On Tuesday, exactly two weeks after the November 5 election, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina reconvened in Raleigh, ostensibly to pass disaster relief for areas affected by Hurricane Helene. But, with no public notice, they snuck provisions into the bill stripping power from the state’s incoming Democratic governor and attorney general and dramatically changing how elections are administered. The bill passed the state House Tuesday night, just hours after it was publicly released, and is expected to be approved by the state Senate on Wednesday.

“It’s a massive power grab,” says Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina for the People Action. “They didn’t like what happened in the election, and they want to overturn the will of the people. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.”

Though Trump carried North Carolina, Democrats won five statewide offices—governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and school superintendent. They narrowly lead in a pivotal state Supreme Court race that is headed to a recount.

Democrats also broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state legislature, which they had held due to extreme gerrymandering. This means that unlike in previous sessions, come January, Republicans will no longer be able to override the vetoes of the state’s incoming Democratic governor, Josh Stein, who easily defeated scandal-plagued Republican candidate Lieutenant Gov. Mark Robinson.

So, in a lame-duck session, Republicans preemptively stripped power from these Democratic officials before they are sworn in.

Most notably, the bill prevents the governor from appointing members of the state election board and transfers that authority to the state auditor, who, for the first time in more than a decade, is a Republican. Under North Carolina law, the governor, a position held by Democrat Roy Cooper for the past eight years, appoints a majority of members on the state election board and county election boards. The auditor will now have that authority, giving Republicans the power to appoint majorities on the state board and 100 county election boards.

These appointments will likely have major ramifications for elections in the state. The state board administers elections and issues guidance to county officials, who in turn have the power to decide where polling places go and the number of early voting locations. In addition, both the county and state boards must certify election outcomes. That raises the possibility that the new bill will enable Republicans to cut back on voting access and refuse to certify election results should a Democrat narrowly win. Price Kromm noted that the bill was introduced only one day after results showed Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs leading her GOP opponent by just 623 votes after trailing by more than 10,000 votes on election night.

“Legislators have put forward a bill that fails to provide real support to communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene and instead prioritizes more power grabs in Raleigh,” Cooper said in a statement.

For years, Republicans have been trying to prevent Democratic governors from appointing a majority of election board members, but they have repeatedly been blocked by voters and the courts. So now they have bypassed the precedent and handed the power over to the state auditor—a position with no expertise or previous authority in elections.

“This makes no logical sense other than he has an R next to his name.”

“No other state has that,” says Price Kromm. “This makes no logical sense other than he has an R next to his name.”

Other Democratic officials will also see their power stripped under the new legislation. The bill prevents the state’s incoming attorney general, Jeff Jackson, from filing lawsuits that contradict the positions of the legislature or joining lawsuits that originate in other states or with private actors, which state attorneys general frequently do.

The bill also changes the composition of the state courts. It eliminates two judicial seats held by judges who ruled against the legislature in voting rights cases and creates two new judicial positions that will be appointed by the GOP legislature. And, it specifies that the governor can only fill judicial vacancies with members of the same party, which would prevent Stein from appointing a Democratic judge to fill the position of an outgoing Republican judge.

This is not the first time Republicans have convened a lame-duck session to strip power from Democrats—and not just in North Carolina. They did so when Cooper beat Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, preventing him from appointing members to boards of University of North Carolina schools, restricting the number of state employees he could hire or fire, and subjecting all of his nominations to confirmation by the GOP-controlled state Senate, which was not previously required.  

Back in 2018, after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers defeated Republican Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Republicans also held a lame-duck session before Christmas to strip Evers of power and pass new laws making it harder to vote. Democrats called it a soft coup, and Evers viewed it as a precursor to the January 6 insurrection. “There hasn’t been a peaceful transition of power,” he told me.

The latest power grab in North Carolina could foreshadow the next few years in Washington under GOP control—and how the Republican Party’s antidemocratic tendencies have become more institutionalized, going much deeper than Trump. As Price Kromm puts it, “It’s batshit crazy down here right now.”

Last month, Louisiana became the first state to begin classifying misoprostol and mifepristone—the two pills used in medication abortion—as schedule IV controlled substances.

The move, driven by anti-abortion Republicans and unsupported by evidence, left the state’s doctors bracing for the worst—the pills also are used to manage miscarriages and treat postpartum hemorrhages, and the new law requires they be locked away with other narcotics, potentially wasting precious minutes in an emergency. Hundreds of Louisiana doctors opposed the law, and one of them, Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell, a board-certified OB-GYN in New Orleans, told me she feared other states would follow.

That fear may now come to pass: Pat Curry, a Republican lawmaker in Texas, pre-filed a bill in the state legislature this week that would classify the two drugs as schedule IV substances there. The next legislative session does not begin until January 14—if passed, the bill would take effect in September 2025. Curry did not immediately respond to a Facebook message from Mother Jones on Sunday, and appeared to block me from messaging him further after I inquired about the bill.

The news, which appears to have first been reported by the Louisiana Illuminator, is just the latest example of right-wing attacks on abortion pills. Project 2025, the extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, recommends that the Department of Justice invoke the 19th-century Comstock Act to prosecute providers of abortion pills, as I have previously reported. It also recommends that the Food and Drug Administration revoke its approval of abortion pills. Conservative attorneys general in three states are trying to revive a US Supreme Court case seeking to restrict access to mifepristone after the justices unanimously dismissed it earlier this year. And as the Guardian reported on Sunday, anti-abortion advocates hope to outlaw abortion pills nationwide during Trump’s next term.

There is no scientific or medical evidence base to support the notion that the pills are dangerous or should be regulated as controlled substances, which federal law describes as drugs that have “potential for abuse.” More than 100 studies have found that mifepristone and misoprostol are safe and effective methods to terminate a pregnancy, and research has shown abortion pills are just as safe and effective when prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to patients as when prescribed and dispensed in person. Post-Dobbs, Americans have taken to stockpiling abortion pills just in case they need them in the future; medication abortion provided via telehealth has also become an increasingly popular option in the face of rising abortion restrictions—it now accounts for approximately one in five abortions nationwide.

The Texas bill certainly has a shot. The legislature is solidly Republican and has historically been strongly anti-abortion, having passed SB 8, a six-week ban, then the nation’s most restrictive, in 2021. (As my colleague Nina Martin reported this summer, new research shows that a huge increase in infant deaths followed the implementation of SB 8, due in part to an increase of babies born with birth defects. After Dobbs, abortion became fully outlawed in Texas, with no exceptions for rape or incest—just the life or health of the mother.)

A spokesperson for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott—who, as I reported, falsely claimed Texas would “eliminate rape” as an attempt to justify passing SB 8—did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday asking if the governor would support the “controlled substances” bill.

When Texas lawmakers return to work in January, they will likely have to contend with protests from doctors and abortion rights advocates, who have evidence on their side. As Gillispie-Bell, the New Orleans doctor, told me: “It’s really a dangerous slippery slope when we have legislation that interferes with what we know to be evidence-based medicine.”

Last month, Louisiana became the first state to begin classifying misoprostol and mifepristone—the two pills used in medication abortion—as schedule IV controlled substances.

The move, driven by anti-abortion Republicans and unsupported by evidence, left the state’s doctors bracing for the worst—the pills also are used to manage miscarriages and treat postpartum hemorrhages, and the new law requires they be locked away with other narcotics, potentially wasting precious minutes in an emergency. Hundreds of Louisiana doctors opposed the law, and one of them, Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell, a board-certified OB-GYN in New Orleans, told me she feared other states would follow.

That fear may now come to pass: Pat Curry, a Republican lawmaker in Texas, pre-filed a bill in the state legislature this week that would classify the two drugs as schedule IV substances there. The next legislative session does not begin until January 14—if passed, the bill would take effect in September 2025. Curry did not immediately respond to a Facebook message from Mother Jones on Sunday, and appeared to block me from messaging him further after I inquired about the bill.

The news, which appears to have first been reported by the Louisiana Illuminator, is just the latest example of right-wing attacks on abortion pills. Project 2025, the extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, recommends that the Department of Justice invoke the 19th-century Comstock Act to prosecute providers of abortion pills, as I have previously reported. It also recommends that the Food and Drug Administration revoke its approval of abortion pills. Conservative attorneys general in three states are trying to revive a US Supreme Court case seeking to restrict access to mifepristone after the justices unanimously dismissed it earlier this year. And as the Guardian reported on Sunday, anti-abortion advocates hope to outlaw abortion pills nationwide during Trump’s next term.

There is no scientific or medical evidence base to support the notion that the pills are dangerous or should be regulated as controlled substances, which federal law describes as drugs that have “potential for abuse.” More than 100 studies have found that mifepristone and misoprostol are safe and effective methods to terminate a pregnancy, and research has shown abortion pills are just as safe and effective when prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to patients as when prescribed and dispensed in person. Post-Dobbs, Americans have taken to stockpiling abortion pills just in case they need them in the future; medication abortion provided via telehealth has also become an increasingly popular option in the face of rising abortion restrictions—it now accounts for approximately one in five abortions nationwide.

The Texas bill certainly has a shot. The legislature is solidly Republican and has historically been strongly anti-abortion, having passed SB 8, a six-week ban, then the nation’s most restrictive, in 2021. (As my colleague Nina Martin reported this summer, new research shows that a huge increase in infant deaths followed the implementation of SB 8, due in part to an increase of babies born with birth defects. After Dobbs, abortion became fully outlawed in Texas, with no exceptions for rape or incest—just the life or health of the mother.)

A spokesperson for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott—who, as I reported, falsely claimed Texas would “eliminate rape” as an attempt to justify passing SB 8—did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday asking if the governor would support the “controlled substances” bill.

When Texas lawmakers return to work in January, they will likely have to contend with protests from doctors and abortion rights advocates, who have evidence on their side. As Gillispie-Bell, the New Orleans doctor, told me: “It’s really a dangerous slippery slope when we have legislation that interferes with what we know to be evidence-based medicine.”

Nevada’s secretary of state, the New York Times’ Danny Hakim reports, is concerned about the large numbers of absentee ballots getting rejected in the state’s most populous counties because of signature mismatches—potentially enough ballots to change election results. From the Times:

More than 11,300 ballots were reported by the state Monday night as still needing signature curing in Clark County, home of Las Vegas, and more than 1,800 in Washoe County. In particularly close elections, a large number of ballots that need curing could determine the outcome.

States that make such comparisons typically match the voter’s signature on the absentee ballot envelope against signatures in the registrar’s voter database and DMV records. If a mismatch is declared, voters are given the opportunity to “cure” a rejected ballot—in Nevada this year, they have through November 12.

The numbers above were much higher than the ones reported in 2020 and 2022, and they are expected to grow as more ballots arrive and are processed, Hakim wrote. “It’s mostly the fact that young people don’t have signatures these days,” Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told the Times. “And when they did register to vote through the automatic voter registration process, they signed a digital pad at DMV, and that became their license signature.”

This is a problem his office might have seen coming, and it’s just one reason that having minimally trained people matching ballot signatures is not a great practice. Or so people who do it for a living told me when I was reporting on the subject during a past election.

There’s a lot of natural variation in people’s script related to health issues, aging, injuries, changes in mental state, and the circumstances in which a signature is created—that DMV touch pad yields a very different signature than a ballpoint pen at a desk will, for example.

“A person could write their signature 100 different times and none of those will be exactly alike.” 

Sample size is also an issue. “You have to have a series of signatures,” Patricia Fisher, a professional documents examiner from Northern California, told me. “They need to be closer in time, and on similar types of documents, because one signature is not going to represent the full range of variations in someone’s handwriting.”

Fisher, who at the time had spent more than four decades verifying disputed signatures, said her No. 1 rule was as follows: You never compare just two signatures to determine a mismatch. And you certainly don’t call a mismatch by comparing a recent signature with one collected years earlier—as might be the case with older voters who originally registered to vote—or drive—some time ago. 

Six signatures is about the minimum for a solid comparison, Fisher told me. A trained examiner looks for “the commonalities, the permanent characteristics, the fleeting characteristics, the other characteristics like the fluency, the speed, the rhythm. There are dozens of variables,” she said.

I spoke, too, with Mark Songer, a former forensic documents examiner for the FBI. “To do any kind of meaningful examination, I like to get anywhere from 6 to 10 representative samples that are pretty contemporaneous with the signature itself,” he told me. “A person could write their signature 100 different times and none of those will be exactly alike, because we all have a range—the only way to establish that range is to have a sufficient number of samples.”

Signature disputes are becoming increasingly common as more people, starting during the pandemic, began voting absentee. And thanks to the ubiquity of touch-pad signatures and the fact that cursive is no longer taught in many schools, signatures have become ever less reliable as a quick verification of a person’s identity.

“If they use a driver’s license signature and you’re signing an electronic pad, that changes many of the characteristics, because it’s not natural,” Fisher told me. “So you’re comparing apples and oranges for such an important thing—to say, ‘No, your vote doesn’t count because your signature doesn’t look right.’”

For a lot of those Nevada voters, that may be the only thing on file: “We’re seeing high engagement and turnout amongst our youth,” Aguilar told CNN.

I reached out to Nevada officials to ask whether it was true, per a rumor on X, that elections workers were attempting to call those voters, as opposed to, say, texting them. Because, I have a couple of first-time voters in my own household, and those people do not pick up the phone—unless it’s dad, and sometimes not even then.

A Clark County elections spokesperson assured me that elections staffers do, in fact, text voters—and call and email and even send them notices in the mail, and then continue to do so right up to the deadline. Yet despite these efforts, she said, only about half of the rejected ballots got cured in previous elections. That could yet be significant, since Clark County still had 9,600 uncured ballots as of 4 p.m. PT. And Washoe County’s website listed 1,375 still in need of curing.

In any case, “the whole signature thing needs to be totally reevaluated,” Fisher told me. “There should not be all these untrained people—and you probably won’t get trained people there, because trained persons know you don’t compare one signature to another signature.”

In the last five years, as the movement to ditch gas-fueled stoves and heaters has spread across the country—it’s also ignited a backlash.

In 2019, Berkeley, California, became the first American city to ban gas hookups in new buildings, a rule intended to reduce carbon emissions—and improve indoor air quality in light of growing evidence that gas stoves emit pollutants linked to asthma and cancer. Dozens more cities followed suit.

The California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley, and the city eventually backed down and repealed its policy. Places with similar laws, including New York state and Washington, DC, were slapped with lawsuits too. Conservatives at the highest levels of government warned the public, misleadingly, that liberals were coming for people’s gas stoves. About half of US states, mostly but not all red, have since passed laws preemptively barring local governments from regulating gas.

This slice of the culture wars is now on the ballot in Washington, one of the country’s most climate-forward states. I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.

“This is a national threat,” says Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Climate Solutions, a Washington State environmental group opposing the initiative. “Washington is somewhat of a testing pool for them to see if they can go further in weaponizing the initiative process to threaten climate progress.”

So how did Washington—the state that gave us REI, modern backpacks, and the “greenest governor” in America—come to consider a measure to preserve gas appliances?

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says one advocate, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

Experts told me I-2066 is largely a response to two progressive climate policies. First, there was a tweak to Washington’s building codes: About a quarter of the state’s carbon emissions come from heating and powering buildings. Last year, the State Building Code Council voted to require new buildings to meet certain energy efficiency standards, a policy that favored electric appliances like heat pumps over more wasteful, gas-powered ones. (Seattle went further, passing a policy requiring many large, existing buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050.)

Then, earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a wonky, but impactful green energy law, House Bill 1589, which requires Washington’s largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to outline a plan for full electrification.

When that passed, the Building Industry Association of Washington, a major funder of I-2066, released a statement claiming the law “clears the path” for Puget Sound Energy to “force its 800,000 natural gas customers to convert their homes to all-electric,” at a cost of “$40,000 to $50,000 per household.”

According to Puget Sound Energy, the bill doesn’t “force” electrification—it is, primarily, a law to help the utility plan to go electric. Plus, climate advocates say, the switch to all-electric buildings is inevitable, given the climate and health dangers of gas. And helping utility companies prepare, they argue, will reduce costs for customers in the long run.

We can do the energy transition “in a chaotic and unmanaged way, or we can do it in a fair and managed way,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle-based senior attorney at Earthjustice, an organization that opposes I-2066. HB 1589 aimed to help ease the state into the transition, he says, but “this initiative is a chaos bomb thrown into the middle of that process that will make energy more expensive and the future more complicated.”

The notion that Washington was shoving clean energy down people’s throats gained traction nonetheless. Let’s Go Washington, a group run by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, and backed by the National Association of Home Builders and Koch Industries, which is heavily invested in fossil fuels, took up a signature drive and successfully got I-2066 on the ballot, along with three other measures. One of the others, I-2117, would roll back Washington’s cap-and-invest program, which has raised about $2 billion for state green energy programs, but also, critics say, pushed up the price of gasoline. (Heywood was unavailable for an interview with Mother Jones, and the Building Industry Association of Washington did not respond to an interview request.)

“It’s the perception that is important,” explains Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington. “And the perception is that these climate laws are imposing new costs that people are not willing to undertake.”

If passed—and polling suggests its odds are good—I-2066 would repeal key parts of HB 1589 and, as Axios reports, require the state to revise the new building codes next year to no longer disadvantage gas. To supporters, that would mean preserving consumers’ “energy choice.” To opponents, it’d be a major setback to the state’s ability to address the climate crisis.

I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”

More broadly, the measure’s passage would serve as a symbolic rebuke to progressive electrification policies. “We had a lot of success,” Hasselman says. “We moved the ball forward quite a bit, and now we’re seeing a real pushback.”

“I do worry,” he adds, “if the billionaires and the fossil fuel companies pour enough money into these initiatives to be successful, it sends a terribly chilling message for the whole nation.”

The day after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in July, Pastor Diane Mullins took the microphone in front of the southwest Ohio church she and her husband, Jim, preside over and began to pace in front of a large LED screen with the graphic of a billowing American flag.

“I’m tired of holding back because I’m running for a stupid office, and I don’t care if they hear that,” she said, her voice slowly rising. “The only reason I’m running, it’s about the kingdom of God and his righteousness that should rule and reign in the government of the United States of America.” Her cadence quickened, the electric organ and audience’s applause swelling to meet her fever pitch as her words turned into commands. “It is time for the godly, it is time for the anointed of God to arise! Awake! Arise! Advance! Be the church. Stop being afraid!”

From the city of Hamilton, population 63,000, the urban center of a mostly rural county, Mullins is running a statehouse campaign in which she presents herself as a mainstream Ohio Republican, running to defend “conservative values.” But when she appears before her hundreds of congregants, Mullins has been much more explicit about the interdependence of faith and politics. “The principle of separation of church and state is a lie,” she said in a 2021 sermon. “The Constitution of the United States was written by men who were Christian men, who were principled men, because they were concerned that one day, the government would try to take over the church and the Christians.”

A Christian nationalist gospel that might have once been a fringe of the Republican Party now commands a central role, from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to down-ballot races across the country—to school boards and local government. Should they be elected, their mission is to infuse government with the word of God. 

“It’s this belief that while the United States might have different people, different races and ethnicities or religions, it was built by white Anglo-Protestants,” says Andrew Whitehead, co-director of the Association of Religion Data Archives at Indiana University, Indianapolis. “And those folks today who are white Anglo-Protestants really have the clearest heritage to help run this country, to have a say in what it should look like.”

“From three to four years old, if you would say, ‘What do you wanna be when you grow up,’ I would tell you I was gonna work for Jesus.”

The child of devout Christians, Mullins always felt certain of her destiny. “From three to four years old, if you would say, ‘What do you wanna be when you grow up,’ I would tell you I was gonna work for Jesus,” Mullins said on the Christian radio show Shaped by Faith, in 2018. But she figured her vocation was to support a ministering husband, in much the same way her mother did for her father, Pearl Robinson, a Pentecostal pastor in the Cincinnati suburb of Hamilton, where Mullins lives today.

For years, Mullins was Jim’s supportive spouse, when he took over what was then called the Calvary Christian Center in Hamilton from his parents. But over three consecutive nights in 2015, Mullins says, messages from God interrupted her sleep. On day one, he said, “Awake. Arise. Advance.” On the second, he said, “Honeybee.” And on the third, “Deborah.”

A biblical figure who was Israel’s first female judge and prophet, Deborah, or “Honeybee” in Hebrew, appears in the Book of Judges and guided an Israeli warrior to lead 10,000 soldiers to defeat an army of Canaanites (people who lived in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine). In the “Song of Deborah,” she is commanded by God to “awake” and “arise” as a “mother in Israel.” For Mullins, these divine messages and the spectacle of what she described as “the nasty women’s march” after Trump was elected in 2016, convinced her to start a ministry called Deborah’s Voice. Aspiring to be “the voice of Christian women,” the ministry’s priorities include “ending abortion,” “protecting traditional marriage,” and “supporting Christian women in politics.” Starting in 2018, Deborah’s Voice even held rallies across the country. “We just feel that women have a voice in this nation, and we don’t want the wrong voice,” Mullins told the Christian Post ahead of the ministry’s 2018 rally in Washington, which was attended by a few hundred people. 

Devoted Christian nationalists tend to be comfortable with the idea of authoritarian social control, Whitehead tells me. The logic goes that chaotic circumstances require rigid rules, and strong leaders like Trump to enforce them, to restore the order that people crave. Mullins views America’s founding documents as sacred and needing protection from change. Meanwhile, the devil—via the so-called “deep state”—has been working internally to thwart God’s plans. 

“It’s this belief that while the United States might have different people, different races and ethnicities or religions, it was built by white Anglo-Protestants.”

The story of Deborah has often appeared in Mullins’ sermons over the years, especially to underscore the significance of a female prophet who was not only trusted but revered. “She was where I believe the church is today,” Mullins preached in September. “We are a righteous people in between the established church and the world, the culture that we live in, that is so ungodly and unrighteous.” Within this context, Mullins says, around November 2023, God once more directed her, this time to campaign for office and serve him in the Ohio House of Representatives as a representative from the solidly red 47th District. Running for office wasn’t her decision, she says, it was God’s. His timing was propitious: November 2023 was when Ohioans voted to legalize recreational cannabis and constitutionally protect abortion. “Everything is about the kingdom,” Mullins said in a January sermon. “So, what is it about the kingdom that God wants to use me for in that?” Mullins’ campaign did not respond to Mother Jones’ interview requests or questions.

This was not Mullins’ first statehouse campaign. Four years ago, before Ohio enacted new legislative maps, she unsuccessfully challenged a different Republican incumbent, telling southwest Ohio newspaper the Journal-News that she was a pro-gun, anti-abortion candidate who wouldn’t compromise her “conservative core beliefs.” What is new, however, is the amount of dark money that she has received, which helped her—like the biblical David—defeat the political Goliath in the primary against three-term incumbent Rep. Sara Carruthers. Make Liberty Win, a Virginia-based hybrid PAC/super-PAC that seeks to elect “liberty-defending” state lawmakers, poured more than $96,000 into supporting Mullins (and opposing Carruthers), $40,000 more than Mullins’ own campaign spent.

By February, the race got ugly, culminating in Carruthers filing a complaint against Make Liberty Win with the Ohio Elections Commission for mailing attack ads without disclosing it was the source. The ads claimed Carruthers “threw a single mother out of her house,” referring to a complicated story in which the surrogate of Carruthers’ two children filed a breach of contract suit against the candidate. Carruthers settled the lawsuit out of court in 2022 and the case is now sealed. (Mullins told the Journal-News in February that “I would never OK a mailer like that.”)

Make Liberty Win spent more than $1.8 million in about a dozen GOP primaries in Ohio, mostly to oppose Republican incumbents, part of the so-called “Blue 22,” in favor of more MAGA-minded candidates unwilling to compromise with Democrats. Eight of the 12 challenged Blue 22 Republicans held onto their seats. But the challengers who did win, like Mullins, presented themselves as being much more hardline conservatives, each highlighting their devotion to Christian values. Ty Mathews, for example, running to represent Ohio House District 83, has three pillars guiding his campaign: God, country, and family. “There’s a reason why [God] is number one,” Mathews explains in a video on his campaign website.

The inflexibility and radical nature of their respective candidacies seem to ignore the fact that Ohioans, including Republican voters, have rejected the state GOP’s efforts to stifle more progressive policies, says Paul Beck, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. “There’s an old adage in politics that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he tells me. “We’re seeing that with these Republican supermajorities. Many of their members now think they can really do anything.”

“Everything is about the kingdom. So, what is it about the kingdom that God wants to use me for in that?”

Mullins hasn’t publicly campaigned much since securing the Republican nomination, trading stump speeches and meet-and-greets for private fundraising events and occasional appearances at county fairs and holiday parades. She doesn’t have a campaign website or a WinRed fundraising page. And aside from references to supporting the Second Amendment and opposing abortion, her policy platform is scant. On her candidate Facebook page, she blends patriotic posts with praise and prayers for Trump, and images of her hobnobbing with Donald Trump Jr. and the GOP’s US Senate candidate in Ohio, Bernie Moreno.

Despite her proclivity for conspiracy theories, Mullins has been relatively mum on immigration—which is striking given the national spectacle Trump and his vice presidential hopeful Ohio Sen. JD Vance have created with disproven claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets. Springfield is about an hour north of Mullins’ district, and Trump and Vance’s falsehoods have, as Republican Gov. Mike DeWine put it, made the community the “epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy.”

Mullins’ political base of operations appears to be inside Calvary Church, a medium-sized brick building adorned with a large cross and a looming white steeple. Every Sunday, worshippers gather in a large auditorium, led by a live contemporary rock band and a chorus of singers. Pastors encourage the unsaved in the audience to make themselves known and receive God. Calvary Church weaves nondenominational teachings with elements of Mullins’ Pentecostal upbringing; she speaks in tongues, for instance, and congregants line up for some faith healing from her and her husband.

For years, Mullins has warned people in her church of the impending end times, pointing to evidence that seemed to be everywhere: Satan “pervert[ed] what male and female was all about” in society. The culture’s ungodliness ushered in the spread of the “man-made” coronavirus. The Antichrist has infiltrated American institutions through communism. From her pulpit, she emphasizes this church’s unique role in bringing the unsaved into the Lord’s “harvest” before Jesus’ return, casting out the ever-present “enemy,” and aligning the United States with the Holy Word. 

One Sunday morning this past summer, less than 5 miles down the road from Calvary Church, Mullins’ Democratic opponent, Rev. Vanessa Cummings, was preaching at Payne Chapel AME Church. As Cummings finished delivering her sermon to the dozen or so people in the pews, she emphasized the need to pray for unity, world peace, and healing from divisiveness. She’s been a pastor at this 184-year-old Black church for three years and has ministered across the state. A longtime public servant and community activist, she served as vice mayor and city councilmember of nearby Oxford and is the vice president of Oxford’s NAACP chapter. She has long helped with voter registration and education drives. Today, I am the only white person in the room and I am reminded of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous observation that 11 a.m. on Sunday was the “most segregated hour of America.”

Sitting across from me in her office after the service, Cummings acknowledges that in a district that is nearly 62 percent Republican, the odds are stacked against her. But, she notes, “If I didn’t think I could win, I wouldn’t run.” The voters she’s spoken to on the campaign trail are desperately seeking change, Cummings tells me, and they’re tired of politicians making decisions against their constituents’ wishes because of their personal beliefs. 

While her faith guides her in her personal life, she emphatically rejects the tenets of Christian nationalism that Mullins preaches. “She believes there’s no separation of church and state. I believe there is a separation of church and state,” Cummings says. “She believes this is a stupid position. I believe it’s a position we should fight for, to get to serve the people.”

“It’s good I’m not God, I’d kill ‘em, every one.”

A few hours earlier, as I sat in a back pew as hundreds of people filtered into Mullins’ Calvary Church, a countdown timer inched toward zero on the three LED screens on the wall behind the pulpit. With a couple of months before the election, Mullins’ sermon was far less political than many of the ones I’ve watched on the Calvary Church YouTube channel. Her message was simple: God does not care what sins you have committed in your past, as long as you believe that Jesus Christ is your savior and you devote yourself to living in line with God’s word.

As forcefully as she has condemned the “perversion” and “unrighteousness” in society, in this sermon she emphasized this church would welcome, with open arms, a homeless drug addict or “two men who come in holding hands” who hope to hear the Lord’s good news. Similarly, people struggling with sins like “abortion, unforgiveness toward an abuser, fornication, sex before marriage” and “pornography” should not be afraid to accept Jesus into their hearts. It’s Mullins’ twist on the common refrain “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” 

It can be hard to reconcile that message with the image of the devilish “enemy” she regularly evokes. And it is the proliferation of sin, she preaches, that prevents the full realization of God’s visions for the world. “There’s too much darkness, too much deep state, too much sexual sin, too much abuse,” Mullins said in 2020. “And every day, I go: Oh Lord, Jesus. And he says, ‘I’m just letting you see it, I’ve known it all along.’ You know what my next thought is? It’s good I’m not God, I’d kill ‘em, every one…We need God. Thank God we’re not him, because we’d probably all be dead, too.”