feature film about the life of Karla Faye Tucker, the Texas woman who was executed by then-Gov. George W. Bush after converting to Christianity on death row. (Carter played the judge in the movie.)

But she ran into more financial difficulties around this time. Carter and her husband fell into debt during the 2008 Recession, and a chapter-7 bankruptcy filing in 2009 stated that Carter was back in the nutrition business. According to court documents, she was doing “nutritional sales” for Mannatech, a multi-level marketing company. “Pamela’s income comes from pyramid sales and fluctuates every month,” the filing stated, although it never amounted to more than a few hundred dollars. At the time, Mannatech, which had deep links to the Christian Right, was mired in controversy. In 2007, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sued the company, alleging “unlawful, misleading sales practices,” including testimonials that suggested that the supplements had cured autism and cancer, and brought a woman out of a coma. (The company settled with the state in 2009, and ultimately paid $4 million in restitution to customers and $2 million to the state, with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing.)

By 2011, Carter had rebounded: “We are praying for a new skin care line,” the Ravished Heart website announced that year.

Carter was not just pitching products, though. She was selling a very particular kind of theology, rooted in a desire to see the United States “united for Jesus,” and a belief that modern-day prophets—like herself—were transmitting revelations from God. A biography at the ministry stated that Carter “is very passionate about her love for the Lord and has been blessed with end-time revelation of His desire for His bride.” (The full revelation was available for purchase for $25.) She talked frequently about building influence on the “Media mountain” and said in 2011 that she was part of “God’s media army…to be raised up for such a time as this, to take possession of the arts, the entertainment media, the internet.”

The term is often used by proponents of a Christian nationalist movement sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation and a belief its adherents subscribe to known as Seven Mountains Dominionism, which aims to take gain influence over the seven spheres (or “mountains”) of government, education, media, family, entertainment, religion, and business.

In response to a candidate questionnaire from the city of Scottsdale two years ago, Carter said she had “been involved…as a volunteer” with three churches or organizations, all of which had ties to the NAR. They included Intercessors for America, a national prayer organization that warns that “there is an Enemy of our souls and our nation who orchestrates a coordinated battle plan that is discernible and beatable with spiritual weapons.” 

Another group she touted her work with was the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer, whose founding pastor, Mike Bickle, was dismissed last year amid allegations of sexual abuse. The church, where worship services have run 24/7 since 1999, has “been criticized by some pastors for what they describe as unorthodox theology and a cultish atmosphere, charges that Mr. Bickle rejects,” the New York Times reported in 2011. (In response to a Kansas City Star investigation into Bickle earlier this year, the organization emphasized that his alleged abuse predated the church’s creation, while Bickle has admitted to “inappropriate behavior” but not “the more intense sexual activities that some are suggesting.”) Long before he was forced out, Bickle had courted controversy with his assertions from the pulpit that Oprah was a forerunner of the Antichrist and that God sent Hitler to kill Jewish people because they wouldn’t accept Christianity.

Carter has described her foray into politics in ways that mirror her earlier work in “God’s media army.”

“What I’m learning in this whole government mountain thing,” she said in a 2020 conversation with Patricia King, a Phoenix-based minister, is that “the warfare just increases.”

“I think we need to do a lot of battle in the spirit—either certain individuals will repent and get in alignment with God’s will, or they’ll be cut off and replaced,” Carter said in the same video, after King discussed efforts to take back the US House of Representatives that year. “There are many scriptures about that. You know, He allows evil to prosper for a season, that it may be destroyed forever. I believe that’s where we are right now in the United States, and around the world, really.”

In that interview, Carter, who served that year as an advisor to the Trump campaign in the state, said she had acted as a prayer “intercessor” while working as a paid poll worker in Arizona. “I was dancing around, I had so much joy in just praying over every person that came in, you know, it was so fun,” she said. “But there’s also a lot of corruption I saw—not at the poll where I was working but at the election facility—and we just have to really watch and pray, watch and pray, and then you can cut that off in the spirit and then report it.”

In addition to her experience owning the fitness center and her advanced degree, Carter has often championed her involvement with two nonprofits, Help 4 Kidz—which provides food and clothing to needy kids—and the National Latina/Latino Commission. The former, she boasted during her city council campaign, had received the “Martin Luther King Award” for its work, which the nonprofit says it received from President Barack Obama. While the group’s founder was separately honored by the White House for her charitable endeavors, the MLK “Drum Major Award” was in fact a mail-order prize in which the White House would send a ceremonial pin and letter to anyone who had been nominated by a neighbor. The commission, which sounds like an official agency, is in fact a Christian organization designed “to mentor on the seven spheres of influence,” and notes on an archived version of its website (which has been down since June) that it was “seeking [sponsors] to Build Bomb Shelters near schools” in Israel. The group, which listed Carter as a board member, has a small footprint; the group has not reported more than $50,000 in revenue at any point in the last 12 years.

The overtly Christian language that has defined her life’s work has been less prominent in Carter’s campaigns, first in the 2022 race for city council and now for state representative. She has preferred to discuss her opposition to higher-density construction projects, and fears that migrants to the state are causing crime to spike. 

In her statement opposing Pamela Carter’s candidacy, Lynda Carter praised the late Republican Sen. John McCain for his “decency, justice, and freedom,” while explicitly endorsing both of the Democrats running against her sister:

“As a native Arizonan, I am proud to endorse Kelli Butler and Karen Gresham to represent LD4 in Arizona’s State House. Kelli and Karen are both strong, experienced candidates, born and raised in Arizona,” she said. “They are working mothers fighting for the rights that matter most to Arizonans, especially every child’s right to a quality education.”

Democrats have made inroads in places like LD4 in recent election cycles with an emphasis on protecting public education and reproductive rights from overreach by Republicans at the state capital. Pamela Carter, for her part, has defended the state’s controversial voucher program and vowed to hold the line on one of the biggest issues facing social conservatives in Arizona right now: abortion.

The district offers a glimpse of how reproductive rights is playing at the ballot box in a highly competitive area. Christine Marsh, the district’s Democratic state senator, won her election in 2022 by a little more than 1,000 votes by relentlessly linking a Republican incumbent to the state legislature’s 15-week abortion ban. The current Republican state representative, Matt Gress, was one of three members of his party to break ranks and vote to repeal Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban, which offered no exceptions even for cases of rape. A recent Fox News survey found that supporters of an abortion-rights ballot initiative in Arizona outnumber opponents by roughly three-to-one—and 50-percent of Republicans said they approved. Carter, though, has sung a different tune. 

“Hopefully we will stand and not allow any abortion,” she said in 2022, when asked how the legislature should respond to the repeal of Roe v. Wade. “If I were in that position, I would say no on any abortion.”

At least a few times a week, when no elections are underway, the Maricopa County recorder’s office hosts tours of the Tabulation and Election Center, or MCTEC, a gray, one-story concrete fortress on the edge of downtown Phoenix where as many as 2.4 million ballots will be sorted and counted this fall. Ever since the 2020 election, when President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the county helped Democrats flip the state, the site has been the subject of suspicion, threats, and conspiracies.

In response to the chaotic scenes of 2020, when Alex Jones showed up with a megaphone and declared that it was “1776,” the county installed a 10-foot-high security fence with an intercom system around the entrance. People in four states have been arrested for threatening the recorder, ­Stephen Richer, whose office is responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots. In March, the vice chair of the county GOP joked about lynching him; in July, she led the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention. Richer, a 39-year-old Republican lawyer with thinning red hair, has, in turn, tried to demystify his team’s processes with aggressive transparency.

On a 105-degree Tuesday in June, I joined a small group from a local chamber of commerce for a peek under the hood. Some participants had questions about their own experiences: Why had a relative’s ballot not been counted? What really happened when Sharpie ink bled through a ballot? As we wound through corridors, past rows of printers and stacks of empty USPS bins, Sarah Frechette, deputy registrar outreach coordinator in the recorder’s office, pointed out one safeguard after another. You need a key card to pass through any door, and each card only grants access to certain areas. No one from the recorder’s office can enter the tabulation room—a different agency counts the votes. Just three people have access to the server, which is encased in a small glass room within the tabulation room. No one can enter that room unless another person is present. If ballots are kept overnight, they are stored in secure rooms behind floor-to-ceiling chain-link cages. The only thing missing is a moat.

When we arrived at a beige room with rows of tables where trained workers attempt to verify signatures on mail-in ballots flagged for review, Frechette drew our attention to the ceiling. “Camera…camera…camera…camera,” she said, pointing up. They are everywhere, and they are always on. You can go online and watch the livestreams yourself.

MCTEC is a citadel of lawfulness, where Democrats and Republicans check each other’s work and protect the democratic process in America’s fourth-largest county. Richer refers to the tabulation room as “the holiest of holy rooms.” But outside the metal gates, it’s a different story.

To much of Richer’s party, MCTEC is a crime scene. Almost four years after Joe Biden’s victory, the myth of stolen elections shapes races up and down the ballot and across the state. It has consumed the energy of the legislature and thrown a wrench into the gears of governance through an endless parade of lawsuits and investigations. America’s most volatile swing state is trapped in a time loop: Arizona is where the 2018 election was suspect, the 2020 election never ended, and the 2022 election is literally still being contested.

This obsession with fraud and betrayal has cost Arizona Republicans dearly. What was once a locus of conservative power has shifted slowly but tangibly toward the Democratic column. Republicans have lost a succession of statewide races, alienated independents, and driven officials from their ranks—and sometimes their homes—with threats of violence and retribution. Those defeats have not muted the power of the stolen election narrative; they have reinforced it. In a paranoid party, the biggest winners are the losers. With every setback the Big Lie grows more righteous, more lucrative, and more vital.

The process has at times veered into the comic, but the results are deadly serious. Arizona shows what happens when a conspiracy takes over a party, and election denial becomes not just a tactic but its animating purpose. Processes, such as vote-by-mail, that have for decades made Arizona one of the easiest places in America to vote are now on the chopping block. Officials and low-level workers who have served the public for years are fighting for their jobs—or giving up on them. The very idea that voters should decide elections is viewed with suspicion in some corners of the legislature.

This fall, with Arizona once again poised to play a major role in the presidential election and the fight to control both houses of Congress, and the state legislature up for grabs, election deniers are everywhere. Republicans are no more prepared to accept a Democratic victory now than they were four years ago. And with President Donald Trump leading or within striking distance in most recent polls of the state, the figures who have spent the last four years undercutting the basic workings of democracy might finally reap their rewards.

To see what the recorder’s office is up against, I didn’t have to go far. That same morning, a few blocks north of MCTEC, a small crowd spilled out the doors of a cramped hearing room in the bowels of the Maricopa County Superior Court for the final three arraignments in State of Arizona v. Kelli Ward, et al. The case—in which 11 ­Arizona Republicans and seven other Trump allies were charged with conspiring to submit false Electoral College certificates in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election—is both a commentary and a meta-commentary on the whole state of affairs.

Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general who brought the case, won her election in 2022 by 280 votes; Abe Hamadeh, her Republican opponent, was still contesting the result. Hamadeh had recently filed a fourth appeal, arguing that Mayes should be removed from office and a do-over should be held. He’d been challenging the result for so long that he was now also running for Congress; Anthony Kern, an indicted fake elector since elected to the state Senate, was running against him.

The fake electors were symbols of the state party’s evolution. Prior to 2016, Arizona’s official Republican organizations seesawed between hardcore activists and more mainstream leaders. The Maricopa GOP censured the late Sen. John McCain, champion of the latter faction, three times for purported liberal heresies. In turn, McCain’s allies periodically purged the state and local party of gadflies to restore a veneer of normality. The Trump years, and McCain’s death, effectively settled the debate; even as the electorate in Maricopa County moved to the center, the Republican Party went full MAGA.

Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor who is stepping down at the end of his term after years of threats and abuse, told me that the first signs of an unraveling came in 2018, when Democrats narrowly won three statewide races, including a bid for US Senate. Gates, a 53-year-old lawyer with short graying-brown hair who had previously helmed the state party’s “election integrity” efforts, recalled how Republicans had expressed shock and suspicion at the results, which weren’t called until nearly a week after the election.

Conservatives focused their ire on Richer’s Democratic predecessor, Adrian Fontes, who at the time was responsible for both in-person and mail-in voting. Fontes had run for office on a promise to expand voting access, but presided over a chaotic primary and general election plagued by hourslong waits at some polling stations. The Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors then reached a deal with Fontes in which the board took back control of in-person voting.

“Some of the vitriol in 2019 when I was the chair and I was negotiating that new relationship, I saw it—it was palpable,” Gates said. “Did I see what ended up coming? No, but these pressures were here. They were under the surface and had broken through.”

Afterward, the state GOP enlisted Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer, to conduct an audit of the 2018 election. The 228-page report he produced is striking, both for what it does and doesn’t say. Richer concluded that it was “plausible” Fontes had acted with partisan interest by opening multiple “emergency voting” centers the weekend before Election Day and by continuing to attempt to “cure” mail-in ballots days after polls closed.

Richer’s report also contained traces of past and future conspiracies. His requests for correspondence between Fontes’ office and George Soros, he noted, went unfulfilled. But he also determined Fontes had done nothing illegal, and his report’s allegations of inappropriate behavior were fairly benign and, by Richer’s admission, unsubstantiated. This was a conventional political document, with a conventional political solution. A few months later, Richer declared his candidacy against Fontes. His slogan: “Make the Recorder’s Office Boring Again.”

Behind the scenes, though, the state party was in the midst of a transformation. In 2018, the millennial political activist Charlie Kirk relocated to Arizona from Illinois and began building out a power base around his nonprofit, Turning Point USA, and his PAC, Turning Point Action. Kirk’s Christian nationalist agenda is centered on the Dream City Church in Phoenix, which claimed during the pandemic to have developed a proprietary air-purification system that kills “99.9 percent of Covid within 10 minutes.” (It does not.) He hosts a “Freedom Night in ­America” rally there once a month; Trump has twice campaigned at Dream City.

These MAGA Republicans blamed their setbacks not on Trump, of course, but on electoral malfeasance and the fecklessness of the McCain wing of the party. At the state GOP’s annual meeting in 2019, a handful of Kirk allies, including Turning Point Action’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, and Turning Point USA’s former spokesperson, Jake Hoffman, helped elect Kelli Ward—a right-wing doctor who had once proposed holding a state Senate hearing on chemtrails and waged an ugly primary challenge against McCain—as party chair. (The Arizona Republic reported that Bowyer was working on his own time, not Turning Point’s.) In a harbinger of things to come, the Republic reported, delegates insisted on choosing their new leader via voice vote. They didn’t trust the machines.

“In a paranoid party, the biggest winners are the losers. With every setback the Big Lie grows more righteous, more lucrative, and more vital.”

Trump lost Arizona the next year, at a time when many Arizonans were primed to reject such a loss, and reacted accordingly. Although Richer defeated Fontes, his fellow Republicans almost immediately alleged that something sinister was going down at MCTEC—and soon Richer himself would become the subject of conspiracies. A lawsuit filed by Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Alex Kolodin, on behalf of Bowyer, Hoffman, Ward, and eight other Arizonans who would have served as electors had Trump won, included an affidavit alleging that former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had helped develop the technology used in Arizona voting machines; a claim that Biden’s lead could have been manufactured “with blank ballots filled out by election workers, Dominion or other third parties”; and a reference to a “former US Military Intelligence” expert who was identified only as “Spider.” Ward pressured the Board of Supervisors to stop the certification. When that failed, according to Mayes’ indictment, the 11 Republicans gathered around a conference table at state party headquarters on December 14 to sign their own set of papers declaring that they were Arizona’s rightful electors.

In their arraignment six months later, Trump lawyers Boris Epshteyn and Jenna Ellis, and fake elector Steve Lamon, pleaded not guilty. (Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Ellis, in exchange for her cooperation in the case.) But Trump diehards still view the underlying event with pride. A video of the signing that the state party posted on X is still up. So is a group photo Ward posted, with the message: “Oh yes we did!” This past spring, four days after the indictments dropped, Hoffman, now a state senator, was elected to the Republican National Committee.

The Arizona efforts to “stop the steal” were merely the prelude to an even stranger quest to expose how the election was supposedly stolen. It is hard to summarize what happened next without starting to feel a little insane yourself. In the months that followed, Republican legislators pursued theories that ballots were shredded, that they were imported from South Korea, that drop boxes were illegally stuffed with ballots, that the tabulators were hacked, and that evidence of voter fraud had been incinerated at a farm where 166,000 chickens died in a fire. (The chicken fire did happen, but no ballots were harmed.) The entire party had become Gene Hackman at the end of The Conversation—delirious, destroyed, surrounded by the shattered floorboards of its paranoia.

In Chandler, Arizona, a QAnon-­promoting realtor named Liz Harris tried proving the existence of massive fraud by linking mail-in ballots to vacant lots. But some of her claims could be debunked using Google Maps. Harris was elected to the Statehouse and subsequently expelled for inviting a witness to testify who accused various elected officials of committing crimes on behalf of the Mormon Church and the Sinaloa cartel. In April, she joined Hoffman on the RNC.

The search for clues culminated in 2021, in a monthslong “audit” commissioned by Republican members of the Arizona Senate, paid for by e-commerce kingpin Patrick Byrne, and carried out under the direction of an IT firm called the Cyber Ninjas at a former basketball arena in central Phoenix nicknamed the Madhouse. The Ninja volunteers, one of whom—fake elector Kern—had been on the US Capitol grounds on January 6, were inspired by an inventor named Jovan Pulitzer (not his given name), who claimed to have developed a proprietary system that could detect ballot tampering. They inspected the ballots for evidence of bamboo fibers (to prove they had actually come from China) and shined UV light under them to search for ­watermarks. (Some QAnon followers believed Trump had secretly marked legitimate ballots.) Pulitzer had previously led a search for the Ark of the Covenant. Evidence of fraud proved similarly elusive.

There was plenty of drama on Election Day, as might be expected in a county the size of Maricopa. Take the Sharpies. Voters who showed up at some polling locations were told to fill out their ballots with markers because the ink dries faster. In some cases, the markers bled through to the other side of the ballot, causing panic among voters. Sharpies formed the basis for one of Trump’s post-election lawsuits, but the case was thrown out because there was no evidence the issue prevented votes from being counted. When a voter brought up the subject on the MCTEC tour, a staffer explained why—the ballot’s offset design was crafted specifically to stop bleed-throughs from affecting the tabulation.

But the spectacle was partly the point. During the audit, the Cyber Ninjas’ CEO partnered with a documentary filmmaker (who’d previously argued that aliens had done 9/11) to produce The Deep Rig, a movie that purported to explain how the CIA influenced the 2020 results. The film premiered in 2021 at Dream City—where the state GOP voted to give Ward another term at its annual meeting that year. (The chair election, which this time used paper ballots, mirrored the party’s crackup; one losing candidate alleged that the election was rigged and demanded an audit, which Ward rejected on the grounds that “you certainly don’t allow a challenger who lost an election to demand something that they don’t have the right to.”) The Cyber Ninja audit was a joke, but a useful one. Politicians and activists learned that there were few consequences to indulging the lie. Quite the opposite—refusing to do so might cost you your job, while egging it on could get you a much better one.

No one understood this lesson better than Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor who resigned after questioning the decision to call Arizona for Biden. As the state party attempted to regroup from its recent setbacks, Lake kept election denial front and center during her run for governor in 2022. She won Trump’s endorsement after promising at a Turning Point event to revisit the stolen election as governor, then hosted a rodeo with MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Lake was the sort of candidate the Turning Point crowd had been waiting for: a proto-Trump for a shadow party. She spoke at Dream City, rallied with Kirk and Bowyer, and stumped with the organization’s enterprise director (also a state representative). Lake led a slate of like-minded conservatives who vowed to use their powers to take back what was stolen from them. She filed her first challenge to the vote process before ballots were even mailed out.

A few weeks after the 2022 election, Lake had a dream. As she later recounted in her memoir, Unafraid: Just Getting Started, she found herself drugged, blindfolded, and bound with duct tape in the back of a pickup truck being driven by two men. One, with “a batch of ginger stubble, a color match for his thinning hair,” was named Stephen. The other—“short, with greasy black hair, and a face that seemed incapable of bearing any expression other than smugness”—was called Bill. They had taken her to the desert to kill her but were too incompetent for the job. After Stephen fumbled with his Glock, Bill grabbed the weapon and fired wildly in her direction. When she awoke, Lake wrote, her phone was ringing. It was her attorney, bearing news about her lawsuit challenging the election results.

If the villains of 2020 were shadowy foreign powers, Republicans had clearer targets when Lake lost two years later. They blamed Richer and Gates, whose Board of Supervisors was responsible for Election Day administration and tabulation, as well as certifying the results. The losing US Senate candidate, Blake Masters, conceded while nonetheless demanding that Gates resign. But the rest of the slate began a series of long-shot legal challenges premised on the corruption and incompetence of MCTEC. Touring Arizona in the ensuing months, Lake beamed photos of Gates and Richer onto big screens and falsely accused them of “intentionally” causing delays at voting sites and of “pumping 300,000 invalid ballots” into the final tally.

Lake wasn’t merely complaining. She actively attempted to reverse the outcome via lawsuits that aimed to install her in her rightful place in the governor’s mansion. To represent her, she hired a self-described “adventure travel guide” and lawyer named Bryan Blehm, who had distinguished himself previously as counsel for the Cyber Ninjas audit. Blehm is often described as a “Scottsdale divorce attorney,” which is true but incomplete; he is also an expert on motorcycle law. He was not an experienced election lawyer, and by his own admission—in a letter defending himself against an investigation by the state bar—lacked the resources for the task.

Blehm’s case was not strong, in other words. A judge suspended his law license for two months for making a false statement in a state Supreme Court filing and ordered him to take continuing legal education. Lake’s attorneys in the voting-machines action were docked $122,000 for filing a case without merit. Alex Kolodin, the Arizona lawyer who worked with Sidney Powell on the election challenge that cited “Spider,” was ordered by a court to take five different remedial ethics classes. (The cases were a boon for Kolodin, who is now a state representative and a member of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee; he recently posted a photo of himself doing his coursework at a Dream City Trump rally.)

But Lake had strength in numbers. Mark Finchem, an Oath Keeper and former state representative who lost his 2022 race for secretary of state by 120,000 votes, filed his own lawsuit to contest the results and demand a new election. Hamadeh filed a series of similar challenges on his own behalf, which “the crazies love because they see me fighting,” he privately told a fellow Republican. Conceding a lost race went from the norm to the exception, and lawsuits were filed as a matter of course. The recorder’s office has been dragged to court 43 times since 2020. Eventually, citing psychological harm, physical threats, and damaged career prospects, Richer fought back with a defamation lawsuit against Lake.

Republican elected officials have tried to make it easier to flood the political and legal systems with baseless claims. Fake elector Kern introduced legislation that would protect attorneys who filed election challenges, however frivolous. Kolodin, the oft-sanctioned election lawyer, supported a bill that would strip the bar of the power to sanction lawyers altogether. In May, GOP members of the Arizona House called for impeachment of Mayes, the attorney general, in part because of her efforts to prosecute election-denying officials in rural Cochise County, which had failed to certify the 2022 election before the deadline.

Arizona’s elections themselves seem increasingly superfluous. One state representative backed a bill to give the legislature, not voters, power to award the state’s electoral votes. Another pushed a law that would preemptively award Arizona’s electoral votes to Trump in 2024. It was an effort, one of the bill’s supporters explained, to “ignore the results of another illegally run election.”

Lake, who continues fighting for a redo of the gubernatorial election even as she runs for US Senate, is stuck in the same predicament as much of her party. Election denial might have started as an applause line, but once you exposed the conspiracy it also meant you couldn’t stop—the only way out was to keep telling the lie until you finally won.

At his office across from the courthouse, I asked Gates, who has publicly detailed his struggles with PTSD, if he had seen any ­indications that the fever was breaking. He replied by pointing out a recent change the supervisors had made to the chamber where they hold public meetings. In February, a group of attendees upset about the recent elections had attempted to storm the dais. Now the room has a pony barrier.

“I could post on X that I just had a sandwich, you know, and there’d be several comments that I’m a traitor,” Gates said.

A few days after the MCTEC tour, I stopped by a Republican candidate forum at a rec center next to a pickleball court in Sun City West, a sprawling retirement village 45 minutes from downtown Phoenix. The community is red, white, and very old—at one point, the emcee interrupted proceedings to ask whether anyone was missing a pair of bifocals.

Fears of stolen elections came up in almost every race, even the ones you might not expect. A candidate for Maricopa County sheriff promised that, if elected, he would put deputies in charge of transporting ballots and confiscate suspicious voting equipment. A candidate for the legislature promised to get rid of early voting. A candidate for Maricopa County attorney blamed the Republican incumbent for pursuing sanctions against election deniers. Even one of the candidates for superintendent of schools managed to bring the conversation back to “election integrity.”

The Trump campaign’s local field director, on hand to promote a get-out-the-vote program, said that Hamadeh had “supposedly” lost his 2022 race, moments before Hamadeh himself took the stage to brag about his ongoing lawsuit. Kern, whose campaign sold T-shirts bearing his mugshot, described himself as a “proud member of the 2020 electors club” and announced to the crowd that it was “time for battle.” Multiple candidates used their time to demand Richer’s firing.

When Richer spoke, following a Lake-backed primary challenger who accused him of mailing out extra ballots, he talked up his law enforcement endorsements and efforts to keep voter rolls up to date. “I want to be a resource,” he told the room.

The crowd booed.

The moderator asked him a question that he said had been picked at random: Did Richer believe the 2020 election was stolen?

Richer enunciated his response as clearly as he could.

“I do not believe the 2020 election was stolen,” he said.

The boos started up again.

Republican voters weren’t persuaded by the recorder’s promises of transparency and good faith. In July, Richer lost his primary by a little less than nine points. For the third straight election, the most competitive county in America’s most competitive state will roll the dice with someone new.

The operating word of the Democratic National Convention was “vibes.” They’re good, if you haven’t heard. They’ve shifted. For a group of people often dismissively referred to as “bedwetters,” Democrats are as excited as they’ve ever been at having a roughly 50-50 chance of disaster. There was just a feeling. Everyone from Bill Clinton to Oprah wanted to talk about the “joy” the new nominee brought to the race. Attendees told me it felt like 2008. “Yes she can,” said Barack Obama. People carried around prints of Vice President Kamala Harris that looked like Shepard Fairey had painted them. I thought I even saw Bill Ayers while walking around in his old neighborhood on Sunday.

A few months ago, such a display of Democratic optimism would have felt impossible. For much of the last eight years, the Democratic Party has been defined by a simmering discontent over the administrations of the past and the primary battles that never ended. Biden, elected in an economic crisis and a global pandemic, had promised to serve as a transitional figure before yielding to a new generation of leaders. But as his reelection bid stumbled, he seemed, instead, like a bridge to nowhere.

Chicago offered a glimpse of what a soft-landing looks like, not just for the economy, but for a whole political party. Years of infighting and recriminations yielded to a policy consensus that sounded like an unusually appealing kind of working-class fusionism. Adding dental and vision coverage to Medicare. Stopping corporate price-gouging. Busting monopolies. Passing the PRO Act. Free school lunch and breakfast. On Wednesday, Tim Walz’s small-town biography doubled as a story not just about football defensive schemes, but about the crushing weight of medical debt and the imperative for government to wipe it out.

The sorts of issues that had often festered for years on the party’s left-flank were dressed up in a kind of general-interest dad plaid, and pitched to a willing audience by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The new consensus did not just happen all at once. It happened, in part, because the current president rebuilt trust in what normie Democrats could accomplish. Biden was a bridge after all. Democrats in Chicago finally found out what was on the other side.

The change within the party was not just a matter of positive thinking. It was reflected in the substance of the event. The spectacle in Chicago was the total inverse of what transpired at the RNC. In Milwaukee, Trump and Vance had dangled the possibility of a new conservative workers party, in the service of an increasingly monarchical donor class. To make their case, they even rolled out a prominent labor leader, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who argued that unions should seek friends in the Republican Party in the fight against “economic terrorism.” O’Brien’s gimmick seemed a bit credulous at a coronation for a corrupt plutocrat who had kneecapped organized labor as president; it looks even more foolish now.

While the RNC offered the illusion of transformation, Democrats showed off their capacity to actually change, and to elevate new leaders and ideas in the service, often enough anyway, of a politics for working people. Instead of O’Brien, the DNC gave a primetime platform to Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, who took off his blazer midway through his speech on Monday to reveal a red union t-shirt that said “Trump is a scab.”

Fain, who took office in 2023, represented a new direction for an old institution. He was the product of a political revolution within the UAW, aimed at driving out stagnant and corrupt leadership, and as president, he pursued a more aggressive strategy, which culminated in a historic strike at the Big Three automakers last year. (Full disclosure, I am a member of the UAW.) His spokesman is a former organizer for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and Fain rails frequently against “the billionaire class.” But his presence on stage spoke not just to a more ambitious and assertive labor movement, but also to the power of real political partnership—and the changes that Biden, of all people, had brought to politics.

The new consensus did not just happen all at once. It happened, in part, because the current president rebuilt trust in what normie Democrats could accomplish. Biden was a bridge after all.

The union’s recent successes, he pointed out every chance he got in Chicago, were powered by members but eased along by the White House. In remarks to reporters this week, Fain credited Biden’s revamped National Labor Relations Board, which Trump had stacked with corporate picks, for clearing the way for clean elections at notoriously difficult shops. When auto workers went on strike last year, Biden, Fain noted, became the first president to ever walk a picket line. And when workers struck in 2019, Harris, as a presidential candidate, was there too.


“Plants were closing under Donald Trump,” Fain said. “I didn’t see Donald Trump save one of them. I didn’t see Donald Trump try to save one of them.”

Fain was a ubiquitous figure throughout the week in running shoes and a rotating array of red and blue UAW shirts. The union had sold thousands of “Trump is a scab” tees since his speech on Monday. Everywhere he went, delegates—many in red union shirts of their own—would gather around him to have a word or take a photo. (He was also multi-tasking—Fain used his speech to deliver a message to Big Three automaker Stellantis, and even took a bus trip during the week to rally outside the company’s plant in Belvidere, Illinois.) On Wednesday morning, after watching Fain quote Ecclesiastes and the “great poet…Marshall Mathers” within the span of a few minutes at a breakfast with the Michigan delegation, I asked him about the party’s trajectory.

“After the Reagan years and Bush 1, you saw a shift somewhat where, because laws changed, deregulation happened, the massive tax cuts for the wealthy, trickle-down economics…and I think the party somewhat shifted to try to appease the business class and the corporate class,” he said, as we walked down an escalator at a Michigan Ave. Hilton. “I think that hurt in the elections, because when people look at both sides, they see the same people serving the same master.”

Things were looking up, though. He believed that Harris and Walz, like Biden, would bring the party closer to its “working-class roots.”

“It’s gonna take time—it’s not gonna happen overnight,” he said. “But we’re on our way.”

The week was a passing of the torch of sorts, not just for Biden and Clinton, but for the man who lost the nomination to both of them, Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator, a more hunched but still fiery 82, is seeking a fourth and perhaps final term this fall, while still mostly talking about the same issues he’s been harping on for four decades—getting money out of politics, universal health care, and tackling “oligarchy.” At a small confab near the United Center hosted by his longtime allies at the Progressive Democrats of America on Monday, Sanders made a forceful case that the man whom Democrats had rallied behind to stop him from winning the nomination had been a real ally once in office.

“He was prepared to really bring about structural changes in this country,” Sanders explained, laying out a wish list from childcare to adding dental and vision coverage into Medicare. “That was Build Back Better, and we failed with the two corporate Democrats in the Senate—but what I want you to understand is he was prepared to do that.”

“You’re not gonna hear a lot about Medicare for All” at the convention, Sanders acknowledged. (Harris, who embraced a variation of the policy in 2019 during her presidential campaign, walked back her support this month.) But Sanders had been a leading voice calling for Biden to stay in the race, in part because of the strength of their working relationship. Although he and Harris are not as close, Sanders sounded positive when we spoke later that night about what a Harris administration might portend.

Harris said the words “we are not going back” six times. The dig at Trump was obvious. But it describes where the party is at too.

“I think the proposals that she has brought forth so far are strong proposals,” he said. “I’m really glad that she is focusing on housing, because I will tell you that it’s an area that has not gotten the attention that it deserves. And she’s right. You got a major housing crisis in Burlington, Vermont, Los Angeles, and every place in between, 650,000 people homeless, millions unable to afford housing, so I’m glad she’s focusing on that. I’m glad she’s continuing the efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs, which is a huge issue. I’m glad she believes in eliminating medical debt, which is just insane that people go bankrupt because they have cancer. So that’s an important issue, and extending the child tax credit that we passed in the rescue plan to lower childhood poverty by 40 percent is also enormous. So I think she’s off to a good start.”

One of the reasons he was feeling optimistic, Sanders said this week, was because of what he called “the rebirth and revitalization of the trade union movement.” In Biden, he had found an ally on the inside, but in Fain—whom he singled out for wearing an “Eat the Rich” shirt during last year’s strike—Sanders saw the vanguard of a workers movement often aligned with the Democratic Party that could continue to drive change outside of it.

The gerontocracy at the top of the party has for a long time created the impression of a stultifying institution. The narrowness of the message Biden was capable of articulating—in contrast to the substance of the policies he was working to deliver—created an oppressive sort of aura. It was all harshly whispered words about “democracy” and the “soul of the nation.” Biden was standing in the way of not just Harris, but of a broader generational transition capable of saying so much more.

It wasn’t just Fain. Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow insurgent once on the fringes on the party, now had roughly the same prominence in the speaker lineup as Hillary Clinton, and attacked the Republican nominee as a “two-bit union-buster.” Everywhere you looked, there was some new star in the coalition, or soon-to-be-star in the coalition, seizing their five to 15 minutes to make their case. Many of these figures weren’t even in politics during the 2016 primaries. Their ideas and careers had been forged in the reactionary crucible in the Trump years.

Perhaps no one embodied this breakthrough better than Harris herself, a politician whose 2020 presidential candidacy floundered in a party still stuck in 2016, and who wallowed as an occasional punchline as vice president for three years.

“[O]ur nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward, not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans,” she said in her remarks at the United Center. She said the words “we are not going back” six times. The dig at Trump was obvious. But it describes where the party is at too.

Going into the week, the grumbling, among the grumbling set, was that Harris was big on sunshine and light on specifics. But the program is simple enough: Making things easier for working-people, in easily recognizable ways—affordable housing, affordable groceries, affordable drugs, and affordable families too; the Child Tax Credit that Sanders promoted is such a popular idea that the Republicans who killed it are now running on bringing it back.

Democrats were also clear-eyed about what they were up against. Throughout the week, a procession of people—Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (first elected: 2018); Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (first elected: 2018); Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson—stepped up to the lectern with a comically oversized book, like something out of an old Cistercian Abbey, and announced that this was “Project 2025.”

During Thompson’s faux-SNL sketch, regular people took turns describing their life circumstances, and then Thompson would page through his big book and tell them how they were screwed. A woman named Nirvana happily announced that thanks to Biden and Harris, she pays just $35 a month for insulin. That was getting axed, Thompson cheerfully informed her. Another person said she was an employee at the Department of Education. She would be fired, Thompson explained. Someone else was happily married to a spouse of the same sex. Womp, womp.

The Project 2025 attacks were the sort of policy evisceration—at various points mean and fun and deeply moving—that I hadn’t seen in such portions since Obama’s scorched-earth campaign against Bain Capital and Paul Ryan’s budget. It is hard to say anything new about Trump. But the key to the Project 2025 attacks was that they didn’t just define Republicans as weird and creepy (although they did do that, in a mix of gut-wrenching and clever ways). That big oversized think-tank document gave Democrats a chance to talk about the things they consider normal. They were unafraid to talk about abortion. They went out of their way to talk about fertility treatments. They stood for the bedrock principle of doing what the doctor tells you to do. It fell to Walz, another relative unknown until Biden’s exit, to sum up this new middle-ground in his characterstically blunt way: “Mind your own damn business.”

The vibesiest scene at the DNC’s vibes-fest this week may have come at “Hotties for Trump,” an after-party where hundreds of zoomers picked up “Fuck Project 2025” condoms and posed for photos next to a couch that said “Property of JD Vance.” The event was bankrolled, like tens of millions of dollars worth of other Democratic operations, by the LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman.

Like the entire Harris campaign itself, the Democratic coalition’s kumbaya feel is fragile and potentially fleeting. There are already signs of potential crackups in this new unified front. “There are some Democratic donors who don’t like Lina Khan,” Sanders told me. “I happen to think that Lina Khan is the best chair of the FTC that we have seen in a very long time.”

Hoffman begs to differ, and in his criticism of one of the Biden administration’s most effective Big Tech trust-busters, you can see the shape of the battles to come. Those grocery stores where Harris wants to crack down on rising costs, for instance, include chains like Kroger—whose merger with Albertson’s Khan has put on hold. The week’s most glaring stain was the refusal to grant speaking time to a Palestinian-American Georgia state representative and Harris delegate—the sort of cynical and short-sighted move that may haunt a group of people who claim to be the party of moral clarity. And for all their positivity, Democrats are still more or less a coin flip from another catastrophe in November, and a new wave of recriminations and soul-searching.

For Democrats, the future is promising but uncertain. But they have, at least, finally left the past behind.

The immediate reaction to former President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night was that it sounded a lot like the sort of remarks he’d delivered before. He asked the audience at Chicago’s United Center if they were “fired up” and rewrote his 2008 campaign mantra to accommodate the vice president: “Yes she can.” Democrats on the ground here say they’re seeing a level of excitement they haven’t witnessed since Obama’s first campaign; the former commander-in-chief was happy to indulge their newfound hope. 

But there was one item on his agenda that sounded quite different from the Obama of old.

“We can’t just rely on the ideas of the past, we need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today and Kamala understands this,” Obama said, as he rattled off key planks of Harris’ domestic agenda. “She knows for example that if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units—and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. That is a priority, and she’s put out a bold new plan to do just that.”

Just a few years ago, if you’d asked the leading political scientists & thought leaders whether YIMBY ideas would be advanced by a figure like Obama on a national stage, they’d have laughed you. Clear evidence for the power of (correct) ideas. pic.twitter.com/GwxGFSfUw5

— Jerusalem (@JerusalemDemsas) August 21, 2024

That’s right—the push for zoning reform has gone presidential. Obama’s lengthy convention remarks are a useful barometer for where the party stands. I checked to see if any of his previous DNC speeches had tackled the housing shortage that has squeezed low- and middle-income Americans’ finances, displaced working people, and powered a homelessness crisis in places like Los Angeles and New York City. The issue never came up in 2020 or in 2016. In 2012, in the aftermath of a severe recession triggered by a predatory mortgage lenders, Obama did talk up home construction—but only the idea of making them more environmentally friendly. In 2008, as that housing bubble was bursting, he addressed falling home values—but that’s a much different problem than an affordability crisis driven by limited supply and high demand. The idea that the government should clear the road for a massive home-construction boom was simply not the sort of thing people talked about in primetime.

“I plead guilty,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me this week, after praising Harris’ proposal. “It just hasn’t been as high up on the agenda as it should have been. It’s an issue that’s staring us right in the face. You know, walk two blocks away from the Capitol you have people sleeping out on the street. I talk to people who pay 50, 60-percent of their income in housing. It’s an issue that we should have dealt with, and we’ve got to be bold.”

The failure to tackle the housing crisis has recently seeped into Republican messaging, albeit in a far different way. A good deal of Trump’s narrative of “American Carnage” in largely Democratic cities is really a story about the downstream effects—things like tent cities and visible drug use. At the Republican National Convention last month, Ohio Sen. JD Vance even offered a radical solution to the crisis.

“The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington,” he said in his convention speech. In his telling, “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business,” and then “tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built.” Then: “Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete—with people who shouldn’t even be here—for precious housing.”

His plan, and Trump’s, was to free up housing stock by deporting 11 million people.