If Donald Trump becomes president again, it looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have his say over who gets which vaccines: Trump said at a rally last weekend that he would let RFK Jr. “go wild” on health should he win the White House. RFK Jr. said Trump promised him control of the Department of Health and Human Services, where the CDC and FDA are housed; Trump’s campaign seemed to suggest that wasn’t set in stone.

A world where an anti-vax advocate would play a large role in shaping vaccine policy is kind of terrifying. While RFK Jr. does make extremely off-the-cuff comments, including about Covid-19 vaccines, some of Kennedy’s specific claims about vaccines may not be apparent unless you go looking for them.

Well, I went looking for them. Here are some of RFK Jr.’s claims about various childhood vaccines throughout the decades, most of which are usually required if you go to public schools. What’s perhaps the most disturbing underlying factor of all his vaccine conspiracy theories is the suggestion that a dead child—vaccines save a lot of lives—is better than an autistic or chronically ill one, conditions he claims vaccines cause.

Measles, Mumps, and Rubella 

In a 2005 Rolling Stone article, RFK Jr. suggests that a rise in childhood vaccines was tied to an increase in kids being diagnosed with autism.

Before 1989, American preschoolers received 11 vaccinations—for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade. As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded.

RFK Jr. was not the first person to suggest a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Andrew Wakefield’s retracted Lancet study linking the two, which was total nonsense, should take a lot of the blame. But RFK Jr. still promoted the conspiracy theory that the measles vaccine was linked to autism in a 2021 Fox News interview, and in his 2023 co-written book Vax Unvax, Kennedy also suggests that the measles vaccine is linked to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis (and Haemophilus Influenzae B)

In the same Rolling Stone piece, RFK Jr. essentially claimed that Americans had been poisoning their kids with vaccines that contained thimerosal, which is no longer in routine childhood vaccines, except some versions of the flu vaccine.

Tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The FDA says that the thimerosal in vaccines has “significantly declined due to reformulation and development of new vaccines—not that the tiny amount of it in vaccines was linked to autism or other health issues. Kennedy also claimed that receiving multiple DTP vaccines raised infant mortality (the 2004 study which Kennedy and Brian Hooker, his cowriter, cite has not been replicated).

Hepatitis B

In a 2017 interview with Stat News, RFK Jr. said that the Hepatitis B vaccine hadn’t received enough testing. He seemed to find a new argument as to why the treatment wasn’t when thimerosal was removed:

The hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety testing. That means that if the child has a seizure on the sixth day, it’s never seen.

Also, people can report an adverse event at any point.

Rotavirus

Back to the infamous 2005 Rolling Stone piece: RFK Jr. seems to suggest that people should not trust the rotavirus vaccine because of financial conflicts of interest in its advocacy.

The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine “had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.” Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he “would make money” if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist’s direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. “It provides no conflict for me,” he insists. “I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it.”

In a 2023 Substack post, Paul Offit, the doctor RFK Jr. referred to in that excerpt, debunked both Kennedy’s claims about himself, and the shoddy science he relied on.

Polio

Type I diabetes is a serious illness—one that Kennedy stokes fears of in his book Vax Unvax. The book claims that Type I diabetes appears in about 21 of 100,000 kids vaccinated against polio, more than double the rate for those who were not vaccinated, according to research performed between 1990 and 2000. Kennedy and Hooker cite a single study to support their claim that the typical polio vaccine given until the year 2000 was dangerous. But most other research refutes this claim. Vax Unvax claims to want to “let the science speak,” per its subtitle, but doesn’t mention how polio can lead to permanent paralysis.

Influenza

As you can probably tell by now, Kennedy likes picking single studies to back his narrative. In Vax Unvax, Kennedy and Hooker point to one study that claims that kids who have gotten the seasonal flu vaccine are almost four times more likely to be hospitalized.

Kennedy’s strategy on childhood vaccines is to instill fear backed by lone studies, claiming they can make kids sicker, in opposition to decades of research that show that childhood vaccines stop kids from getting sicker—and let them avoid preventable long-term health effects.

When Wendy Davis wanted to get birth control as a teenager in the 1980s, she went to her local Planned Parenthood in Fort Worth, Texas, with a friend. “There is absolutely no way I would have asked my mother for her permission to do that,” says Davis, the former Texas state senator who famously filibustered an anti-abortion bill for 11 hours in a pair of pink sneakers. “That’s just not something that’s possible for many, many, many teenage girls.” 

Forty years later, with abortion banned in wide swaths of the country, access to reliable contraception is more important than ever. Yet for Texas teens, getting prescription birth control is arguably harder now than it was when Davis was an adolescent. Over the past two years, federal courts—including the notoriously conservative 5th Circuit—have ruled that minors must have parental consent to obtain prescription birth control from Texas clinics subsidized by a federal family planning program known as Title X. Flush with victory, Texas Republicans have made it clear: They have no intention of stopping there. In late July, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit to overturn a new federal rule that reaffirmed teens’ ability in other states to get contraception without their parents’ consent. “The Biden Administration continues to prove they will do anything to implement their extremist agenda,” Paxton said in a press release.

To anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the far right’s plans to limit access to birth control have long been hiding in plain sight. When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in the Dobbs decision in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” other rulings with similar legal principles, including Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision establishing a right to contraception (and, more fundamentally, a constitutional right to privacy). The ultra-conservative strategists behind Project 2025— including Roger Severino, longtime anti-abortion movement lawyer, and Russell Voght, an avowed Christian nationalist—have spelled out a plan for how a Republican-led White House could gut or rewrite key federal birth-control regulations, building on efforts that began during the first Trump administration. (While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even claiming he doesn’t know who wrote it, at least 140 members of Trump’s team, including Severino and Voght, had a hand in drafting it.)

But what has escaped many Americans is that these threats aren’t just terrifying what-if-this-happens scenarios. As the Texas lawsuits show, in some parts of the United States, that scary future has already arrived. States have been passing laws allowing pharmacies to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions based on moral objections, or proposing legislation that unscientifically classifies emergency contraception and IUDs as “abortifacients.” Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch has found that since 2021, at least 21 states have directed a total of $513 million to religiously affiliated crisis pregnancy centers and “alternatives to abortion” programs that actively spread misinformation about birth control and discourage its use.

And though contraception is supported by around 90 percent of voters, when Congress had the chance earlier this year to pass a law protecting access to birth control, Republican senators blocked it, claiming it was unnecessary.

The Biden administration has repeatedly pushed back—most recently, with a new proposed rule under the Affordable Care Act to require private insurance to cover 100 percent of the cost of over-the-counter birth control and offer patients more choices for prescription contraception. In a statement, Vice President Kamala Harris described the move as “the largest expansion of contraception coverage in more than a decade.” But the regulations won’t be finalized until after the presidential election, and the new rules are virtually certain to be challenged in GOP-packed federal courts even if Harris wins. 

And what if she doesn’t?

A new Trump administration and its right-wing allies are expected to escalate attacks on contraception on a multitude of fronts, including appointing extremists to key government positions. Rather than outright bans, we should expect more subtle incursions—regulatory changes, limits on insurance coverage, and funding reductions for family planning, as well as rules like the parental consent requirement for teens, according to reproductive health policy experts interviewed by Mother Jones. “It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing,” says Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute. “They’re not. It is much more behind-the-scenes, around the margins. And yet, the impact is still potentially devastating.”

“It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing. They’re not.”

“That’s what happened to abortion,” adds Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who studies the impact of family planning policy. “Death by a thousand cuts.”

Here are four key strategies we can expect under a new Trump administration intent on undermining access to contraception:

Doubling Down on False Claims that Birth Control Causes Abortion

One of the most common attack lines against contraception is the claim that certain methods—notably IUDs and morning-after pills—are abortifacients, which is to say they cause abortion, purportedly by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. In fact, decades of research show that these methods block fertilization from ever happening—by preventing the release of eggs, for instance, or stopping sperm from reaching them. Yet the belief that IUDs and emergency contraception, like Plan B and Ella, end pregnancies rather than preventing them has become distressingly common, thanks in part to rampant misinformation spread by the anti-abortion movement—including appointees in the first Trump administration.

The falsehoods have made their way into Food and Drug Administration policy, with decades-long repercussions for reproductive health. Back in the early 2000s, when the FDA was trying to decide whether Plan B should be sold over the counter, it relied on an advisory committee that included several abortion opponents. Over the objections of their colleagues, those committee members persuaded the agency to include language in Plan B’s packaging that stated the drug “may also work” by preventing implantation. Not until 2022 did the FDA finally update the Plan B label to clarify the drug “does not terminate a pregnancy.” But anti-abortion groups could challenge that update in a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, since 2015, the “abortifacient claim” has inspired lawmakers in at least seven states to vote to cut off funding for contraception or block bills to protect access to it, USA Today found in a recent investigation. Project 2025 also continues this line of attack, describing Ella as a “potential abortifacient” and proposing to wipe out mandatory insurance coverage for it. Some anti-abortion organizations, including the influential Students for Life, even falsely claim that the daily birth control pill is an abortifacient. As my colleague Kiera Butler has written, it’s all part of a growing right-wing movement to persuade women that hormonal contraception is just plain bad for them. If Trump wins, his appointees are likely to bring those arguments with them to the agencies they oversee, further threatening birth control access.

Rewriting Title X

Attacking government subsidies for contraception has been part of the GOP playbook for decades. A favorite target is Title X, a federal safety-net program that underwrites free reproductive health services—birth control, cervical cancer screenings, and STI screening and treatment, but not abortion—for low-income and uninsured people. Planned Parenthood clinics, a common provider of these services, receive about 20 percent of Title X funds.

No surprise: Texas has led the way in attacking the federal program since 2011, when the legislature slashed state funding for reproductive health care and redirected Title X money to primary care providers. The changes that year—designed to kneecap Planned Parenthood—forced scores of reproductive health clinics to close, and others to reduce hours, charge patients new fees, or ration the most effective (but expensive) forms of contraception, such as IUDs. As a result of the changes, the number of clients served by Texas family planning organizations fell by more than half, and the teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent. “It shredded the safety net for women’s health care in our state,” says Davis, now a senior adviser to Planned Parenthood Texas Votes. “Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight. It was devastating, and slowly, we’ve been building our way back.”

“Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight.”

Trump’s first-term appointees, following Texas’ lead, set about dramatically reshaping the entire Title X program. The administration’s “gag rule,” first proposed under Ronald Reagan but never fully implemented, which forbids any clinics that took Title X money from referring patients to abortion providers. It also required them to keep separate books and separate facilities from their abortion services, if they offered them—a logistical nightmare. Some 1,300 reproductive health facilities, including 400 Planned Parenthood clinics, withdrew from the program rather than withhold abortion referrals from patients who wanted them, and roughly 1.6 million patients lost access to federally subsidized birth control. “It was a very difficult time in the program,” says Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association. “Of course, the numbers plummeted.” What happened to the freed-up Title X money? The Trump administration sent some of it to a chain of Christian “crisis pregnancy centers” that refused to provide contraception or even referrals for birth control, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer found in a 2019 investigation.

When Joe Biden took office, his administration promptly revoked the Trump rule, and the Title X network started rebuilding. But Vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance has already signaled that a second Trump administration would try again to defund Planned Parenthood—code for attacking Title X. Project 2025 urges the next president to “quickly” reissue the gag rule. It also advocates that Title X be “reframed with a focus on better education around fertility awareness”—a less-reliable method of cycle tracking favored by anti-abortion activists and wellness influencers—with grants opened up once again to anti-abortion religious organizations.

In anticipation of a Trump win, Coleman’s organization has been working with reproductive health clinics to prepare for the old gag rule to be reissued and even expanded soon after Inauguration Day. Not only could the next version of the rule pick up on Texas’ efforts to require parental consent for teenagers, Coleman warns Trump appointees are also likely to attack gender-affirming care. (Title X does not explicitly fund such care but some providers offer those services separately, just as they do abortion.) “They may say, if you take Title X, you can’t provide any of that care,” Coleman speculates. “We are quite concerned about them trying to enforce not only a gender binary—because we also do see men in the Title X program—but to recast it as: ‘This is a program about biological sex.’”

That’s if Title X survives at all: House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget bill in September 2023 would have defunded the program entirely.

Gutting the Affordable Care Act

Before the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, birth control accounted for around a third of women’s out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Monthly copays deterred women from getting the Pill, while an IUD could have an up-front cost of $1,000.

The ACA changed all that for over 62 million women. Starting in 2012, the law classified contraception as a form of preventive care and made it mandatory for private insurance to cover a wide range of prescription birth control at no cost to consumers. Last year, responding to the fallout from Dobbs, the Biden administration directed agencies to find ways to strengthen the contraception mandate and make sure insurers follow it; last month’s announcement on coverage of over-the-counter contraception follows that effort.

Fighting the contraception mandate has been one of the key ways conservatives and religious groups have sought to erode access to birth control. In 2014, the Supreme Court’s infamous Hobby Lobby ruling blew a crater in the ACA’s contraception mandate in the name of protecting religious freedom. There had always been a religious exemption for churches and houses of worship. But Hobby Lobby expanded that exemption to include 90 percent of US businesses—letting them deny coverage for birth control in employee insurance plans if the owners had a religious objection.

Trump broadened the exemption even further in his first term, allowing employers to decline to provide birth control based on moral, not just religious, objections. “It opens the door wide for any employer that provides health insurance to pick and choose what kind of contraception they would like to cover,” says Dana Singiser, cofounder of the Contraceptive Access Initiative.

Of course, there’s always the chance that a Republican White House and Congress would wipe out the ACA altogether, as Trump tried to do in 2017. Trump has since made conflicting statements about whether he would try again for a repeal or impose “concepts of a plan” to replace it. In late October, Speaker Johnson promised a “massive reform” of the ACA if Trump is elected.

Even with the ACA still on the books, experts say Trump could do significant damage, bypassing Congress by issuing new regulations or guidance from executive-branch agencies. Project 2025 leans in on this idea, urging the next president to make regulatory moves that would hobble the contraceptive mandate. “It’s not flashy,” says Lauren Wallace, senior counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center. “Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

“Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

The Biden administration is currently finalizing a replacement to Trump’s rule allowing moral objections to the contraceptive mandate; it’s safe to say that Trump would block or revoke it. He could also issue other regulations to make the contraceptive mandate “unworkable,” Wallace says. He could give insurers more agency to make rules around which types of birth control they choose to insure or require patients to try certain methods, before covering more expensive ones.

Project 2025’s authors, of course, have their own ideas about which forms of birth control are preferable. Their blueprint urges the next president to require the Department of Health and Human Services to issue new regulations about what is covered by the ACA contraceptive mandate. In: “fertility awareness” methods. Out: male condoms and Ella.

Shrinking Medicaid While Increasing Surveillance

Back to Texas.

Over the past decade or so, at the same time the state was attacking family planning clinics, it found a way to mess with the most common way people pay for birth control: Medicaid. And Davis sees what it did as a potential model for other states should Trump win.

First, the state passed a law banning abortion providers and their affiliates from participating in the state’s Medicaid-funded family planning program. The law conflicted with a federal rule allowing Medicaid patients to choose any “willing” provider. That meant Texas had to apply to the Obama administration for a waiver of the rule. “They got into a standoff,” Davis recalls. “The Obama administration said, ‘We’re going to remove all of your funding if you do this.’ And Texas said, ‘Fine, do it.’”

For the next few years, Texas ran a shrunken version of the program using state funding. Then Trump appeared, installing a National Right to Life Committee lobbyist to oversee national family planning policy. Texas applied for the Medicaid waiver again—and this time, received it. The Trump administration also gave the state permission not to cover emergency contraception in its Medicaid-funded program.

Davis predicts that other states will use the same maneuver to sever Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, should Trump return to office. Tennessee, which bans virtually all abortions, and South Carolina, which bans them at six weeks, have already applied for similar waivers. And Missouri recently enacted a law to ban all Medicaid reimbursements for abortion providers and their affiliates—even though the state’s abortion ban means they now only provide services like contraception and cancer screening.

Project 2025 proposes making federal Medicaid family planning funding conditional on states participating in a frighteningly detailed abortion surveillance system. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the blueprint says, “HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.” The database would include the gestational age at which the abortion was performed, the method, and the reason for it.

The proposal would force states to make an “impossible choice,” says Madeline Morcelle, senior attorney at the National Health Law Program. Participating in that “weaponized program,” she says, “would likely be used to criminalize pregnant people,” particularly immigrants, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, young people, and people with disabilities. But dropping out would likely mean losing federal funding for vital Medicaid services affecting millions of those same low-income people.

Davis, in Texas, says she knows that predictions about losing access to birth control can sound exaggerated. She’s heard such criticisms before—from people who believed that Roe would never fall. “There are those out there who believe that this is hyperbole,” she says. But as a Texan who has witnessed how what appears radical becomes normalized, she has no illusions about the potential dangers. “I don’t think it’s unlikely at all that as Republicans become more and more extreme, and governed in a more and more extreme way by their rightward flank, that we are going to see these things become a reality.”

Correction, October 31: An earlier version of this story misstated which funds Project 2025 suggests withholding from states that don’t participate in an expanded abortion surveillance program.

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mother Jones.

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right. 

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01. 

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change meant Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there were to be unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against US citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. 

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got into the act in a tweet criticizing Kamala Harris’ response to a story that Trump wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had”:

“It’s particularly ironic since Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power—for the first time in history—to use lethal force to kill Americans on US soil who protest government policies.”

By that evening, his post on X had 5.6 million views.

Joseph Nunn, a lawyer with the Liberty & National Security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and a leading expert on domestic uses of the military, had a clear response to the social media storm.

“There’s nothing here. People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

(Click here to read DOD Directive 5240.01.)

Contrary to claims online, DOD Directive 5240.01, which last had been updated in 2020, does not grant any new powers to the military. That’s not how military directives work. Like them or not, all military policies are subject to US law; they do not create new legal authorities. 

Directive 5240.01 has a narrow focus: It only addresses military intelligence, and the section that has circulated online specifically deals with intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement. 

The paragraph that contains the term “lethal force” refers to a requirement that the Secretary of Defense—the highest level of the Defense Department—must now authorize military intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement when lethal force might be involved.

“This is not an independent source of authority,” Nunn said. “We really should look at this as an administrative safeguard that is being put in place.” 

Military intelligence has long been authorized to provide assistance to federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement when lives are endangered, under limited circumstances. That could include providing technical expertise or helping with international anti-terrorism or counter-narcotics operations, for instance.

“A reference to lethal force in a directive like this doesn’t mean they’re planning to have snipers on rooftops in covert ops,” said Nunn, who has written on limiting the role of the military in law enforcement. “The nature of law enforcement will sometimes involve the use of lethal force.” 

In its response to The War Horse, the Pentagon said the directive’s update was “in no way timed in relation to the election or any other event.” 

“Reissuing 5240.01 was part of normal business of the Department to periodically update guidance and policy,” the DOD’s Gough said.

The Defense Department has issued or revised 10 other directives and instructions since it updated “5240.01” at the end of September, ranging from a policy on space-related military activities to guidance on public affairs’ officers use of military vehicles.

“It’s not unusual to update DOD regulations,” says Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University and a former senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. “It doesn’t signal some nefarious agenda.”

The update to “5240.01” brings the policy in line with other Defense Department directives. One of those is known as DOD Directive 5210.56—an entirely different Defense Department directive than the one updated last month. It lays out rules when troops across the military can use lethal force outside of military operations, limiting it to “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm” or to protect critical national security assets. 

Posts online, including the one that Flynn shared, claim that Directive 5240.01 runs afoul of a legal statute known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act, which dates back to Reconstruction, generally forbids military troops from acting as domestic police. Civil liberty experts consider it an important civil rights protection against possible military overreach. 

Despite the conspiracy claims spreading online, the directive clearly states that military intelligence units assisting civilian police must consider the Posse Comitatus Act.

“The updated issuance remains consistent with DoD’s adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act, commitment to civil rights, and support of other safeguards in place for the protection of the American people,” Gough said.

Spreading misinformation about the military can be particularly damaging “to the relationship between the military and the public,” Brooks told The War Horse.

“This sort of politicization, this idea of sowing mistrust in the military in order to gain partisan advantage, is really corrosive,” Brooks said. “There’s a motive. There’s something to be gained by spreading these rumors.”

Ironically, however, Rep. Harris, the Republican congressman, was right about one thing when he claimed that if Kamala Harris wins, she “could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.” That’s because any president, regardless of party, has the power to mobilize military troops against American citizens in certain circumstances. Only one candidate—Trump—in this year’s presidential election has outright suggested it. 

But that presidential power isn’t granted by a random military policy. It’s granted by the Insurrection Act.

A law nearly as old as the country itself, the act gives a president essentially unilateral authority to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and call on military troops to suppress domestic rebellions. The law effectively leaves it up to the president to decide what constitutes a rebellion.

“There are essentially zero procedural safeguards in the Insurrection Act,” Nunn says.

During his first administration, Trump and his allies reportedly considered invoking the Insurrection Act both during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and again after he lost his re-election bid. And legal experts say that any follow through on Trump’s increasingly frequent threats to use the military domestically, including against “radical left lunatics,” would likely come through an invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Republicans are saying that the real misinformation is being peddled by Democrats. They claim the Harris-Walz campaign is taking out of context Trump’s comments from his October 13 interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo, with some suggesting he was referring to undocumented migrants or to only deploying the military in a national security crisis.

Here is the full quote from Trump when Bartiromo asked if he “expected chaos on election day” from “outside agitators,” including “Chinese nationals,” “people on terrorist watch lists,” “murderers,” and “rapists”:

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people who have come in, destroying our country—and by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated.

“But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.

“And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

When Wendy Davis wanted to get birth control as a teenager in the 1980s, she went to her local Planned Parenthood in Fort Worth, Texas, with a friend. “There is absolutely no way I would have asked my mother for her permission to do that,” says Davis, the former Texas state senator who famously filibustered an anti-abortion bill for 11 hours in a pair of pink sneakers. “That’s just not something that’s possible for many, many, many teenage girls.” 

Forty years later, with abortion banned in wide swaths of the country, access to reliable contraception is more important than ever. Yet for Texas teens, getting prescription birth control is arguably harder now than it was when Davis was an adolescent. Over the past two years, federal courts—including the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit—have ruled that minors must have parental consent to obtain prescription birth control from Texas clinics subsidized by a federal family planning program known as Title X. Flush with victory, Texas Republicans have made it clear: They have no intention of stopping there. In late July, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit to overturn a new federal rule that reaffirmed teens’ ability in other states to get contraception without their parents’ consent. “The Biden Administration continues to prove they will do anything to implement their extremist agenda,” Paxton said in a press release.

To anyone paying even a modicum of attention, the far-right’s plans to limit access to birth control have long been hiding in plain sight. When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in the Dobbs decision in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” other rulings with similar legal principles, including Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision establishing a right to contraception (and, more fundamentally, a constitutional right to privacy). The ultra-conservative strategists behind Project 2025— including Roger Severino, longtime anti-abortion movement lawyer, and Russell Voght, an avowed Christian nationalist—have spelled out a plan for how a Republican-led White House could gut or rewrite key federal birth-control regulations, building on efforts that began during the first Trump administration. (While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even claiming he doesn’t know who wrote it, at least 140 members of Trump’s team, including Severino and Voght, had a hand in drafting it.)

But what has escaped many Americans is that these threats aren’t just terrifying what-if-this-happens scenarios. As the Texas lawsuits show, in some parts of the US, that scary future has already arrived. States have been passing laws allowing pharmacies to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions based on moral objections, or proposing legislation that unscientifically classifies emergency contraception and IUDs as “abortifacients.” Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch has found that since 2021, at least 21 states have directed a total of $513 million to religiously affiliated crisis pregnancy centers and “alternatives to abortion” programs that actively spread misinformation about birth control and discourage its use.

And though contraception is supported by around 90 percent of voters, when Congress had the chance earlier this year to pass a law protecting access to birth control, Republican senators blocked it, claiming it was unnecessary.

The Biden administration has repeatedly pushed back—most recently, with a new proposed rule under the Affordable Care Act to require private insurance to cover 100 percent of the cost of over-the-counter birth control and offer patients more choices for prescription contraception. In a statement, Vice President Kamala Harris described the move as “the largest expansion of contraception coverage in more than a decade.” But the regulations won’t be finalized until after the presidential election, and the new rules are virtually certain to be challenged in GOP-packed federal courts even if Harris wins. 

And what if she doesn’t?

A new Trump administration and its right-wing allies are expected to escalate attacks on contraception on a multitude of fronts, including appointing extremists to key government positions. Rather than outright bans, we should expect more subtle incursions—regulatory changes, limits on insurance coverage, and funding reductions for family planning, as well as rules like the parental consent requirement for teens, according to reproductive health policy experts interviewed by Mother Jones. “It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing,” says Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute. “They’re not. It is much more behind-the-scenes, around the margins. And yet, the impact is still potentially devastating.”

“It would be cleaner if there was some direct attack on the right to contraception that opponents of reproductive healthcare were pursuing. They’re not.”

“That’s what happened to abortion,” adds Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who studies the impact of family planning policy. “Death by a thousand cuts.”

Here are four key strategies we can expect under a new Trump administration intent on undermining access to contraception:

Doubling Down on False Claims that Birth Control Causes Abortion

One of the most common attack lines against contraception is the claim that certain methods—notably IUDs and morning-after pills—are abortifacients, which is to say they cause abortion, purportedly by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. In fact, decades of research show that these methods block fertilization from ever happening—by preventing the release of eggs, for instance, or stopping sperm from reaching them. Yet the belief that IUDs and emergency contraception, like Plan B and Ella, end pregnancies rather than preventing them has become distressingly common, thanks in part to rampant misinformation spread by the anti-abortion movement—including appointees in the first Trump administration.

The falsehoods have made their way into Food and Drug Administration policy, with decades-long repercussions for reproductive health. Back in the early 2000s, when the FDA was trying to decide whether Plan B should be sold over the counter, it relied on an advisory committee that included several abortion opponents. Over the objections of their colleagues, those committee members persuaded the agency to include language in Plan B’s packaging that stated the drug “may also work” by preventing implantation. Not until 2022 did the FDA finally update the Plan B label to clarify the drug “does not terminate a pregnancy.” But anti-abortion groups could challenge that update in a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, since 2015, the “abortifacient claim” has inspired lawmakers in at least seven states to vote to cut off funding for contraception or block bills to protect access to it, USA Today found in a recent investigation. Project 2025 also continues this line of attack, describing Ella as a “potential abortifacient” and proposing to wipe out mandatory insurance coverage for it. Some anti-abortion organizations, including the influential Students for Life, even falsely claim that the daily birth control pill is an abortifacient. As my colleague Kiera Butler has written, it’s all part of a growing right-wing movement to persuade women that hormonal contraception is just plain bad for them. If Trump wins, his appointees are likely to bring those arguments with them to the agencies they oversee, further threatening birth control access.

Rewriting Title X

Attacking government subsidies for contraception has been part of the GOP playbook for decades. A favorite target is Title X, a federal safety-net program that underwrites free reproductive health services—birth control, cervical cancer screenings, and STI screening and treatment, but not abortion—for low-income and uninsured people. Planned Parenthood clinics, a common provider of these services, receive about 20 percent of Title X funds.

No surprise: Texas has led the way in attacking the federal program since 2011, when the legislature slashed state funding for reproductive health care and redirected Title X money to primary care providers. The changes that year—designed to kneecap Planned Parenthood—forced scores of reproductive health clinics to close, and others to reduce hours, charge patients new fees, or ration the most effective (but expensive) forms of contraception, such as IUDs. As a result of the changes, the number of clients served by Texas family planning organizations fell by more than half, and the teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent. “It shredded the safety net for women’s health care in our state,” says Davis, now a senior adviser to Planned Parenthood Texas Votes. “Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight. It was devastating, and slowly, we’ve been building our way back.”

“Tens of thousands of women literally lost the only health care they had ever known, overnight.”

Trump’s first-term appointees, following Texas’ lead, set about dramatically reshaping the entire Title X program. The administration’s “gag rule,” first proposed under Ronald Reagan but never fully implemented, which forbids any clinics that took Title X money from referring patients to abortion providers. It also required them to keep separate books and separate facilities from their abortion services, if they offered them—a logistical nightmare. Some 1,300 reproductive health facilities, including 400 Planned Parenthood clinics, withdrew from the program rather than withhold abortion referrals from patients who wanted them, and roughly 1.6 million patients lost access to federally subsidized birth control. “It was a very difficult time in the program,” says Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association. “Of course, the numbers plummeted.” What happened to the freed-up Title X money? The Trump administration sent some of it to a chain of Christian “crisis pregnancy centers” that refused to provide contraception or even referrals for birth control, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer found in a 2019 investigation.

When Joe Biden took office, his administration promptly revoked the Trump rule, and the Title X network started rebuilding. But Vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance has already signaled that a second Trump administration would try again to defund Planned Parenthood—code for attacking Title X. Project 2025 urges the next president to “quickly” reissue the gag rule. It also advocates that Title X be “reframed with a focus on better education around fertility awareness”—a less-reliable method of cycle tracking favored by anti-abortion activists and wellness influencers—with grants opened up once again to anti-abortion religious organizations.

In anticipation of a Trump win, Coleman’s organization has been working with reproductive health clinics to prepare for the old gag rule to be reissued and even expanded soon after Inauguration Day. Not only could the next version of the rule pick up on Texas’ efforts to require parental consent for teenagers, Coleman warns Trump appointees are also likely to attack gender-affirming care. (Title X does not explicitly fund such care but some providers offer those services separately, just as they do abortion.) “They may say, if you take Title X, you can’t provide any of that care,” Coleman speculates. “We are quite concerned about them trying to enforce not only a gender binary—because we also do see men in the Title X program—but to recast it as: ‘This is a program about biological sex.’”

That’s if Title X survives at all: House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget bill in September 2023 would have defunded the program entirely.

Gutting the Affordable Care Act

Before the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, birth control accounted for around a third of women’s out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Monthly copays deterred women from getting the Pill, while an IUD could have an up-front cost of $1,000.

The ACA changed all that for over 62 million women. Starting in 2012, the law classified contraception as a form of preventive care and made it mandatory for private insurance to cover a wide range of prescription birth control at no cost to consumers. Last year, responding to the fallout from Dobbs, the Biden administration directed agencies to find ways to strengthen the contraception mandate and make sure insurers follow it; last month’s announcement on coverage of over-the-counter contraception follows that effort.

Fighting the contraception mandate has been one of the key ways conservatives and religious groups have sought to erode access to birth control. In 2014, the Supreme Court’s infamous Hobby Lobby ruling blew a crater in the ACA’s contraception mandate in the name of protecting religious freedom. There had always been a religious exemption for churches and houses of worship. But Hobby Lobby expanded that exemption to include 90 percent of US businesses—letting them deny coverage for birth control in employee insurance plans if the owners had a religious objection.

Trump broadened the exemption even further in his first term, allowing employers to decline to provide birth control based on moral, not just religious, objections. “It opens the door wide for any employer that provides health insurance to pick and choose what kind of contraception they would like to cover,” says Dana Singiser, cofounder of the Contraceptive Access Initiative.

Of course, there’s always the chance that a Republican White House and Congress would wipe out the ACA altogether, as Trump tried to do in 2017. Trump has since made conflicting statements about whether he would try again for a repeal or impose “concepts of a plan” to replace it. In late October, Speaker Johnson promised a “massive reform” of the ACA if Trump is elected.

Even with the ACA still on the books, experts say Trump could do significant damage, bypassing Congress by issuing new regulations or guidance from executive-branch agencies. Project 2025 leans in on this idea, urging the next president to make regulatory moves that would hobble the contraceptive mandate. “It’s not flashy,” says Lauren Wallace, senior counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center. “Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

“Every administration is allowed to put out proposed rules, put out guidance. So those are the ways this coverage can be stripped.”

The Biden administration is currently finalizing a replacement to Trump’s rule allowing moral objections to the contraceptive mandate; it’s safe to say that Trump would block or revoke it. He could also issue other regulations to make the contraceptive mandate “unworkable,” Wallace says. He could give insurers more agency to make rules around which types of birth control they choose to insure or require patients to try certain methods, before covering more expensive ones.

Project 2025’s authors, of course, have their own ideas about which forms of birth control are preferable. Their blueprint urges the next president to require the Department of Health and Human Services to issue new regulations about what is covered by the ACA contraceptive mandate. In: “fertility awareness” methods. Out: male condoms and Ella.

Shrinking Medicaid While Increasing Surveillance

Back to Texas.

Over the past decade or so, at the same time the state was attacking family planning clinics, it found a way to mess with the most common way people pay for birth control: Medicaid. And Davis sees what it did as a potential model for other states should Trump win.

First, the state passed a law banning abortion providers and their affiliates from participating in the state’s Medicaid-funded family planning program. The law conflicted with a federal rule allowing Medicaid patients to choose any “willing” provider. That meant Texas had to apply to the Obama administration for a waiver of the rule. “They got into a standoff,” Davis recalls. “The Obama administration said, ‘We’re going to remove all of your funding if you do this.’ And Texas said, ‘Fine, do it.’”

For the next few years, Texas ran a shrunken version of the program using state funding. Then Trump appeared, installing a National Right to Life Committee lobbyist to oversee national family planning policy. Texas applied for the Medicaid waiver again—and this time, received it. The Trump administration also gave the state permission not to cover emergency contraception in its Medicaid-funded program.

Davis predicts that other states will use the same maneuver to sever Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, should Trump return to office. Tennessee, which bans virtually all abortions, and South Carolina, which bans them at six weeks, have already applied for similar waivers. And Missouri recently enacted a law to ban all Medicaid reimbursements for abortion providers and their affiliates—even though the state’s abortion ban means they now only provide services like contraception and cancer screening.

Project 2025 proposes making Medicaid and other federal health funding conditional on states participating in a frighteningly detailed abortion surveillance system. “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the blueprint says, “HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.” The database would include the gestational age at which the abortion was performed, the method, and the reason for it.

The proposal would force states to make an “impossible choice,” says Madeline Morcelle, senior attorney at the National Health Law Center. Participating in that “weaponized program,” she says, “would likely be used to criminalize pregnant people,” particularly immigrants, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, young people, and people with disabilities. But dropping out would likely mean losing federal funding for vital Medicaid services affecting millions of those same low-income people.

Davis, in Texas, says she knows that predictions about losing access to birth control can sound exaggerated. She’s heard such criticisms before—from people who believed that Roe would never fall. “There are those out there who believe that this is hyperbole,” she says. But as a Texan who has witnessed how what appears radical becomes normalized, she has no illusions about the potential dangers. “I don’t think it’s unlikely at all that as Republicans become more and more extreme, and governed in a more and more extreme way by their rightward flank, that we are going to see these things become a reality.”

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mother Jones.

Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right. 

The focus? Department of Defense Directive 5240.01. 

The 22-page document governs military intelligence activities and is among more than a thousand different policies that outline Defense Department procedures.

The Pentagon updated it at the end of September. Although military policies are routinely updated and reissued, the timing of this one—just six weeks before the election and the same day Hurricane Helene slammed into the Southeast—struck right-wing misinformation merchants as suspicious.

They latched onto a new reference in the updated directive—“lethal force”—and soon were falsely claiming that the change meant Kamala Harris had authorized the military to kill civilians if there were to be unrest after the election.

That’s flat-out not true, the Pentagon and experts on military policy told The War Horse.

“The provisions in [the directive] are not new, and do not authorize the Secretary of Defense to use lethal force against US citizens, contrary to rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media,” Sue Gough, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said Wednesday night.

But as Trump doubles down on his “enemy from within” rhetoric, DOD Directive 5240.01 continues to gain traction among his supporters as ostensible proof that Harris, not Trump, wants to use the military against American citizens.

By early last week, “5240.01” began to spike on alt-tech platforms such as Rumble, 4chan, and Telegram, as well as on more mainstream platforms like X, according to an analysis by The War Horse and UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center. 

On Ron Paul’s Liberty Report, a YouTube show, the former Texas congressman told viewers that the policy meant that the country is now a “police state.” Republican Maryland congressman Andy Harris told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo last Wednesday that he was concerned the Defense Department was pushing through policies without congressional oversight.

“This is exactly what the Democrats said Trump would do. And they’re doing it,” he said. “This means that after an election, they could declare a national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.”

Former Trump national security adviser and retired Army Lieutenant Gen. Michael Flynn tweeted the policy update out to his 1.7 million followers, just as he shared the week before a video suggesting the military had manipulated the weather to focus Hurricane Helene’s deadly fury on Republican voters in the South.

On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got into the act in a tweet criticizing Kamala Harris’ response to a story that Trump wanted “the kind of generals that Hitler had”:

“It’s particularly ironic since Biden/Harris have just pushed through DoD Directive 5240.01 giving the Pentagon power—for the first time in history—to use lethal force to kill Americans on US soil who protest government policies.”

By that evening, his post on X had 5.6 million views.

Joseph Nunn, a lawyer with the Liberty & National Security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and a leading expert on domestic uses of the military, had a clear response to the social media storm.

“There’s nothing here. People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “People like Michael Flynn should know how to read a DOD directive.”

(Click here to read DOD Directive 5240.01.)

Contrary to claims online, DOD Directive 5240.01, which last had been updated in 2020, does not grant any new powers to the military. That’s not how military directives work. Like them or not, all military policies are subject to US law; they do not create new legal authorities. 

Directive 5240.01 has a narrow focus: It only addresses military intelligence, and the section that has circulated online specifically deals with intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement. 

The paragraph that contains the term “lethal force” refers to a requirement that the Secretary of Defense—the highest level of the Defense Department—must now authorize military intelligence assistance to civilian law enforcement when lethal force might be involved.

“This is not an independent source of authority,” Nunn said. “We really should look at this as an administrative safeguard that is being put in place.” 

Military intelligence has long been authorized to provide assistance to federal law enforcement agencies, as well as state and local law enforcement when lives are endangered, under limited circumstances. That could include providing technical expertise or helping with international anti-terrorism or counter-narcotics operations, for instance.

“A reference to lethal force in a directive like this doesn’t mean they’re planning to have snipers on rooftops in covert ops,” said Nunn, who has written on limiting the role of the military in law enforcement. “The nature of law enforcement will sometimes involve the use of lethal force.” 

In its response to The War Horse, the Pentagon said the directive’s update was “in no way timed in relation to the election or any other event.” 

“Reissuing 5240.01 was part of normal business of the Department to periodically update guidance and policy,” the DOD’s Gough said.

The Defense Department has issued or revised 10 other directives and instructions since it updated “5240.01” at the end of September, ranging from a policy on space-related military activities to guidance on public affairs’ officers use of military vehicles.

“It’s not unusual to update DOD regulations,” says Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University and a former senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. “It doesn’t signal some nefarious agenda.”

The update to “5240.01” brings the policy in line with other Defense Department directives. One of those is known as DOD Directive 5210.56—an entirely different Defense Department directive than the one updated last month. It lays out rules when troops across the military can use lethal force outside of military operations, limiting it to “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm” or to protect critical national security assets. 

Posts online, including the one that Flynn shared, claim that Directive 5240.01 runs afoul of a legal statute known as posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act, which dates back to Reconstruction, generally forbids military troops from acting as domestic police. Civil liberty experts consider it an important civil rights protection against possible military overreach. 

Despite the conspiracy claims spreading online, the directive clearly states that military intelligence units assisting civilian police must consider the Posse Comitatus Act.

“The updated issuance remains consistent with DoD’s adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act, commitment to civil rights, and support of other safeguards in place for the protection of the American people,” Gough said.

Spreading misinformation about the military can be particularly damaging “to the relationship between the military and the public,” Brooks told The War Horse.

“This sort of politicization, this idea of sowing mistrust in the military in order to gain partisan advantage, is really corrosive,” Brooks said. “There’s a motive. There’s something to be gained by spreading these rumors.”

Ironically, however, Rep. Harris, the Republican congressman, was right about one thing when he claimed that if Kamala Harris wins, she “could declare national emergency and literally call out the Army in the United States.” That’s because any president, regardless of party, has the power to mobilize military troops against American citizens in certain circumstances. Only one candidate—Trump—in this year’s presidential election has outright suggested it. 

But that presidential power isn’t granted by a random military policy. It’s granted by the Insurrection Act.

A law nearly as old as the country itself, the act gives a president essentially unilateral authority to temporarily suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and call on military troops to suppress domestic rebellions. The law effectively leaves it up to the president to decide what constitutes a rebellion.

“There are essentially zero procedural safeguards in the Insurrection Act,” Nunn says.

During his first administration, Trump and his allies reportedly considered invoking the Insurrection Act both during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and again after he lost his re-election bid. And legal experts say that any follow through on Trump’s increasingly frequent threats to use the military domestically, including against “radical left lunatics,” would likely come through an invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Republicans are saying that the real misinformation is being peddled by Democrats. They claim the Harris-Walz campaign is taking out of context Trump’s comments from his October 13 interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo, with some suggesting he was referring to undocumented migrants or to only deploying the military in a national security crisis.

Here is the full quote from Trump when Bartiromo asked if he “expected chaos on election day” from “outside agitators,” including “Chinese nationals,” “people on terrorist watch lists,” “murderers,” and “rapists”:

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people who have come in, destroying our country—and by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated.

“But I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics.

“And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

This story was produced in collaboration with Talking Eyes Media and Amplifier Fellows.

Four years ago, Georgia was at the center of a political maelstrom. On top of the two runoff elections that resulted in Democratic control of the Senate, there was also Donald Trump’s demand that Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger “find” 11,779 votes to secure his victory there. Georgia delivered high drama on an impressive scale.

The state is likely to be the site of a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Kamala Harris this year, with shifting demographics slowly nudging it from red to blue. The change is driven by growing numbers of immigrants, African Americans, and young people. But as we traveled around the state, it was clear that Georgia’s youth vote isn’t a gimme for Democrats.

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Earlier this month in Athens, Georgia, a young voter told me, “If there is a threat to democracy, it’s certainly not Donald Trump.” He detailed what he saw as the alleged abuses perpetrated by Democrats, including jailing Trump supporters and indicting him four times. “They forced Joe Biden off the top of the ticket against his will and appointed a replacement nominee,” he added. “Not elected, appointed a replacement nominee.”

Young conservatives are a formidable presence in Georgia, which has the highest proportion of people under 30 of any swing state. They will be instrumental in determining the outcome of the election. During my recent conversations with them, the economy repeatedly ranked as their top concern. Hardly anyone mentioned abortion, gender, or climate change. Most of them were politically active, belonging to groups like the College Republicans, Turning Point USA, and the Young Patriots Association, and several had interned at the state capitol.

“I think it’s insulting to assume that the people cannot tell whether information is true or it’s false.”

Jefry Capinegro, a junior at the University of Georgia, is a thoughtful, serious 24-year-old who sees himself as “pretty far to the right.” He says he’s deeply committed to the truth, and he reads the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, as well as bouncing between multiple TV news sources.

When I asked about potential threats to democracy, Jefry told me that Democrats are trying to censor conservatives on social media, a sentiment I heard multiple times from other young people. I pressed Jefry on whether it was okay to limit information that is false or incites violence. “I think it’s insulting to assume that the people cannot tell whether information is true or it’s false,” he said. He insisted that it is dangerous to allow the government to decipher fact from fiction because “we’ve seen these fact-checks to be wrong on numerous occasions.”

Jefry cited Trump and JD Vance’s claim that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. He said that while it sounded crazy at first, it was actually based in truth—he had seen the video. He described police body cam footage that shows a Haitian woman with blood on her face as officers ask her repeatedly if she ate a cat that laid on the ground.

I found the video he was referencing. It turns out the incident happened 174 miles from Springfield, and it shows an American-born Black woman who later pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to multiple criminal charges. When I shared this information with Jefry via text, he immediately responded, “Thank you for finding that. I stand corrected. Perhaps not the best example to cite, but glad to know now.”

The following excerpts have been condensed for clarity.

---

Daniel Shaver
18-year-old college student, founder of Young Patriots Association

We’ve gone to a point now where the polarization between the Republican and the Democratic Party has gotten so bad that people are afraid to speak out. And I feel like to an extent that is a violation of people’s rights to freedom of thought and expression. I know people who have personally lost their jobs because their employers did not agree with their political beliefs. I’ve also seen people have things taken down on social media because their views were considered misinformation. And I think that is dangerous to personal freedom.

I have felt pressure, as far as societal pressure. If you don’t agree with me on this, then you’re not going to be part of our club. You’re not going to get this job. There’s a lot of that pressure going on. It’s the unspoken, the silent tension that people have to deal with. And I feel like that is very sad and it’s dangerous to the future of our country. You shouldn’t have to be afraid to say, I’m Republican, I’m Democrat, I’m independent. You shouldn’t have to feel that way. And we have to make sure that we’re all fighting to make sure that people feel safe to share their beliefs. 

---

Miracle Jones
27-year-old health care human resources professional

I am a Christian, and I am a devoted Christian. So everything, my point of view, they are heavily biblically based. So when I’m looking for policies, I’m looking for policies that align more so with the Bible than anything else. Because for me, it’s always God first.

Fun fact: I’ve never registered to vote until this election, because I’m worried. I’ve never been worried. I’ve always had the mindset of God will take care of me, either way, no matter who gets in the office. But now, this time, I feel like it actually matters who gets in the office.

So with Trump policies, for instance, the gun laws, he’s, you know, pro-guns, the Lord, whether people have read that part in the Bible or not. He’s also for protecting ourselves. And then Trump he’s not for teaching you know 73 different genders or allowing men to participate in women’s sports. We all know what the Lord says about homosexuality and things of that nature. And then when it comes to the border thing, God is, he’s for borders, he’s for different nations. That’s why we have different nations and different languages to begin with, because if all the people try to come together like they once did back in the day, then they try to play God and he can’t have that, so he’s for the borders.

If you ask me, I think the Democratic Party is silencing me. I feel like they are the ones behind like the social media fact-checkers in some form or fashion, whether directly or indirectly. I think the freedom of religion is more so supported by the Republican Party than the Democratic Party.

---

Jose Barrera Bales
20-year-old election protection organizer for Common Cause, Georgia

I am disappointed in the 2024 election because the candidates are both on very extreme sides of the aisle. Neither one of them, you know, very much resonates with me politically. And they both have extraordinary plans that they want to implement that will increase our deficit probably more than we’ve ever seen before.

Julie Winokur: What do you say to your friends who are not voting?

Jose: I would say vote anyways, because, you know, even if it’s a protest vote, it still shows how un-content the American populace is. And even if you do vote for, you know, for somebody that I might not particularly agree with, it is a civic duty. It’s a civic responsibility. And it’s good for you to keep your voice as an individual out there.

I want to go into politics. Hope to be one of the first elected independents in Georgia. It’s a very lofty goal, some may even say impossible, but if I do achieve it, then, you know, it’ll change the status quo for the better, hopefully. The sense of hope for me is hopefully the future independent movement in Congress eventually will achieve term limits and corporate lobbying and end the political division between the Republicans and the Democrats. Maybe then the middle ground can start to mend the country a little bit.

---

Aqui B’Nek Wingo
26-year-old union electrician

Being black and a union member and not being a Democrat, it looks really, really weird. I see myself as a Republican in a lot of sense, but mostly I wish we had a more European style system where we have multiple different parties and everything, because there are some things Republicans do that I’m not really a big fan of and there’s some things the Democrats do that I’m a fan of.

Ever since I came out as a Black conservative, I’ve taken a lot of flak from my extended family members. I take a lot of flak even in my union. Just the other day, another black person made a racial slur towards me because I’m a Republican.

I’m not a big fan of free college for all because I’m not going to waste my own tax dollars on a useless liberal arts degree like gender studies or wherever these titles they bunch up together so people get degrees. That seems a huge waste of time and money. If we’re investing more into, let’s say, trade programs that we can go out to work, that’ll be better because in construction fields across the country, it’s such a huge shortage of people because the last 30 years there’s been a push for college, college, college. Trade is bad, trade is bad, trade is bad.

I don’t trust Western media, and I hate saying it like that, but our media, especially here in the US, is extremely biased. So what I always do is I go to Sky News. I’ll go to Visegrád 24 on Twitter. There’s Polish news I look at. I also look at DW, France 24, and sometimes the Japanese, because I want the most unbiased stuff that I can get, and the best way I can get it is by one looking at different countries in different news sources outside the country and multiple sources to gain a broader picture of what I want to see.

---

Jefry Capinegro
24-year-old college student

I am an immigrant to this country. I was born in Guatemala, and I was adopted when I was six months old. At the time, the immigration issue was maybe not as in the headlines as it is today, but as the immigration issue has come to the forefront.

Here at the University of Georgia, this community, this campus, we’ve seen the ugly side. Laken Riley took a jog one morning down by the intramural fields on the south campus, as many people do. But she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it was an illegal immigrant who attacked her, who sexually assaulted her, and who murdered her. It should have never happened. It happens far too often. One time was too many. But this community felt the impact.

Oftentimes people perceive the whole immigration argument is very black and white, very pro-immigration or anti-immigration. Well, certainly I’m pro-immigration. I myself am an immigrant. But the key word in there that seems to be somehow lost is ‘illegal’. The Republican Party, the conservative, whatever you want to call them, we are absolutely pro-immigration. I think we all understand that this country was founded and built on immigration. We are very pro-immigration. We’re just not pro-illegal immigration.

---

Abigail Ray
22-year-old college student

My feelings about the upcoming election, I would have to say, are: It’s nerve-wracking. It’s really nerve-wracking because I feel like we’re on a trajectory—like heading towards a cliff, like we’re going towards a cliff. We’re speeding there. And I feel like if we do not secure this election and if, in my opinion, the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, doesn’t win, I feel like we will not be able to, you know, turn the wheel and jerk it and save our country.

I feel like we need to save the country from further annihilation. I’ll give you an example. Flying around Athens, Georgia, for the last three days has been an airplane toting the banner that says: Abortion pills by mail. And rather than Kamala Harris of the Democratic Party wanting to advocate for, you know, a happier, healthier society where people can afford to have children and where men actually want to impregnate women and want to raise kids and have a happy family and a good society where kids can thrive, rather than do that, they want to make it easier for Americans to cut themselves down at the knee. They want to make it easier to take away our rights. And it just doesn’t make any sense.

Julie Winokur: The abortion pill airplane, is that a Harris campaign advertisement?

Abigail: No, there’s no name on the on the sign, but it’s blue. And we know that there were abortion vans outside the Democratic National Convention where they were literally having people come and get an abortion in a van. And so what you can detect from that is that they must not want to advocate for pro-American life. They must not actually love us.

---

Chaston Atkins
19-year-old college student, state secretary of the Georgia Association of College Republicans

I’ve always necessarily been critical of President Trump, and I think that I have not necessarily been on the populist bandwagon. 

Because I am a political science major, a lot of my friends are politically engaged. I would say that maybe 35 to 45 percent of my friends are actually liberal or moderate or not necessarily conservative. And, you know, that just comes with the territory of being on a college campus, engaging with people who have different ideas. And so it just comes to dealing with those people, being cordial, being kind, knowing that we’re not going to agree on everything, but we have other things that we can agree on and that we should work on those things and try not to be hyperpartisan, which I think is detrimental not just to the individual but to the government and to society as a whole.

I don’t necessarily believe that there is a threat to democracy. I think people are hyperpartisan, they’re mad, they’re angry, they’re being hostile, and that’s something that you can say is brought on by politicians who are seen as somewhat demagogue-like.

I believe that former President Trump has already said that he would step down in case of him losing the election, but regardless as to whether he said it or not, I think he ultimately will. I think that everyone learned their lesson from what happened last time, that you can’t let things get out of control. You can’t let things become riotous. I don’t think that’ll happen at all this time. I think that regardless of the outcome, I think we’re going to be in safe hands.

---

Laura Kelley
22-year-old college student

Everything is so difficult with politics, in my opinion, because I’m a conservative and I believe that government should not be super involved in people’s lives. People should have the freedom to do what they want, and that’s the best thing about America.

So with books in schools, that’s so difficult. My mom is actually a librarian in an elementary school and it’s in a northern county in Georgia, so obviously the population is very conservative. And when this topic came to light the school board was super against certain books to be put into the schools. So therefore, my mom had to make those selections. But also it’s like those kids want to read those books. So it’s just so complicated, like maybe the kids should be able to buy it outside school if they really want to read those. But if the taxpayer is saying those books shouldn’t be allowed in schools, they shouldn’t. So I really don’t know what I believe in that.

“I have two rules,” Bernie Moreno, Ohio’s Republican candidate for US Senate, told a crowd at a Columbus-area event earlier this year. “Rule number one is you can videotape and tape record anything I say. What I say to you here is what I’ll say to the media, is what I say privately, is what I say to my own team…Rule number two,” he continued, “is please ask difficult questions.”

Moreno, who rose to prominence as the owner of multiple luxury car dealerships, has made similar declarations at least half a dozen times on the 2024 campaign trail. But while Moreno brags about his dedication to transparency, his campaign also uses a machine at his events that renders voice recordings and videos taken by everyday voters inaudible as his race against incumbent three-term Sen. Sherrod Brown narrows to a slim margin; the winner of this close race will help determine which political party controls the US Senate.

The so-called “anti-recording devices” are available on Amazon for $399.99 and work by emitting white noise and ultrasonic waves that recording devices pick up but people present in person generally do not.

Moreno’s decision to muffle recordings with the gadget may have been prompted by criticism he’s received for leaked audio in which he discusses his thoughts about abortion: In late September, Moreno was recorded at an event saying that suburban women making abortion their top issue at the polls is “a little crazy by the way—especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.'”

Business Insider first reported on October 25 that Moreno’s campaign was using the anti-recording tools to thwart political trackers, who are paid to trace candidates’ every move, from recording Moreno soundbites. The campaign told the publication that the gadget was “only being used against trackers, rather than regular event attendees.”

Mother Jones, however, has learned from an Ohio voter that the device also distorted the audio she tried to record at a mid-October event hosted by Moreno in Ottawa County, Ohio. (Warning, the muffled audio isn’t pleasant on the ears.)

The voter, who asked to remain anonymous, said she had hoped to record the event in order to share it with a friend who wanted to attend but had a scheduling conflict. Instead, the recordings the woman took ended up sounding something like launching an internet dial-up connection or tuning a decades-old radio.

Mother Jones has verified this voter does not work for any political campaigns. Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party confirmed the party had not sent any paid operatives or trackers to this particular Moreno event.

After the Business Insider account published, a conservative political strategist whose firm, Big Dog Strategies, has worked with Moreno’s campaign went so far as to share the Amazon listing: “For all our friends asking, here’s the link.” A spokesperson for the Moreno campaign did not respond to specific questions sent by Mother Jones.

The Spy Associates–brand product listing confirms its audio-jamming device is effective in preventing anyone within a wide radius—not just political staffers—from recording: “Our ultrasound anti-recording speech protector, with its advanced noise and ultrasonic waves,” the description says, “ensures unauthorized recordings within a range of +/- 6.5-33 feet and a 270-degree interference angle are rendered indecipherable.”

“Don’t you want a president who’s going to make America healthy again?” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked a roaring crowd, during Sunday’s triumphal rally in support of Trump at Madison Square Garden. 

When Kennedy, the country’s most famous anti-vaccine activist, suspended his campaign to endorse Donald Trump, it not only represented the death of his presidential aspirations, but the dawn of something new: the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement, a tidy bit of sloganeering designed to highlight where Trump and Kennedy’s agendas overlap.

“How can you claim this is going to make people healthy?”

The concept is meant to convince skeptical Kennedy supporters to back Trump. But so far it’s mainly illustrated the various ways Kennedy is on board with Trump’s radical deregulation agenda, which would see the agencies responsible for policing food, environmental and medication safety defunded.

After all, the ex-president has done it before: Trump came into office pledging to make huge cuts to scientific and medical research. Under his administration, the FDA took fewer enforcement actions against companies suspected of marketing dangerous, unsafe, or ineffective products, and cuts to public health agencies may have harmed the country’s readiness to respond to COVID. 

There are signs that another Trump administration will be even worse for public health: Project 2025, an agenda for his second administration prepared by his allies, calls for the CDC to be broken up, slamming it as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” It also demonizes the National Institutes of Health, claiming the agency has an “incestuous relationship” with vaccine manufacturers and is in the grip of “woke gender ideology.”  

Despite his governing record, Trump has adopted some MAHA talking points, promising to end the “chronic illness epidemic” in America, which, like Kennedy, he has previously blamed partly on vaccines. Trump, who already installed Kennedy on his presidential transition team, also publicly promised to put him on a panel to study what he called “the decades-long increase in chronic health problems, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, infertility, and many more.” 

The main overlap between Trump and Kennedy—and the driving force behind the MAHA movement—is a their shared conviction that the institutions responsible for policing the safety of food and drugs should be defunded and their employees investigated and possibly jailed.

On Monday, Kennedy told a group of MAHA supporters that Trump had “promised me…control of the public health agencies,” including HHS, the CDC, FDA, NIH, USDA, “and a few others.” Kennedy recently tweeted that the FDA’s “war on public health is about to end” under a new Trump administration, before listing an array that encompassed pseudoscientific practices and products: “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” He added, “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.” 

At the Madison Square Garden rally, Kennedy accused Democrats of “giving us the sickest children in the world,” called the chronic disease crisis “existential for our country,” and said he was focused on “ending the corruption” at agencies including the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA, all which he lumped in with the CIA as being in dire need of top-to-bottom reform.  

According to researcher and author Matthew Remski, Kennedy’s recent appearances have seen him deemphasize attacks on vaccines to instead focus on a much broader set of purported issues around health.

“It’s probably the most successful rebrand that he’s managed since his anti-vax turn back in 2005,” says Remski, a co-host of Conspirituality, a podcast examining the alignment between New Age and right wing spheres. “MAHA represents his organizational capacity to bring the full spectrum of anti-vax-adjacent issues and concerns and grievances together under one umbrella.”

And could be a profitable one. The brand has given rise to the MAHA Alliance—a new conservative super PAC led by Del Bigtree, an anti-vaccine personality and Kennedy’s former campaign communications director. Bigtree says the group has already raised nearly $8 million, including a recent $3 million donation from Elon Musk.

Kennedy’s new role in GOP politics has opened doors to him and those in his circles—including some with a track record of promoting harmful or scientifically unsupported health claims. In September, Kennedy and a number of close allies and MAHA boosters took part in a Capitol Hill event on nutrition hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), a longtime friend of the anti-vaccine movement. Billed as “a nonpartisan panel discussion about the industries that impact national health,” in his opening remarks, Kennedy accused the FDA, the USDA, and the CDC of being “sock puppets for the industry they’re supposed to regulate.” 

Other panelists included Calley Means, a self-styled “healthcare reform” advocate who had been involved in Kennedy’s campaign, men’s rights activist and pop psychologist Jordan Peterson (as well as his daughter Mikhaila, who promotes an all-meat regimen she’s dubbed “the Lion Diet”), and Vani Hari, a wellness influencer who uses the moniker Food Babe, who’s previously been accused of making unscientific claims in her quest to pressure food makers to drop certain ingredients.

Given “his distorted views,” Kennedy makes a poor figurehead for a movement purportedly centered on health.

During her panel remarks, Hari pushed a new campaign against Kellogg’s cereals’ use of food dyes as part of a larger agenda against foods with “synthetic preservatives and pesticides.” The science demonstrating danger from the synthetic food dyes Kellogg’s uses in the U.S. is far from settled; according to a 2014 NPR profile, a previous campaign Hari mounted against supposedly-questionable beer additives actually targeted products derived from algae and fish.

Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist who combats health misinformation, told Mother Jones the panel gave participants like Hari “a huge megaphone.” Love has pointed out that some of the Kellogg’s ingredients that Hari has claimed are “banned” in other countries legally appear there under different names. When Love later criticized a video actress Eva Mendes made praising Hari’s campaign and calling Kellogg’s dyes “harmful for children,” Calley Means baselessly accused Love of “advertising for Monsanto.” Peterson called her “a liar” as well as “incompetent, deceitful, resentful and arrogant.”

Danielle Shine—an Australian registered dietitian and nutritionist who studies nutrition misinformation also drew fire from Means and Peterson after commenting on Mendes’ video—says Kennedy makes a poor figurehead for a movement purportedly centered on health, given “his distorted views.”

“It’s perplexing that someone who seems to lack an understanding of basic science and promotes misinformation about vaccinations, food, and health would be positioned to lead a public health initiative,” she says. “His rhetoric repeatedly demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of food and nutrition science.”

Kennedy’s demonization of public health agencies, as he foregrounds influencers who make unsubstantiated claims about science and health, illustrates, Love argues, that the efforts of the so-called Make America Healthy Again circle are entirely misdirected.

“They’re pushing towards an ecosystem where there’s less protection, safety, oversight and regulation,” she says. “They’re not talking about the things that do matter, like getting more Americans insured… They say they’re going to take on a company like Kellogg’s, an entity that has no impact on health outcomes, while also pushing to take all authority, oversight, and funding away from federal entities who do that.”

“How,” she adds, with a measure of disbelief, “can you claim this is going to make people healthy?”

On the evening of January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to, ostensibly, “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals.” It was among a slew of presidential actions announced in those first days of the administration aimed at rolling back the agenda of his predecessor, from defunding sanctuary cities to tearing down the Affordable Care Act. (Over his four years in office, Trump went on to implement 472 executive actions in an effort to reshape the immigration system.)

“When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before.”

But for many observers, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” would go down as the most memorable and infamous: the “Muslim ban.”

Touted as an anti-terrorism measure, the first iteration of Trump’s travel ban on foreigners from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—was a watershed moment. It had a particularly harsh toll on Syrian refugees, indefinitely suspending their resettlement (which was considered “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” despite America’s role in the conflict). But, more so, it showed the extent to which the new administration would make its nativist agenda real.

The morning after Trump signed the proclamation, thousands of protesters rushed to airports across the country as word got out that travelers were being stopped and detained. House and Senate Democrats gathered outside the Supreme Court in opposition to the ban. International condemnation followed, with global leaders denouncing Trump’s actions as shameful and divisive. Former President Barack Obama praised in a statement “citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize, and have their voices heard by their elected officials.”

Back then, the anger and outrage that this could not be normal or, indeed, American, felt palpable and spurred fierce resistance among a cohort unmoored by the Trump administration. But years of anti-immigrant policymaking and rhetoric—especially a flip by Democrats away from condemnation of Trump to tough border talk to win back centrist voters—have changed the landscape. There is now a normalization of the idea that America should restrict immigration.

Facing the prospect of a second Trump administration—and, with it, an escalation in hostility against immigrants and organizers—immigrant rights activists, advocates, and lawyers are building their defenses back up.

In a time of apparent collective amnesia about Trump’s actions, many of the activists have not forgotten what they had to stand up against. Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), an advocacy organization representing more than 200 groups across the state, helped lead a nationwide pushback against the travel ban. “As a Muslim American,” he later recalled in a USA Today op-ed, “it was impossible not to feel directly and personally targeted.”

Now, Awawdeh, and countless other veteran immigrant rights organizers who were at the forefront of the firewall to mitigate the harm of the Trump White House’s attacks on immigrants are gearing up for another battle. Only this time around, they have the benefit of knowing what to expect—and something of a blueprint for how to respond.

“In the scenario where Trump is elected,” Awawdeh tells me, “we go into defend and protect mode. We’ve seen what he’s done to our communities in his first term…He had no regard for the law and he continued to run afoul of the laws on the books, even our own constitution. That didn’t stop him.”

They have their work cut out for them. The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration: the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants; deploying the military within US borders (against migrants and, presumably, protesters); ending birthright citizenship for American-born children of undocumented immigrants; and possibly reviving the “zero tolerance” policy of family separation.

If reelected, Trump has also vowed to restore the “Muslim ban” executive order. “When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” he said in 2023. “Remember the famous travel ban?” Trump reportedly said in September about stopping refugees from Gaza from being allowed into the United States. “We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world.” He added: “We’re not taking them from [terror] infested countries.”

Trump has made expelling the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants from the United States the cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign. In interviews and rallies, he has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest deportation operation in US history, a sweeping effort that would involve gulag-like detention camps on the border and likely the use of the military within US territory—on top of the human cost to immigrants and their families and economic devastation.

“Even if he is unsuccessful in moving mass deportation forward,” Awawdeh says, “What he will do is instill a deeply chilling fear within our communities.”

Awawdeh hopes to take lessons from those first four years of resisting not only the travel ban, but also family separation and a rule punishing immigrants for accessing public benefits. “The biggest piece that we did but didn’t do as strongly in his first go-around was litigation,” Awawdeh says, “and I think that’s the piece that we’re all going to be doubling and tripling down on.”

Policy and legal experts at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) are actively keeping a growing list of policy proposals from the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook and drafting legal memos for potential lawsuits. “Part of the analysis is really asking: What are the things that we know are patently unconstitutional?” says Kica Matos, president of the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund. That list includes the promise to end birthright citizenship for US-born children of undocumented immigrants and the plan to deploy the US military to conduct arrests and deportations in the interior of the country.

“The threats to carry this in a bloody way are indicative to us of intentionality to willfully disregard the constitutional rights that we all have and to violate the civil rights of people who might be impacted,” Matos adds.

During “Trump 1.0,” as she puts it, the federal courts served as a bulwark against some of the former president’s most extreme policies. But the Supreme Court has only gotten more conservative and willing to see the limits of presidential power extended, including to dictate immigration policy. In this environment, fighting back will require a collective effort, from inside the courthouses all the way out to the streets.

“We are bracing for the worst, and we have to think ahead because the stakes are too high to wait,” Awawdeh says. “Think of the worst case scenario in your mind of what a white supremacist would do in office with Project 2025 as their manifesto. That’s the way we’re planning right now.”

Strategic litigation is only part of their calculus. Another huge component is community education and readiness. Across the country, advocates are expanding know-your-rights trainings and campaigns about interactions with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They’re also distributing family safety plans to immigrant households and coordinating with local communities to establish safe spaces—including offices doubling as rapid response hubs—where immigrants can seek shelter during raids or roundups, and setting up emergency funds.

In scenario-planning meetings with partner organizations, Lindsay Toczylowski, the co-founder and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), says they have been asking themselves: Can we look at the past post-election periods and what can we learn from how we all responded as an immigrant rights movement?

ImmDef is a 200-people legal services organization based in Los Angeles that specializes in deportation defense work. (The city has one of the largest number of immigrants with pending deportation proceedings in immigration courts in the country—113,292, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.) In 2023, the nonprofit represented about 2,500 immigrants in removal proceedings and assisted many more with other legal issues, including newly arriving asylum seekers.

“Every time somebody goes into a courtroom,” Toczylowski says, “their potential exile from their communities, their permanent separation from their families, and oftentimes their life itself is on the line.” For clients facing persecution or violence in their countries of origin, she puts in no uncertain terms, “we’re talking about death penalty cases in immigration court.”

The former president has promised a seemingly never-ending catalog of crackdowns on all forms of immigration

What keeps Toczylowski up at night these days, having seen parents in her own neighborhood get picked up by ICE after dropping off their children at school, is the thought of cases where a lawyer couldn’t intervene in time to stop a deportation. As the November election nears, she wonders what a mass deportation operation will do. “We see what gets left behind when someone is ripped out of our community,” she says.

If sweeping raids and mass deportation come to pass, boosting the legal defense infrastructure to be able to quickly mobilize a network of pro-bono immigration attorneys will be critical. ImmDef has long been investing in building deportation defense capacity. For one, they have been recruiting and training lawyers who are interested in doing that work but lack the legal expertise, cultural competency, or language skills, and have brought on more attorneys to join the strategic litigation and advocacy teams.

Over the last couple of years, the group has tripled their team in San Diego to help prospective asylum seekers with their initial screening credible fear interviews and launched a welcoming project to inform immigrants facing deportation orders about their rights. To that end, they have partnered with Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an organization serving indigenous migrants, to create and disseminate educational videos in languages other than English and Spanish.

Toczylowski acknowledges a “whole of immigrant rights movement response” will be necessary, but she believes they’re ready. “We’ve survived things once before and we will survive this time around,” she says, “because there’s no other choice. Our communities need us to be there.”

If implemented, the Project 2025 agenda could undermine deportation defense services and further strain critical and already scarce legal aid for asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors. Among other things, the project’s playbook chapter on DHS pushes for restricting access to federal funds to organizations unless they “support the broader homeland security mission.” Advocates also fear the conservative plot could lead to pressure on local and state jurisdictions to defund legal services, make immigration courts more hostile to immigrants, and even open up legal providers to criminal penalties.

“There’s no question that Project 2025 would shift the landscape enormously,” Shayna Kessler, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s advancing universal representation initiative, says, “and require some real recalibration.” In 2017, in response to an environment of heightened immigration enforcement, the organization established a network of governments, service providers, and advocates to implement publicly funded deportation defense programs at the state and local governments, for immigrants who, unlike their counterparts in the criminal justice system, aren’t entitled to free legal representation.

“If we do enter a period of really intense immigration enforcement again,” Kessler says, “those legal teams will be poised to continue that defense.”

In our conversations, Kessler and others stressed that the fight for immigrants’ rights doesn’t stop at the ballot box. Nor is it contingent on the outcome of the election. If elected, Vice President Kamala Harris might continue the Biden administration’s crackdown on asylum at the southern border. And the immigration system will not cease to be broken. While preparedness is key, so is mobilizing the American public to resist the vilification and dehumanization of immigrants. That will require large scale mobilizations, not unlike the resistance to the travel ban, to draw visibility and push for intervention from elected officials.

“Grave injustices preceded the former administration,” says Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas legal services nonprofit founded in 1986. “And for all intents and purposes will continue into a next administration, no matter who is elected into office.”

When Monica Duran, the Democratic majority leader in Colorado’s House of Representatives, was 19 years old, she escaped domestic abuse with her young son and did what many survivors try to do: She fled to a shelter and sought counseling.

“For so long, you hear that you are worthless,” Duran told me. The support she received after leaving, she said, helped her realize that “I was worthy, I did have something to offer.”

As intimate partner violence continues to rise, such services are critical for helping survivors of domestic and sexual violence heal. But as I learned during my recent investigation for Mother Jones, they are becoming increasingly difficult to access due to a yearslong decline in federal funding from a pot of money created by the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA. Colorado is not exempt. The state went from getting $31.3 million in VOCA funds in fiscal year 2017 to about $13.6 million in the most recent fiscal year, when the money was stretched to help support more than 125,000 survivors—mostly women who were victims of domestic violence or sexual assault, Department of Justice data shows.

Like most states, Colorado has tried to stave off the worst effects of the funding cuts, with state lawmakers allocating millions of dollars to affected programs. But those providers are still struggling after years of plummeting federal funding. Roshan Kalantar, executive director of Violence Free Colorado, the statewide domestic violence coalition, said some have had to close office space and eliminate legal advocacy services, which help survivors file for divorce or obtain emergency protective orders against abusers. More could soon follow. “We have at least two programs that might close,” Kalantar told me last week, “but many more will essentially limit what they can do.”

Duran and Kalantar are trying to avoid those outcomes. They are among the forces behind a ballot measure that, if passed by voters next month, would create a new funding stream for victims’ services in the state by imposing a 6.5 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition as of next April, when it would take effect. The measure, known as Proposition KK, would create an estimated $39 million in annual revenue, the bulk of which—$30 million—would support VOCA-funded services for victims of crime, as well as crime prevention programs in Colorado. The rest of the funds would go toward mental health services for veterans and young people and increasing security in Colorado public schools. The bill that proposed the ballot measure passed in the Colorado General Assembly in May, with most Democrats supporting it and most Republicans in opposition. Should voters support the measure, the tax would not apply to firearms vendors that make less than $20,000 annually, law enforcement agencies, or active-duty military personnel.

Supporters—including Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and Everytown for Gun Safety—say Prop KK would bolster desperately needed services in the state and could serve as a model for other states trying to come up with innovative ways to respond to federal VOCA cuts. Accessing support after intimate partner violence, Duran said, “is a matter of life and death—this is how serious this is.”

The tax on firearms has resulted in strenuous opposition from the gun lobby. The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, the organization’s lobbying arm, said earlier this year that the proposal “should be seen as nothing more than an attack on the Second Amendment and those who exercise their rights under it” and pointed to a similar measure in California, which imposed an 11 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition earlier this year and has faced a court challenge for being unconstitutional.

Several Colorado pro-gun groups—including the NRA state chapter, the Colorado State Shooting Association; Rocky Mountain Gun Owners; and Rally for Our Rights—have also opposed Prop KK, noting that firearms and ammunition are already taxed at 11 percent on the federal level. Ian Escalante, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, said in a video posted to X: “This is the radical anti-gun left trying to punish gun owners for exercising their rights.” Spokespeople for the three state-level groups did not return requests for comment from Mother Jones.

Duran, who said she’s a gun owner, said she’s “disappointed that this has been turned into a Second Amendment issue,” especially because domestic violence and the shortage of resources to support survivors is “a crisis.” Kalantar sees the tax on guns and ammunition in Prop KK as fitting, given the role that firearms often play in intimate partner violence. Research has shown that more than half of domestic violence homicides involve a gun and that access to a firearm makes that outcome more likely. Last year, there were 58 domestic violence fatalities in Colorado, more than three-quarters of which were caused by guns, according to data released this month by the state attorney general’s office. “It feels very appropriate that people making money off the sale of guns in Colorado should participate in the healing” of survivors, Kalantar said.

“It feels very appropriate that people making money off the sale of guns in Colorado should participate in the healing” of survivors.

If the measure passes, the Blue Bench, a sexual assault prevention and support center in Denver that served about 7,000 survivors last year, is one of the organizations that would benefit from this new source of revenue. Executive Director Megan Carvajal says VOCA funds make up half of its budget, paying for counselors who lead therapy sessions for survivors, the 24-hour hotline they can call in a crisis, and case managers who offer support at hospitals and police stations in the aftermath of assaults. In June, Carvajal learned that the Blue Bench’s latest VOCA award would be less than $650,000—a 40 percent cut compared with the previous year’s budget—which will mean laying off three therapists, two case managers, and a community educator who visits schools to talk about informed consent and healthy relationships. The organization will also have to move out of its Denver office space by the end of the year and transition to being mostly remote, Carvajal said.

If Prop KK does not pass and organizations like the Blue Bench face even further funding cuts, Carvajal’s prediction is grim: “People are going to die.” Research suggests that more than 30 percent of women contemplate suicide after being raped and more than 10 percent attempt it. More than half of all suicides involve a firearm, and suicides by firearm are highest in states with the fewest gun laws, according to a KFF analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. For Carvajal, the work she and other advocates do is essential to reduce those statistics—but is only possible with adequate funding.

“If you pick up the phone and someone says, ‘I believe you,’” Carvajal said, “it can change your mindset from wanting to die to wanting to live.”

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788, calling 800-799-SAFE (7233), or going to thehotline.org. The Department of Health and Human Services has also compiled a list of organizations by state.

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

Before I could knock on the door of the house in rural, upstate New York, a big, burly man dressed in a plaid lumberjack jacket came outside to greet me. “I’m looking for Yvette Ovitt,” I told him, when he asked me what I wanted. “Oh, she’s dead,” he replied calmly. “She died back in June. Heart attack.”

After expressing my condolences, I explained my mission: I was testing a get-out-the-vote app that the Turning Point Action political action committee is using this election season. On its website, Turning Point says this app “is vital” to what it claims “will be the largest and most sophisticated ballot chasing operation the movement has ever seen.” The conservative youth organization is specifically deploying the technology to try to turn out “low-propensity” voters in Republican areas—people they believe are Trump supporters but who have rarely voted in recent elections. People like Yvette, apparently, may she rest in peace.

Rather than rely on the traditional campaign or Republican Party apparatus for the 2024 election, the Trump campaign has outsourced much of its ground game to Turning Point and other conservative PACs. The strategy is largely untested, as are the groups running the operation. Turning Point has promised to spend more than $100 million on its “chase the vote” effort this cycle to get Trump elected. The youth group was involved in such efforts in 2022, and many of the most high-profile candidates it backed lost. Others, like America PAC, a super PAC funded almost entirely by billionaire Elon Musk, got into the game just this summer.

Bad addresses, dead voters and people who refuse to answer the door are a regular feature of political canvassing for both the parties, so I wasn’t especially surprised to find that one of Turning Point’s targets was no longer with us. Fortunately, I wasn’t using the app to persuade people to vote. I was at the Ovitt house because I was interested in how well this app worked. I also wanted to know how Republicans it identified might feel about the ease with which I was able to access their personal information with it.

Phone apps are now a canvassing staple for elections. When they’re used by the major political parties, their use is closely supervised by the campaigns. The primary app used by Democrats is called MiniVan. When I downloaded MiniVan, I needed a code from a campaign official to access any of the data, which I did not have. No such privacy protections exist for the Turning Point app, where its extensive data is accessible to anyone with a phone.

Turning Point’s app was developed by a company called Superfeed that has close ties with its founder Charlie Kirk, whose mother-in-law is on the Superfeed board. Superfeed’s former CEO, Jeff DeWitt, was previously the Arizona GOP chairman, until he resigned from the party post in January after news broke that he’d allegedly tried to bribe Kari Lake to keep her from running for his state’s Senate seat.

Turning Point officials have marketed the Superfeed app to other conservative groups. Also using the app this cycle is Early Vote Action, a PAC founded by MAGA activist Scott Presler, whose GOTV work for Trump was recently boosted with a $1 million donation from Elon Musk. Presler has spent the past year trying to register Republican voters in overlooked groups, like hunters and the Amish. He claims to have flipped the voter registration figures in several Pennsylvania counties from blue to red. The Nevada, Delaware, Georgia and Arizona state Republican parties have also adopted the app.

The Superfeed corporate website is nonfunctional, but the Apple store says the Turning Point app allows users to “read original content and feeds from TPUSA top creators.” The app originally started as a vehicle for right-wing news distribution, not for election work. Giving how much is riding on the app in this election, I decided to give it a test run this month when I was in upstate New York leaf peeping in the reddest part of a reliably blue state.

After downloading the app, I discovered a mess of X social media posts on the home screen, from Kirk and other Turning Point surrogates including: pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec; Benny Johnson, a right-wing influencer and former Turning Point employee who was allegedly duped into taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a front group to create pro-Russia content; and Tyler Bowyer, the Turning Point COO who’s been indicted in Arizona for his alleged participation in Trump’s “fake elector” scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. (Bowyer has also served on the Superfeed board.)

Among the social media posts is a button that says, “Register To Vote: Tap Here.” Users are then led to the Turning Point Action website, where they’re instructed to fill out a form as if they were registering to vote. But there are clues that this is not an authentic voter registration form—“referred by,” and “referral email,” queries that have nothing to do with voting and a lot to do with data harvesting. Once the form is filled out, a new window opens announcing, “Wait! One more step! Confirm your state to register to vote online.” That’s when users click a state and are redirected to a government website where they can legitimately register to vote.

The arrow for the election “activist suite” is buried like an afterthought among the other junk on the app home screen, and accessing these tools requires users to again provide all their personal information and enable location tracking. Turning Point Action did not respond to questions about its privacy protocols and what it does with the data collected through the app.

The “activist“ tools include, among other things, a text-spamming and calling feature, both of which employ the users’ actual phone number. In contrast, Democratic phone banks always anonymize phone calls to protect the privacy of volunteers. There’s also a feature that invites users to upload all their phone’s contacts into the app. Users’ friends will no doubt appreciate this giveaway of their lucrative personal information once they start getting spammed with texts and calls.

I declined to give Turning Point my phone book, skipped the spam texts, and instead hit “knock on doors.” Then I hopped in my car to try to find the “voters near me” listed in the app, all of which eventually led me to Yvette Ovitt’s home.

As a journalist, I have never canvassed for any political party or candidate, so I am unfamiliar with these types of operations. Yet even my unsophisticated use of the app felt like a massive privacy violation. As I drove, a list of target contacts appeared, with the names, addresses, ages, and phone numbers of people up and down the road. Several entries were tagged with a red flag indicating that the address was home to multiple voters over the age of 75—a potential goldmine because older voters tend to vote more than younger ones.

This feature alone should be cause for concern by app users and potential contacts alike. A Democratic National Committee spokesperson told me that the party’s canvassing app doesn’t allow this sort of universal, geolocated address lookup; the party provides canvassers only a predefined walking list created by campaign administrators. The DNC spokesperson also says the systems are protected with encryption, two-factor authentication and other modern security measures—none of which was present on the Turning Point app.

Once I settled on an address to visit, I had trouble locating the scripts the app provided for talking to any potential voters. A so-called training video that I found on the Turning Point Action website was an hour-long gabfest on Rumble, frequently interrupted with ads for Ivermectin, so I didn’t finish it. By comparison, the Democrat’s MiniVan training video is a quick, ad-free five minutes.

No one was home at the first couple of addresses I tried, but I finally hit pay dirt at a large house with a beat-up old truck covered with graffiti parked on the road out front. A man outside asked me suspiciously if I had come up his driveway to buy his pickup. I explained that I was looking for a 22-year-old woman named Sophie, and showed him the app. He grudgingly informed me that Sophie was away at college.

He declined an interview and warned me not to knock at the house next door. A woman there, also listed in the app, was his 80-something year old mother. “She won’t want to talk to you,” he told me in a tone suggesting he was just about to yell at me to get off his lawn.

I moved on to a few more empty houses, and one address I simply couldn’t find. Finally, the app directed me to Yvette Ovitt’s home, a modest wood structure fully decked out with yards of artificial spider webs that looked professionally wrapped around the fence and adorned with smiling pumpkins and spooky signs wishing people a Happy Halloween.

The man who came out to meet me turned out to be Yvette’s older brother, Randy Ovitt. He lived there, too, so I showed him her name and asked what he thought about how easy it was for anyone to find this much information about his sister and their neighbors. “That’s fucked up—I mean messed up,” he corrected, laughing as he lit up a cigarette.

Looking at Yvette’s listing, I asked Randy whether his sister was a 51-year-old Republican. While he could confirm that his sister had died just shy of her 51^st birthday, which happened to be the day I showed up, Randy had no idea about her party affiliation. They didn’t talk about politics, he said, except about the “towelheads they keep dropping in here, getting their $1,000 debt cards.”

Randy was referring not to a Fox News myth, but a story that has gained prominence on the network and morphed into a MAGA talking point. In March, New York City mayor Eric Adams started giving pre-paid debt cards—valued at about $1,440 a month for a family of four—to migrants who had been bused to the city from Texas, so they could buy food and baby supplies. The cards were a cheaper way for the city to provide meals to the new arrivals than the city’s food-service contracts but they’d quickly become an anti-immigration talking point.

Randy was not listed in the app, possibly because he may have been a registered Democrat. At first, he told me he thought he wouldn’t vote in November. “It’s terrible, ain’t it?” he said of this year’s election. But after his second cigarette, he confessed that he “might of” voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and hinted that he might vote for Harris, too. When I showed him the list of voters I was looking for, he pointed to one name and said the man had been dead for a while. Randy explained that someone else listed at the same address was the partner of the dead man’s daughter Dawn, who also lived there. “Ernie will talk to you,” he said.

Encouraged, I headed down the road to a large compound in the woods, full of trailers, a mobile home, a small house, plus several vehicles. There I found Ernie Gray, cutting plywood to build an enclosed deck on the mobile home for Dawn. He told me he’d swapped a 4 x 4 for the work on the roof because at 60, he thought he was too old to be getting up on the ladder. He was doing the rest of the work himself.

I showed him the Turning Point app with his listing in it. “How the hell did you get that?” he asked with a good-natured growl. “All my information is supposed to be private!” The app had his phone number wrong—it had belonged to Dawn’s deceased father and had been disconnected ages ago—but the rest was spot on.

Dawn and Ernie were die-hard Trump fans, not low-propensity voters. He said they’d both already voted for Trump in the primary and planned to do it again in November.  Ernie elaborated extensively on the many ways he hated Joe Biden, as Dawn nodded along from behind the screen door, where she stood with a tiny dog at her feet. Ernie, too, complained about immigrants getting debit cards, an issue that seems to rank high on the list of concerns of voters in these parts.

It was getting late in the day, so I bid Ernie farewell and packed it in. After two hours of driving around, I’d used the Turning Point app to identify two dead people, one missing college student, an elderly woman with a protectively hostile son, a closet Democrat, and one Trump supporter who needed no persuasion.

Later, I spent some more time noodling around on the app. I finally found the door-knocking script, which instructed me to ask potential voters questions such as “Do you usually get an early ballot?” or “Can we help get your ballot in on time?” Just to see what happened, I clicked “no” or “I need more help” on these questions for a voter in Virginia and then hit “submit.” The app then helpfully made a pie chart report on all my efforts. Apparently, once I tagged these people as contacted, they dropped off the list so other canvassers would not bother them. The potential for mischief with this app seemed very high and I wondered: Is this the way to win an election?

“These people are amateurs,” a longtime Republican consultant who wanted to remain anonymous told me after I described my app test results. In a close presidential election, he said, “People are voting not because someone came to their door, certainly not because somebody they never met came to the door. They’re going to vote because of something they’ve read or seen, or because someone they know dragged them to the polls.” Still, he predicted, “I think Republicans are going to have a good night in 11 days, and then all these grifters are going to take credit for it.”

On Monday morning, I drove to Powder Springs, Georgia, a working-class suburb 20 miles northwest of Atlanta, to see former President Donald Trump speak at a palatial Pentecostal church called Worship With Wonders. As I pulled into the 30-acre campus, a gentleman wearing a safety vest and directing traffic motioned for me to roll down my window and handed me a stack of voting guides “for you to hand out to your congregation.” Before I could tell him I didn’t have a congregation, he waved me toward the yawning parking lot, which was filling up fast with a crowd of several thousand attendees.

The organization behind both the day’s event and the voting guide (which assured readers that Trump would say “NO” to “boys competing in girls’ sports” and “YES” to allowing “only US citizens to vote”) was the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a national Christian group that aims to “mobilize and train people of faith to vote and flex their political muscles.” Their flex today turned out to be a four-hour marathon of praise music, speakers, and a lengthy intermission before Trump arrived. The extensive speaker lineup included several superstars of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) a growing charismatic movement led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who believe Christians are called to take over the government. In recent years, Trump has emerged as a key figure in this quest: In 2020, Paula White-Cain, the NAR-affiliated Florida pastor who served as Trump’s lead spiritual adviser during his presidency, warned her followers that Christians who didn’t support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” 

The day’s main attraction was a meandering conversation between White-Cain, and Trump, who described him as a “champion of people of faith.” Trump reciprocated by calling White-Cain “a great person, a great woman,” and then the conversation began. Sometimes Trump answered White-Cain’s questions, but he mainly treated them prompts for what has become his trademark, meandering, stream-of-consciousness responses.

When White-Cain asked about his religious upbringing, Trump described attending his family’s Presbyterian church in Queens. “It made me feel good,” he replied, “but sometimes you couldn’t get out of there fast enough, I have to be honest.” The audience roared with appreciation for his candor. His father, Fred Trump, used to take him to see Billy Graham preach, he recalled. Which made him think of the hymn “How Great Thou Art.” Which made him think of Elvis.

“It made me feel good, but sometimes you couldn’t get out of there fast enough, I have to be honest.”

When White-Cain asked him about his recent work with Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, on relief efforts in hurricane-stricken North Carolina, Trump marveled at how tornadoes destroy some things but leave others untouched. Then he told a story about how Graham-the-younger had once asked him not to swear so much. The response to a question about Trump’s plans for US-Israel relations was the oft-repeated story of moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in 2018. This time he finished with a flourish, with an anecdote about telling the contractors to build the new embassy out of a material called “Jerusalem stone” because “a very rich guy, a very big Wall Street guy” he knew had always told him he was very proud that his building contained the material. And—score!—it also turned out to the “cheap as hell.” Trump’s most significant line of the event may have been his cryptic promise that his “faith council” would be “directly in the Oval Office.”

While Trump rambled and riffed, the speakers who preceded him, each of whom was allotted only a few minutes, cut right to the chase. Faith and Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed announced his group had knocked on more than 8 million doors so far this election season, and then described a moment when Harris allegedly told a heckler who yelled “Christ is king” at a Wisconsin event that he was “at the wrong rally.” Reed crowed, “Today you’re at the right rally!” The crowd went wild. Lance Wallnau, a NAR apostle and key player in the “Stop the Steal” campaign promised, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!” Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, got a standing ovation when he said the “Lemon Test” for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”

The crowd was fairly diverse, and the speaker lineup, while mostly white, did include some pastors of color. Florida’s Bishop Kelvin Cobaris, the former president of the African American Council of Christian Clergy, said, “I want to tell every African American in here ‘Don’t be a afraid to lose your Black card…vote to defend religious freedom, vote to defend Israel!’” Pastor Sam Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said the enemy is “trying to kill our children in the classroom.” For a split second, I naively thought he was talking about guns, but then he clarified that the killer was “ideologies and social constructs that are out of alignment with the word of the Lord God.” The group ended the event by gathering around Trump to pray over him.

The attendees I spoke with afterward were jubilant—likely in part because after a program full of shaking their fists against “men in women’s sports” and “transgender surgeries for illegal aliens,” the crowd rocked out to the queer anthem “YMCA” as Trump was leaving the stage. Betsy Jorgensen, a volunteer with the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition, told me that she was “very confident we are going to win, barring any other tragedy.” She was from nearby Lumpkin County, which, she said, “is so red we call it Trumpkin County.” There, she had been knocking on doors and registering voters because she believed this election was crucial to right the country. “We are the last bit of a republic, of the free world,” she said. Alayna Martin, also from nearby, said she thought Trump would win “in a landslide” and that she liked him because “he cares about our faith and wants us to be a part of everything.

Sophie McLean, a regular congregant at the church where the event was held, also thought Trump would win, but her friend and fellow congregant, Jennifer Smith, wasn’t so sure. In fact, she still hadn’t yet made up her mind whom she was going to vote for. What would help her choose? I asked. “More time—I’m running out of it, but more time,” she said. “I probably need a little bit more prayer.”

On an unusually warm Thursday afternoon three weeks before Election Day, Joe Sheehan, a Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin Assembly, took me on a tour of his hometown of Sheboygan, an industrial city of 50,000 on Lake Michigan that calls itself the “Malibu of the Midwest” and is best known for its bratwurst. We stopped on Superior Avenue, a wide, tree-lined street that runs east-west across the city, from the lake toward the countryside.

“This is one district,” Sheehan said, pointing to the north side of the block. He walked 10 feet to the other side of the street. “This is another district. Ta-da, gerrymandering!”

Both sides looked identical, with maple and oak trees and two-story homes festooned with Halloween decorations and blue Harris-Walz yard signs. But in 2011, when Republicans drew new redistricting maps in secret to give themselves lopsided majorities in the legislature, they split the city of Sheboygan in half at Superior Avenue to attach both parts to the surrounding redder rural areas. Sheboygan had been represented by a Democrat in the Assembly in all but four years between 1959 and 2011, but ever since it has elected two Republicans, becoming a poster child for the gerrymandered maps that were regarded as among the worst in the country.

Last year, however, a progressive majority took over Wisconsin’s Supreme Court and struck down the skewed lines. The Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly passed new maps proposed by the state’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, which gave both parties a roughly equal chance of winning control and dramatically increased the number of competitive races. Democratic-leaning Sheboygan, which Joe Biden carried by 8 points in 2020, became whole again and is now one of the 15 seats Democrats need to win to regain control of the state Assembly (the lower house) for the first time in a decade and a half.

“Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get more seats.”

Sheehan is running for office for the first time at 66. He served for 20 years as the superintendent of Sheboygan-area schools, but came out of retirement to help Democrats regain control of the Assembly after new maps were put in place. “That’s a huge part of me running,” he told me. “Previously, when the city was split up, Democrats had a really hard time winning because their vote was split up. Now their vote isn’t.”

Sheehan has a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and describes himself as a Tim Walz Democrat, “not formal, more of a coach-teacher type.” His first TV ad shows him in the classroom talking, much like Walz, about the importance of free breakfast and lunch for kids, which his opponent, GOP Rep. Amy Binsfeld, voted against. He’s the type of home-grown and authentic candidate that Democrats believe can help end 13 years of hard-edged GOP control of the state.

While the presidential race consumes virtually all of the country’s political oxygen, there’s a tremendous amount at stake at the state legislative level in 2024 as well. Democrats are vying to retake or maintain control of legislative chambers in more than half of the presidential battlegrounds, including Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The new lines in Wisconsin represent a sea change in one of the country’s most important toss-up states. Democrats have won 14 of the past 17 statewide elections in Wisconsin, but Republicans control 65 percent of seats in the Assembly and 67 percent of seats in the state Senate, just short of a supermajority in both chambers. “For over a decade, we had maps in Wisconsin that made it more likely that Republicans would have two-thirds supermajority than Democrats would have a majority in an almost perfectly 50–50 state,” said Rep. Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the Assembly.

This seemingly voter-proof advantage gained through gerrymandering gave legislative Republicans a green light to entrench their power through tactics like voter suppression, dark money, and stripping Democrats of power, while the size of their inflated majorities allowed them to block, with little accountability, popular policies on issues like abortion rights, health care, gun restrictions, and education. “For more than a decade, Wisconsinites knew the victor in the state legislative races in advance,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get more seats.”

In 2022, there was just one true toss-up Assembly race in the state, according to the Milwaukee-based journalist Dan Shafer, despite competitive elections for virtually every statewide office. Now, under the new lines, there are 10 districts that Biden won by 2 points or less. “We absolutely believe there’s a path to a Democratic majority here,” said Neubauer, while admitting that picking up 15 seats to regain control “is a lot to flip in one year.” (Only half of the state Senate is up this cycle, so 2026 is the earliest it could flip to Democrats.) But even if Democrats simply reduce the GOP’s advantage, that will bring the legislature more in line with the purple nature of the rest of the state. “What the gerrymander did was prevent the voters from holding Republican legislators accountable for the decisions that they were making in Madison,” said Neubauer. “I really do see these fair maps starting to restore the democratic process in Madison and hopefully increasing bipartisan work.”

Wikler believes that legislative candidates like Sheehan represent a “secret weapon” for Democrats up and down the ballot this year. Democrats recruited candidates in 97 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts and the increase in the number of competitive races could boost Democratic turnout, he argues, which could make the difference in a state that is regularly decided by 20,000 votes or less in presidential elections.

“There’s always these moments in the Fast & Furious movies when Vin Diesel hits the nitrous and pulls into the lead, and that nitrous super boost this year for Democrats could be the state legislative races,” he said.

The progressive group Run for Something, which recruits candidates for downballot races, calls it the “reverse coattails” effect. The group studied seven battleground states in 2020, including Wisconsin, and found that when Democratic state legislative candidates ran for office in districts where Republicans previously ran unopposed, the Democratic vote share for the top of the ticket increased by anywhere from 0.4 percent to 2.3 percent.

Wikler predicts there’s a small but significant number of potential Democratic voters in the state who are disillusioned by national politics but will vote in state races because of issues like Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban or cuts to public schools. “It’s not a huge number, but it doesn’t take a huge number of people to tip statewide elections in Wisconsin,” he said. “If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.”

He’s betting that candidates like Sheehan can break through stereotypes of the party in a way that Harris might not be able to do, like the one splashed on a giant red-and-white sign I saw when I drove into Sheboygan: “Kamala wants to do to Wisconsin what she did to California.”

Few voters will perceive Sheehan as a California liberal, however. His yard signs are green, the color of his beloved Green Bay Packers, and the campaign material he gives to voters has the team’s schedule on the back. “That’s one thing they won’t throw away,” he said.

As Sheehan knocked on doors in Sheboygan, his crossover appeal became evident—but so did the difficulty of automatically translating his support to the rest of the Democratic ticket. He turned off Superior Avenue and passed a gray house adorned with colorful Halloween decorations, including a severed head that looked all too real. Darbie Magray, a welder who wore a purple-and-blue tie-dye sweatshirt, yelled out that she’d already voted by mail for Sheehan. She is the type of swing voter Democrats need to win if they hope to flip the legislature and carry the state—a registered Independent who is skeptical of Trump but still not sold on Harris. “I don’t like Donald Trump at all,” she said, as her son precariously climbed on the porch railing to attach a head on a skeleton. But she wasn’t a fan of Harris, either. “I don’t like some of the things she’s done either,” she said. “I don’t like that she let all these immigrants come over.”

Magray wouldn’t say which candidate she supported for president, but she openly expressed her admiration for Sheehan, citing his support for public schools and vow to protect abortion rights. “I just think he’s the best candidate,” she said.

Sheehan said he’s knocked on 3,000 doors in Sheboygan and talked to 40 voters who said they’ll vote for him and Trump. “What they told me is, ‘Joe, it sounds like you’re listening to me and want to get along,’” he said.

“If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.”

After knocking on doors, he took me to his favorite bratwurst restaurant, Northwestern House, a former brothel next to the railroad tracks. The owner gave him a dap as he entered and said he’d voted for him. So did a number of other elderly white patrons who didn’t look like your stereotypical wine-drinking, latte-sipping, Zoom-watching Harris voter. Sheehan ordered a double brat sandwich with butter and brown mustard, a Sheboygan staple, with a side of tater tots—the type of meal that would put most candidates to sleep. “You got a familiar face,” a man visiting from Janesville told him. “You’re either running for something or a car dealer.” When Sheehan said he was running for Assembly, the man told him, “You got a friendly face. Good luck.”

With so much polarization in politics these days, maybe a friendly face eating brats is exactly what could swing the balance of power in a battleground state that will be decided by the smallest of margins.

In 2010, as Democrats were preoccupied with passing Barack Obama’s legislative agenda in Washington, Republicans blindsided them by picking up nearly 700 state legislative seats. This “shellacking,” as Obama called it, gave the GOP the power to draw four times as many state legislative and US House districts as Democrats in the subsequent redistricting cycle, including in critical swing states like Wisconsin.

Democrats have been playing catch up at the state level ever since. They unexpectedly picked up chambers in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in 2022, but remain at a significant disadvantage, with Republicans controlling 56 legislative chambers compared to 41 for Democrats.

The States Project, an outside group that supports Democratic state legislative candidates, is focusing on nine states in 2024: flipping GOP-held chambers in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin; defending new Democratic majorities in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania; preventing GOP supermajorities in Kansas and North Carolina to preserve the ability of Democratic governors to veto legislation; and winning a Democratic supermajority in Nevada that could override the vetoes of the state’s Republican governor.

Major national developments, including Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election at the state level and the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, have underscored the importance of state legislative races. “2024 is potent combination of state legislatures posing a risk to a free and fair presidential election and state legislatures having been handed a fundamental constitutional right,” said Daniel Squadron, co-founder of the States Project.

In addition to the weighty issues state legislatures decide—from voting laws to abortion rights to gun control to book bans—their balance of power is often decided by a handful of votes. New Hampshire Republicans won a majority in the state house by 11 votes in three races in 2022. Control of the Virginia House of Delegates was determined by a coin flip in 2017.

Despite the outsize importance of state legislative chambers—and the fact that Republicans have used their power over state politics to roll back so many hard-won rights—Democrats continue to pay less attention to these races than Republicans.  

On October 10, one day after the Harris campaign announced that it had raised a staggering $1 billion, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) warned that it was $25 million short of money needed for “essential voter contact tactics,” including funding for TV ads, mailers, digital outreach, and door-knocking programs, despite receiving $2.5 million from the Harris-Walz ticket.

“The latest data from the field shows our party’s collective effort to win key state legislative races could fall short this cycle without a significant increase in financial support to close essential funding gaps in the final weeks of this election,” wrote DLCC President Heather Williams. “Right now, our internal data suggests we may be on an eerily similar trajectory to the 2020 election outcomes—when Democrats narrowly won the White House and took full control of Congress, yet lost more than 100 Democratic legislative seats and two chamber majorities in the states.”

Those resources are especially vital because Democrats are less likely to vote for downballot races than Republicans, who tend to vote straight-ticket for all contests. That could end up costing Democrats control of pivotal swing chambers. “It’s no secret we are still working to tell the story of what I would say is an ‘and’ strategy,” said Williams. “Democrats need to care about what is happening in the White House and the Congress and the states.”

When I asked Squadron, a former New York state senator, if state legislative races were getting enough attention amid the presidential race, he responded, “The answer is an emphatic no! Enough attention relative to the ability to impact electoral outcomes? No. Enough relative to their impact on people’s lives? No. Enough attention relative to their role in preserving a liberal democracy in this country? No.”

Even though many Democratic candidates, including Harris, have focused their campaigns on issues like abortion and fair elections, a shocking number of Democratic donors and voters still don’t seem to understand that states are far more likely to decide these issues than the federal government, especially in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions embracing states’ rights.

“Structurally, state legislatures don’t get the attention that top of the ticket races do,” said Squadron. “There continues to be a fundamental belief, especially among Democrats, that the federal government is a greater source of harm or improvement in people’s lives than state governments in a way that just isn’t accurate.”

But deep-pocketed GOP donors do understand the importance of investing at the state level.

Two GOP megadonors, Elizabeth Uihlein (whose family has bankrolled much of the election denial movement) and Diane Hendricks (the state’s richest woman), donated $4.5 million last month to Wisconsin Assembly Republicans, giving them a $2.5 million advantage over Assembly Democrats. Republicans changed Wisconsin law in 2015 to allow unlimited donations to legislative campaign committees—one of the many ways in which they undermined the democratic process under GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos to entrench their power. “We have no one who can write us a $1 million check,” Neubauer said. “That puts us at a competitive disadvantage.”

But what Democrats lack in money, they hope to make up in old-fashioned shoe leather. Compared to past elections, where GOP control of the legislature was predetermined, Neubauer said she’s “seen incredible enthusiasm in Sheboygan and the other districts that were significantly gerrymandered under the old maps. People are thrilled to have the opportunity to compete in a competitive election at the legislative level.”

After I visited Sheboygan, I drove an hour north to Green Bay, where Harris was holding a campaign rally across the street from Lambeau Field. Wikler spoke first to the crowd of 4,000 supporters. One of the biggest applause lines of the night came when he referenced the state legislative races. “We finally have fair maps in the state of Wisconsin!” he said to cheers. “We can make Robin Vos the minority leader in the state Assembly and Greta Neubauer the majority leader.”

Few voters nationally could name these people, but everyone at the rally in Wisconsin understood the stakes.

On the last day before the start of early voting, Kristian Carranza, a 34-year-old Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, and David Hogg, the gun control activist from Parkland, Florida, were discussing lessons they’d learned about door-knocking as they went door to door in a neighborhood of big trucks and single-family homes on San Antonio’s Southside.

The yapping dogs are mostly harmless. “No soliciting” signs are not to be ignored. And the knock itself is a delicate science. (The city’s mayor, with whom Carranza had recently campaigned, swore that the optimal wait time was exactly 7 seconds between knocks.) In neighborhoods like this, people often kept their front doors open but the screen doors shut.

“On the Northside, there’s so many more Ring cameras,” Carranza said. “I’ve never had so many Ring conversations knocking doors than I have this year.” Sometimes, she’d have an entire conversation without anyone ever opening the door.

“There’s a path to holding the line against private school vouchers, and the path runs through House District 118.”

When doors do open, Carranza led with a simple pitch. 

“I’m running to put more money [into] funding our public schools,” she told a middle-aged man a few houses down from where we’d started. “So many of our schools are closing. We’ve had some schools closed in Southside [Independent School District] as well, and we have to do everything we can to keep our little ones in school.”

Carranza’s pledge to protect education funding was not an idle bit of boilerplate. Her campaign in state House District 118 is a small race with potentially enormous stakes: The fight for votes here could help make or break Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s push to create a taxpayer-funded voucher program, which would allow parents to create “education savings accounts” to fund private school tuition or homeschooling. The proposal, which has been a priority for many conservatives in the state for decades, has been defeated in two consecutive special sessions—thanks, in part, to opposition from rural Republicans who feared that it would lead to closures and consolidation in small school districts. But during the Republican primaries this past spring, Abbott and allies spent more than $10 million to oust the bill’s opponents. He believes he now has the votes—unless Democrats can knock off enough voucher supporters this fall. To do that, they must defeat Carranza’s opponent, Republican state Rep. John Lujan. Carranza expects the race to come down to just a few hundred votes.

Four years ago, Democrats talked about flipping enough seats to win control of the state House of Representatives. Instead, they picked up just one. This time around, their ambitions are more modest. Monique Alcala, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, told me the party needed to flip three seats—the number they think they’d need to stop a voucher bill from passing. The 118th, which forms a half-eaten U along the lower edges of Bexar County and stretches into the historically Mexican American and Democratic neighborhoods of the Southside, is one of the most winnable of their targets on paper. But the precinct Carranza and Hogg canvassed, like much of the district, shifted significantly toward Republicans during the Trump era. It was the only state house district that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Beto O’Rourke for governor in 2022, and a Republican to the legislature the same year—Lujan, a former San Antonio firefighter and sheriff’s deputy, who is finishing his first full term in office.

The high stakes have made the district a magnet for outside spending. Hogg’s group, Leaders We Deserve, which bills itself as an “EMILYs List for young people,” has poured more than $1 million into the race, hoping to both elevate a millennial progressive and in the process send a message to Abbott, who declined to support gun control legislation in the wake of the 2022 mass shooting at a school in Uvalde.

“There’s a path to holding the line against private school vouchers, and the path runs through House District 118,” Carranza told me, as she sipped a Coke in the back of an ice cream shop near her campaign office. She said she believes Abbott’s reforms are a “scam.” They “would be devastating to the public education system in Texas,” she said, and, as evidence, pointed to a similar program in Arizona—where a “school choice” law has mostly benefited wealthy families who already had abandoned the public education system, while subsidizing religious institutions and, in one infamous case, the purchase of dune buggies.

Carranza’s political platform is rooted in her experience as a community organizer. She went door to door in these same neighborhoods to encourage residents to apply for health coverage under the federal Affordable Care Act.

“This is a very low-income, working-class, middle-class neighborhood; these are not the type of communities that are going to benefit from a voucher program,” Carranza said. “The $8,000 voucher won’t be enough to get a child into private schools, to be able to afford tuition and uniforms, and travel to get to the schools—because they don’t provide travel and all the little things that I think we don’t always think about that schools provide.” 

As she sees it, Abbott’s bill would only exacerbate an existing crisis, by taking money and students out of the system. In the Harlandale Independent School District, she said, referring to the district we were sitting in and where she grew up, “we had four elementary schools closed just this past spring. The fight against private school vouchers is a lived reality for people that live in this district, and when we talk about schools closing, it’s not just schools, because for families in these communities, we don’t just look to our public schools for quality education.” Close public schools, and you close after-school activities and free lunch programs, too. It was an attack on a deeper social safety net.

Lujan, for his part, has argued that while he supports vouchers, he does not support taking funds out of public education and emphasized the need for oversight of private schools that receive public funds. Although he has voted for Abbott’s measures in the past, he said at a recent debate that he would approve a school-choice bill in the next session only if it included new standards for assessing how well private schools are performing. But Abbott, for one, doesn’t seem troubled by where the Republican stands; the governor came to the district last week to stump for him.

The voucher fight may be the most immediate challenge in the legislature, but Carranza’s campaign has been shaped by Texas Republicans’ decadeslong push to eliminate abortion rights. She traced her decision to work in politics to state Sen. Wendy Davis’ 13-hour filibuster of the state’s sonogram law in 2013, which Carranza watched on the floor at her mother’s home, glued to a YouTube stream on her laptop. Since then, Texas’ restrictions have gotten more severe. Carranza is running hard against the state’s post-Dobbs abortion ban, which makes abortion illegal except to protect the life of the mother. (In practice, the restrictions have done the opposite; NBC News reported last month that the maternal mortality rate jumped 56 percent in the state from 2019 to 2022.) Lujan has taken a far different stance.

“If it was my daughter, I don’t have any daughters, but if I had a daughter, and that would have been, you know, it would have been a rape, I think we, as a—personally—I would say, ‘No, we’re gonna have the baby,’”  Lujan said during a local radio interview in September.

That comment wasn’t just callous, Carranza said. It missed a key bit of context. “I think we have to be very clear about this: In the state of Texas, no woman is allowed an abortion if she is a victim of rape,” Carranza said. “And I think that that needs to be clear, because he’s saying that he would force his daughter—his hypothetical daughter—to birth a rapist’s child. It’s not even a choice that we get to have. And it’s very upsetting that he thinks that he can make that choice for people in his family.” In other words, the state is already forcing women to do exactly what Lujan talked about. She cited a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that estimated that 26,000 Texas women had become pregnant due to rape in the 16 months following the ban’s enactment.

Lujan later clarified that he would only have encouraged his hypothetical daughter to have the child and was simply articulating his personal values. He has said he would work to add exceptions for rape and incest into state law if re-elected, though the legislature took no steps to do so during his first term in office.

With school vouchers hanging in the balance and a chance to send a message on abortion rights—and reverse the recent erosion of Democratic support—the race has taken on an outsized significance both inside and outside the state. Carranza recently campaigned with Democratic US Reps. Greg Casar and Joaquin Castro. Inside the cramped campaign office, where a lone “Swifties for Kamala” sign was taped above a door frame, dozens of volunteers from the Texas Organizing Project, a PAC that mobilizes voters in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities, waited for canvassing instructions. Hogg, who interrupted his brief speech to volunteers to double check with Carranza that the Lujan quote about abortion was actually real, boasted that the district was the centerpiece of his organization’s efforts in the state. Its seven-figure investment was going, in part, toward saturating the airwaves with TV ads. Some of Carranza’s spots warned about the consequences of a statewide voucher program. One ad simply played Lujan’s comments on abortion in 15-second bursts.

Democrats’ efforts in Texas have at times suffered from a bit of a false-summit problem. The big breakthrough looks so close. But adding a few million votes in a massive and ever-evolving state is hard, and the party has been burned by high expectations more than once. While there’s cautious optimism about Democrats’ post-Biden prospects this year, no one I talked to was getting out over their skis. Hogg told me he expected their investment in time and money to pay off “even if the state is not going to flip this cycle.” 

“We’re just on the ground so one day Kristian could be on the forefront of that change,” he said. 

Carranza said the goal now is to flip the state House by the end of the current redistricting cycle—in 2030. “They’re understanding that we have to act now before it gets worse and even if it’s going to take one year, two years, three years, five years,” she said of her conversations with voters at the door. Winning back the Southside is only the first step.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A new study delving the emotional and psychological impact of climate change on 16,000 young Americans provides crucial empirical evidence for what until now “we’ve been relying on our intuition to tell us,” the study’s first author says.

A clear majority of young Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 are either very, or extremely, worried. 

Eric Lewandowski, a psychologist at New York University, focuses on the mental and emotional effects of climate change and co-authored a 2021 paper on the subject but still felt there was more to be studied in the United States. 

His new paper, “Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events,” was published October 17 in The Lancet Planetary Health.

The bottom line nationally: Young people are overwhelmingly concerned about climate change. The study found that nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were either very or extremely worried when asked, “How worried, if at all, are you about climate change and its impacts on people and the planet?” and more than 85 percent said they experience some level of climate anxiety.

“It was very striking” that endorsement of climate issues was above 50 percent no matter political affiliation. 

“This was a chance, in such a big country, to try to get a better feel across the country, where the impacts of climate change are so heterogeneous, to try to get a feel for the emotional and psychological impacts of climate change,” said Lewandowski. 

To get a sense of how both geography and politics impact the perceived mental toll of climate change, the study compiled survey data on approximately 400 youths from each state or state cluster (states with smaller populations and similar geography and political landscapes were grouped together during data analysis, with the exception of Hawaii which had a sample size of around 100, but was considered too dissimilar from other states to be clustered).

Though this study still only provides an “emerging picture” of the mental impact of climate change on American youth, it provides crucial empirical evidence for what until now “we’ve been relying on our intuition to tell us about the emotional and psychological impact of climate change,” said Lewandowski. 

There was similarity in responses across dramatically different geo-political regions of the country. The responses never differed by more than 25 percent across all surveyed populations. 

The survey also tracked the emotional and psychological impact of climate change across the political spectrum. “Endorsement was high regardless of political identification, and yes, it was lower in the Republican group…One of the widely recognized features of thinking about climate change in this country is the political divide, and that’s also documented in the research,” said Lewandowski. 

“It was very striking,” he said, that endorsement of climate issues was above 50 percent no matter political affiliation. 

“We also asked people to report which of a range of seven severe weather events they had experienced in the area where they lived,” said Lewandowski. “As people endorsed or reported that their area had experienced more and more of these things, there was correlated increased distress and increased desire for action.”

“Everyone’s worried about this, and so it’s like, what does that mean for policy outcomes in places like Texas or Missouri or Florida.”

On both a hopeful and tragic note, the slope of that increase in distress and calls for action, stayed static between people of different party identification. “It really seems that this increase is happening, and we suggest the increase will happen across the political spectrum as there are more and more impacts,” said Lewandowski.

To Olivia Ferraro, a 25-year-old climate activist and member of the Climate Mental Health Network Gen Z advisory board who lives and works in New York City, this is just more evidence of right wing politicians being out of touch with their Gen Z constituents. 

This is exciting news to Ferraro. “Many of those respondents might not have ever participated in the democratic process before. So it’s very encouraging to see to me that it’s not really a partisan issue for young people,” said Ferraro. “Everyone’s worried about this, and so it’s like, what does that mean for policy outcomes in places like Texas or Missouri or Florida over the next five to 10 years, as these young people age into voting age groups?”

Overall Ferraro found the study results validating. For her, climate change is not just terrifying, but also personal. In 2022, Ferraro found herself unhealthily obsessed with climate change while feeling like she could do nothing after taking a deep dive into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the comprehensive state of the climate and the outlook of climate change. Then she got heat stroke one summer afternoon while on vacation in Florida. 

“I just passed out,” said Ferraro, who had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance and received stitches for a head wound. “It was very stressful, and I was just existing in the hot weather. I wasn’t even doing anything particularly exerting,” she said.

Given her own experience, she understands how going through an extreme weather event can be a catalyzing moment. “All of these factors together over months were a cocktail of distress,” she said. 

She expects concern over climate will only grow as more people feel the impact of extreme weather first hand. Ferraro just hopes that the effects of climate exposure on increased calls for action carries across generations.

“I feel like data won’t be what changes the minds of older generations,” said Ferraro. “I honestly think that a lot of the empathy and understanding about how distressing climate experiences are will most likely come from a close personal connection, who is thoughtful enough to share a first hand experience, or someone living through a serious weather event.” 

Caroline Hickman, a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Bath, welcomes the latest research on climate change and young people in the US. 

Much of the current data on regional variation in youth response to climate change comes from the 2021 paper she, Lewandowski, and numerous other authors published in The Lancet.

One thing Hickman wishes would get more attention is the way climate distress waxes and wanes at various stages of life. When the results of the 2020 British Association of Counseling and Psychotherapy survey on the mental health impact of climate change first came out, she was struck by how much concern over climate change decreased during midlife. While approximately 60 percent of people aged 16 to 34 and around 55 percent of people over the age of 55 experience some level of climate distress, only 44 percent of people aged 45 to 54 experienced any form of climate distress.

While we can speculate, said Hickman, “You could say, midlife, you’re busy trying to pay the mortgage…maybe getting divorced, separated, maybe trying to keep your head above water financially, right? You’ve got a lot of pressure all around from every direction, at midlife, particularly generationally, you’re taking care of aging parents and children, so you’re sandwiched.” But, she said, “the trouble is that is also the age of most industry CEOs and politicians, right? These are the people with the power to do something about this.”

Saahitya Uppalapati, a PhD student and climate communications researcher at George Mason University in Virginia, thinks the climate crisis has a PR problem. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s a luxury to be concerned about [the climate], but that’s not true,” she said. 

Her research has shown that it’s “people from Gen Z, with fewer economic resources and people of color who are experiencing the highest levels of climate distress,” especially when compared to the level of climate distress among “white Boomers.”

Uppalapati’s research has shown that 3 percent of Americans are already experiencing clinically significant climate anxiety, and 3 percent are so distraught over climate change, they meet the diagnostic criteria for depression. 

While this 3 percent is already a significant number of Americans, the percentage of Latino Americans experiencing climate anxiety and depression is much higher, with 10 percent reporting clinically significant anxiety and 10 percent reporting climate triggered depression. 

This holds true across other vulnerable communities. “There’s also some research to say that they’re also more likely to report that they’re involved in climate change activism, and more environmentally engaged than white people, and they also feel more confident about taking action,” said Uppalapati. “I think the historical and the systemic challenges that people of color have experienced, be it wider situations that have been exacerbated by climate change, like living close to highways because of zoning and the heat that comes with it, I think that has really fostered a sense of concern among people of color. You tend to see that they’re more concerned and anxious and depressed about it, but they’re also more engaged.”

Uppalapati’s work is the first of its kind. By modifying some of the existing diagnostic screening questions, she was able to use well established screening criteria for anxiety and depression, but specifically geared toward climate change.

The true number of people experiencing climate-triggered anxiety and depression may be much higher, said Uppalapati. “I think there’s hesitation to use that word [climate], but people might be experiencing it and not realize it, especially if they’re hesitant or reluctant to acknowledge climate change.”

“It’s okay to have some level of anxiety and depression. It’s a very normal response, but we don’t want it to get to a stage where it truly impedes your life. And we saw that over 3 percent are likely experiencing distress that is limiting their everyday life. That’s concerning, and it’s important that they provide mental health resources,” said Uppalapati.

That said, some climate distress is beneficial for climate action. Uppalapati co-authored another paper that showed the people who are experiencing the most climate distress are the ones most likely to take action. Another forthcoming paper looks at the connection between race, climate distress, and climate action. 

“You can’t shake off the fact that exposure to higher climate harms and social inequities stem from some level of systemic racism, And I just think it’s interesting that despite having the highest exposure, they’re also the people who are doing the most,” said Uppalapati. “They’re able to channel that distress into action.”

An education reporter turned climate organizer, Anya Kamenetz, of the Climate Mental Health Network, knows the importance of a good communication tool in helping gauge the emotional toll climate change is taking on the young—and old.

That was the idea behind the so-called climate emotions wheel, which Kamenetz created with the Network to help find new ways for people to voice their feelings around the climate crisis. 

A riff on the traditional emotions wheel common to therapists the world over, the climate emotions wheel features the 27 emotions most commonly associated with climate change. Laid out in a tiered rainbow pattern, there are four core emotions— anger, positivity, fear, and sadness—with secondary feelings radiating off of the central emotions. The 23 secondary emotions range from inspiration to indignation with everything from loneliness to panic to the old standby, hope in between. 

The wheel is available under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can use it. Since its creation a year ago, “it’s traveled all over the world. It’s been translated by volunteers into 15 languages. It’s been presented in classrooms and libraries. It was presented at the last UN conference at the cultural pavilion, and at a talk there,” said Kamenetz. 

There is even an emoji climate emotions wheel. Designed to be used with small children experiencing climate distress, the emoji wheel has since become a hit with people of all ages. 

Panu Pihkala, the Finnish interdisciplinary environmental studies researcher whose work the wheel is based on, was actually hoping to create something like the climate emotions wheel when he set out to work on his 2022 paper Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions. But it was “so complicated and I was so busy that I never did it. So I was very glad that somebody was doing it, and I enjoyed the cooperation!” said Pihkala, who was a member of the working group that translated his paper into the climate emotions wheel. 

In addition to trying to identify what feelings are most commonly associated with climate change, in his 2022 study, Pihkala also asked about people’s self recognition of stronger, more psychosomatic symptoms. But, he said, “a major issue in this kind of research is that it may be difficult for people, first of all, to recognize what they are feeling at all. And second, to recognize what they are feeling exactly in relation to climate change.”

This emotional disconnect can cause people to shy away from acknowledging their feelings and taking any subsequent action on climate change, especially when they stem from political alignment or potential for social alienation. 

“Fundamentally, the whole range of emotions can be constructive if the energy in these emotions becomes channeled in constructive ways,” said Pihkala. “For example, guilt can lead people to just distance themselves problematically from these issues, or it can lead people to change their ways.”