The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When you start walking around a city with a small child, you notice two things about cars. One is that a lot of drivers suddenly seem a lot more considerate. They yield at crosswalks. They stop at stop signs. They lay off the horn. People are fully capable of driving normally, in other words—when they want to. But the other thing that jumps out is that a significant number of drivers don’t seem affected at all: They just keep rolling through those stop signs; they inch forward as you cross; they honk when the car in front of them has stopped, like an absolute dipshit, to yield for some guy pushing a stroller. 

It is always a little jarring to know how little you matter. A few centimeters of metal and plastic is enough to reduce anyone outside of it to nothing. Driving, whatever the commercials say, isn’t very good for the soul. It’s not all that great for democracy, either.

The 2024 election was full-on car-brained. “Pain at the pump” is an old standby at this point, and Donald Trump’s campaign was all too eager to add gas to the long list of necessities that had gotten more expensive while Democrats controlled the White House. But it seeped into the ether in other ways. 

After falsely asserting that Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats, JD Vance also tried to link them to rising auto insurance rates. He argued that the newcomers’ inability to drive responsibly was harming the community and making car ownership more difficult for working people. This narrative got so out of hand on the right that at one point, the New York Post even sent a reporter to stand at an intersection in Springfield to watch traffic for a while—eventually producing a breathless dispatch about a minor fender-bender.

Vance also tapped into genuine fears about the risk traffic violence poses to kids. In 2023, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus in Springfield, killing one child and injuring more than 20 others. Republicans talked about the incident so often that the victim’s family pleaded with them to stop. But this was not a Haitian problem. NBC News reported that there were 6,089 crashes involving a school bus over a recent four-year period in Ohio alone. Traffic violence, like gun violence, is something that the United States excels at by design. In any given year, upward of 40,000 Americans will die in a car crash, and the only time I’ve ever heard a candidate for higher office acknowledge it is either to downplay the roughly equal toll of gun violence or as justification for mass deportation.

“Haitians” are not the reason car insurance rates have gone up across the country in recent years, either. As Marin Cogan explained at Vox, that rise is attributable to inflation, the increasing amount of tech in cars (another thing that sucks!), and a shift for the worse in driving behavior that dates to the pandemic. But that narrative fit into the broader story Vance and Trump told about how the things that make you identifiably American were getting harder and harder to attain. 

For all the talk of the freedom of the open road, Vance and his allies were seizing on the latent anxiety that a car-dependent culture imposes on citizens and the real damage it causes. One of the biggest drags on household finances is a machine that might someday kill you—and you’re surrounded all the time by other people who might do the same. That stress lends itself to reactionary politics. When you are driving, you are constantly pathologizing other drivers. 

The primacy of car culture shaped how Democrats campaigned and governed, too. In June, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paused New York City’s long-awaited congestion pricing toll on car traffic in the southern half of Manhattan, days before the policy was set to go into effect. Hochul has denied that there was any political calculation to the decision (which she reversed almost immediately after the election was over), but the electoral subtext was obvious—the toll would affect a small minority of commuters in a few key suburban districts that Democrats were targeting in their effort to win back the House. 

It was a bad electoral calculation—in the end, Democrats barely flipped one seat in the New York City area—but I’m sympathetic, at least, with one aspect of the analysis: There was no telling how vengeful car owners would become. After this year’s election, one angry real estate broker told the San Francisco Standard that the practice of daylighting—that is, requiring cars to leave a buffer before a crosswalk so that pedestrians can see oncoming traffic—was why Democrats lose. I don’t know if it’s true with that degree of specificity (daylighting? really?), but car-brain feeds into the sort of social erosion that does. Driving makes us angrier, poorer, less healthy, and more isolated. Of course, it makes people resentful, too.

One of the most striking Republican ads I saw this year was a spot from a group called Election Freedom Inc. It starts with a Latino man clutching a hard hat. “You worked hard,” a narrator says. “You bought your truck.” While you toiled, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Kamala Harris, the ad said, were giving away millions of dollars to illegal immigrants in benefits and funding sex change operations in prisons:

This is a damn good ad guys. This is really good creative. pic.twitter.com/QEZQbRIRTz

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) October 24, 2024

It was jarring to see the dynamic laid out like that. It was like someone made the Jesse Helms “Hands” ad about a Ford-250. But that was what the election was all about, in a way; Trump asked people to choose between their immediate material circumstances and their neighbors. Anyone who’s tried crossing a busy intersection on foot recently knows how that one goes.

Let’s just get it out of the way upfront: Donald Trump is assembling a government of billionaires, the likes of which the United States has never seen. The president-elect has tapped five reported billionaires for cabinet posts: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for interior secretary, hedge funder Scott Bessent for treasury secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for education secretary (I know, just roll with it), and former Sen. Kelly Loeffler—wife of New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher—for small business administrator.

But those appointments are almost normal compared to the billionaires Trump’s installing everywhere else. After Elon Musk spent a quarter-billion dollars to get him elected—$40.25 billion, if you count the in-kind acquisition of Twitter—Trump made the world’s richest man co-chair (with maybe-billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy) of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. There, one of the government’s largest contractors will be tasked with trimming about $2 trillion from the federal budget. Or maybe they’ll just harass civil servants until they quit; it’s not really clear what DOGE will be, beyond a dead joke about an internet meme from 2013.

They’re joined in the administration by Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, whom Trump announced would serve as his “AI and Crypto Czar”—whatever that means. Steve Witkoff, a New York City real estate billionaire who’s deeply enmeshed in the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf petro-states, will be Trump’s Middle East envoy. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman—a Musk ally who moonlights as a commercial astronaut on SpaceX flights and holds the distinction of being the first person to place a bet on a professional sporting event from space—will run NASA. Private equity mogul Stephen Feinberg, whose firm owns the company that trained journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killers, is Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of defense. Fiserv President Frank Bisignano (worth just shy of $1 billion—for now—according to Axios) is on deck to run the Social Security Administration. Massad Boulos, who is slated to be a Middle East adviser and is also Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, was frequently described in the press as a billionaire until a New York Times story revealed that he actually just ran a Nigerian trucking business and once tried to sell a kind of “erotic” energy drink called Tantra Beverages.

It’s a bit more commonplace to hand out ambassadorships to ultra-wealthy allies, but even by that measure, it is rare to send someone overseas who is barred from practicing law in New Jersey. Charles Kushner, Trump’s pick for ambassador to France, is family, though, and it’s hard to say at this point that the crimes of the father—which included hiring a prostitute to help blackmail his brother-in-law to avoid a conviction for tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions—do not, on some deeper level, represent the United States with some accuracy. Arkansas billionaire Warren Stephens, Trump’s choice for ambassador to the United Kingdom, is by those standards fairly anonymous—but it’s notable that he’s filling the seat held in the first term by another billionaire, Woody Johnson. Meanwhile, private equity mogul and Trump business associate Tom Barrack—who was recently acquitted of charges of illegally lobbying for the United Arab Emirates—will be the president’s man in Turkey.

All told, there are 15 reported billionaires slated for jobs in the administration—16 if you count the Big Guy himself. And then there are the billionaires with no formal role who have nonetheless been invited to advise the incoming president behind the scenes, or who have been widely reported as having Trump’s ear. Guys like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a cheerleader for “effective accelerationism,” who, I feel required to point out, is currently trying to build a new model city from scratch in California; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; and hedge funder John Paulson. This is an incomplete list. Every time I set out to compile it, a new name would percolate—some mogul you’ve never heard of who’s tied up in useless tech and worth more than Rhode Island.

It’s hard to overstate just how unprecedented it is to have this many ultra-ultra-wealthy figures working inside an administration. Overall, Axios projected that the net worth of the cabinet—just the immediate cabinet—was about $10 billion, which would make it roughly 100 times richer than President Joe Biden’s cabinet—and more than three times richer than Trump’s first-term cabinet, which was itself so historically wealthy that people couldn’t stop writing articles about it.

Prior to the first Trump administration—which featured both McMahon as Small Business Administration chief and billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary—only a handful of billionaires had ever received major non-ambassadorial jobs in an administration, even adjusting for inflation. Penny Pritzker, scion of the Hyatt hotel dynasty, spent one term as Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce. Henry Paulson, the George W. Bush treasury secretary who got down on his knees to beg then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass a bank bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, would have passed for a billionaire in today’s dollars. And at the time Gerald Ford tapped Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president, after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the New York governor was worth a little more than $1 billion in today’s dollars based on his own assessment of his wealth.

Rocky’s confirmation process speaks to how unusual the prospect of a billionaire in the White House (or at least the Old Executive Office Building) really was. It was not viewed as normal; it was viewed, in some corners, as a possible threat to the national interest. Although he had already spent years in public service, Congress spent four months poring over and debating the extent of his wealth and the layers upon layers of conflicts it might present. This was a guy who had given Henry Kissinger a $50,000 check as a gift, who had showered friendly politicians with cash over the years, and who had a vast family fortune tied up in an industry—oil—that was vital to the nation’s future.

There is a tendency to say that we are in the middle of a new Gilded Age…But whereas the robber barons really did make a lot of stuff, many of the ultra-wealthy moguls meddling in politics today are caught up in a sort of negative creation, burning through vast sums of energy in pursuit of fake money and AI slop.

“It begins to seem easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Vice Presidency of the United States by way of the 25th Amendment,” the New York Times quipped as the congressional proceedings dragged on. One California Democrat put the question at hand simply: “Can Nelson Rockefeller serve two masters—the public and his own interests?” But Rockefeller’s supporters had the votes, and a sense of righteousness of their own; one Republican congressman even argued that opposing Rockefeller on the grounds of his wealth violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The 14th Amendment applied to plutocrats, too.

You can find a few more inflation-adjusted billionaires in key posts if you go back further. A MarketWatch piece from 2013 dredged up Averell Harriman, the railroad heir who served as Harry Truman’s commerce secretary, and also Jesse Jones, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s final commerce secretary. FDR’s choice to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission would have been a billionaire, too—Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who is, of course, the grandfather of Trump’s worm-eaten choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services. But these were scattered appointments; there was no real pattern there. It was nothing, in other words, like today.

There is a tendency to say that we are in the middle of a new Gilded Age. I recently argued as much in a Mother Jones cover story. But whereas the robber barons really did make a lot of stuff, many of the ultra-wealthy moguls meddling in politics today are caught up in a sort of negative creation, burning through vast sums of energy in pursuit of fake money and AI slop. If only they built railroads. This is an age, above all, of hustlers and their henchmen, and to find a parallel for this particular combination—this sense of opening the doors of the government to both big business and a whole lot of people who might flunk a background check—you have to go back to a different era. I’m talking about Warren G. Harding and the Republicans who ran Washington throughout the 1920s.

The Harding administration had it all. There were sleazy billionaires (again, I’m using today’s dollars) looking for sweetheart deals on public assets—guys like oilmen Harry Sinclair and Ed Doheny, the model for Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. There was, in Interior Secretary Albert Fall, a militant border hawk with a wealth of personal conflicts of interest who assumed office despite rumors that had once had a political rival whacked back in New Mexico. The attorney general, Harry Daugherty, chosen for his personal loyalty, was a crook who kept his own bagman as a special assistant. William J. Burns, Harding’s pick to run the Bureau of Investigation (today’s FBI), used his power to spy on and intimidate political rivals while covering up the personal transgressions of the president and his inner circle. (Laton McCartney’s 2009 book on the Teapot Dome scandal described one particularly grisly Justice Department cleanup job: Harding and Daugherty both attended a party at the home of the Washington Post publisher in which drunken guests killed a “chorus girl” by throwing kitchen implements at her.) Harding’s Veterans Bureau director was on the take for private contractors. His commerce secretary was a millionaire from the Bay Area. 

How, you might ask, did Harding’s cabinet make it through the confirmation process? They didn’t. Per McCartney, Harding colluded with a friendly Senate leader to skip advise-and-consent entirely. So men like Fall were approved without hearings, via one big acclamation vote—not too unlike Trump’s nixed plan to sneak unqualified nominees in via recess appointment.

At the center of it all was the richest man ever to serve in a presidential administration—financier Andrew Mellon, who built a fortune so vast his dilettante grandson, Timothy, could one day spend nine figures to elect Trump. Mellon, who held the job of treasury secretary over three successive Republican administrations, embodied the ethos of the era, of a party of, for, and by big business. As Matt Stoller explained in his 2019 book, Goliath, Mellon took the job after his bank had loaned Harding’s campaign $1.5 million, and he had so many financial conflicts that his appointment was “probably illegal.” In office, he weaponized the Bureau of Internal Revenue to investigate critics while delivering huge bonuses to corporations and their leaders—including himself. This is what you got when you put a one-man nation-state in charge of the national economy:

Mellon could also see to it that his industrial empire flourished in the era through other mechanisms. He blocked antitrust action against [his aluminum company] Alcoa. The FTC didn’t bother to look into Gulf Oil, or any of Mellon’s other vast holdings. Mellon didn’t just ward off attacks, but negotiated with foreign leaders for oil concessions for his own oil company, both in Colombia and in Kuwait. And the great tax reductions he pushed through Congress, which slashed his own tax bill, ended up slashing into the stock market, pushing up the value of the stocks he held.

The Harding administration did not, in the end, work out particularly well either for most of the men who sought to weaponize it or for the nation caught up in its chaos. The president had a heart attack and died while his wife was in the middle of reading him a positive press clipping. The interior secretary went to prison, along with one of his billionaire patrons. The attorney general barely avoided it. The Bureau of Investigation director resigned in disgrace. The commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, eventually became president himself and watched the entire global economy collapse at his feet. Republicans would lose control of Congress for most of the next 60 years. And eventually, after the stock market crash, Mellon was driven from office, too, exiting just ahead of impeachment proceedings into his decade of oligarchic corruption.

Republicans learned then what they may come to understand once again: It was no way to run a country—but for a beautiful moment in time, they created a lot of value for shareholders.

In the race for Arizona’s open US Senate seat, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego has defeated the state’s most vociferous election-denier, Republican Kari Lake. His win gives Democrats 47 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 53.

Gallego’s win should not come as a shock if you’ve been paying attention. He had led Lake in polls consistently for the last year, usually running well ahead of the Democratic presidential ticket over the same period. But Democrats’ fourth consecutive Senate victory in a row in Arizona wasn’t exactly preordained either. Gallego’s victory statewide, after 10 years representing the state’s safest blue congressional district, was a testament to his own ability to adapt to Arizona’s purple electorate—and the far-right conspiracy theorist’s insistence on digging in her MAGA-red heels.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema opting not to run for re-election as an Independent in the general election also helped clear the way for Gallego to build a winning coalition. Of roughly 4.4 million registered voters in Arizona, a little more than a third are Republicans; a third are not affiliated with either party; and a slightly smaller cohort, about 30 percent, are Democrats.

Gallego consolidated his base at the outset by running as the anti-Sinema—a Democrat who wouldn’t abandon the party’s economic agenda or cozy up to millionaires at Davos. As he laid the groundwork for a Senate campaign, Gallego emphasized his progressive record in the House, where he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus for many years.

His 2024 Senate campaign didn’t abandon Democrats’ meat-and-potatoes issues. Gallego was still decisively in favor of abortion rights, LGBTQ issues, passing voting rights legislation, and acknowledging climate change. But to beat Lake in the general election, in a state that has voted for the GOP candidate in the last five of six presidential elections, much of Gallego’s messaging had to evolve. So did the feelings of a small but impactful cohort of moderate and conservative Arizona voters. 

While Lake became a devotee and instigator of the Big Lie—falsely claiming she won her gubernatorial race in 2022 and that Trump won his race in 2020—Gallego was especially proactive in trying to thwart election denialism. 

A Marine veteran who saw combat in Iraq, Gallego became one of the heroes of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. As his colleagues were panicking about the rioters seeking entry to the House floor, Gallego showed them how to use gas masks. As we reported in the May-June issue of Mother Jones, he also handed Rep. Eric Swalwell a pen to use for self-defense, should the California Democrat be attacked. This imagery undoubtedly inspired Democrats, but Republicans largely wanted to forget the day’s events ever happened.

Though Democrats lost the support of some Hispanic voters in other states, Gallego’s support hovered closer to what the party has won in recent elections, and he ran particularly strong among men. He met those voters where they were; earlier in the campaign, he even rented out a boxing gym to hold a watch party for a big boxing match. And his campaign embraced Gallego’s potential to become the first Latino senator from a state with one of the largest Latino populations in the United States, kicking off the final weekend of the race with a Mexican rodeo, where volunteers handed out Lotería cards featuring Gallego as “El Senador” and Lake as “La Mentirosa,” or liar. It reminded him, he said, of the rodeos he’d gone to growing up, when visiting his father’s family in Chihuahua. But his appeal was about far more than his identity. It was rooted in aspirational working-class politics that could reach even the sorts of voters who have recently drifted to Trump.

“We’re sending people to Washington, DC, that don’t understand how hard it is to work,” he said at that rodeo. “They don’t understand what it means to put 40 hours away. They don’t understand what it means to actually struggle and still believe the next day it’s going to be better.”

Gallego was comfortable talking about border security, too. Far from the open-border policies Lake accused Gallego of promoting, he often advocated for more border patrol agents and physical structures in high-impact regions, and he highlighted how Republican senators blocked a $20 billion border security package earlier this year, at Trump’s behest. 

There’s a common refrain in politics that losing candidates tend to fight the last war. Lake turned that line into performance art.

As the child of two immigrants, Gallego emphasized the need to reform the process of migrants coming to the US legally. Migrants are “doing all these illegal or abusive things because they want to get here and we’re not making it easier,” he told Mother Jones over the summer, “and we do need people to come work.”

But the race was as much about Gallego’s ability to adapt his messaging to a broader audience as it was Lake’s complete inability to do the same. For the former local TV news anchor, election denial was both a ticket to stardom and a trap. Lake resigned from her job at Fox 10 Phoenix not long after publicly questioning Fox News’ decision to call the state for President Joe Biden four years ago, and she rocketed to stardom on the far-right as one of the most vocal proponents of the stolen-election narrative in a state with no shortage of them. Her insistence that Trump actually won the state, and her promise to prosecute election administrators—including Democratic secretary of state Katie Hobbs—earned her Trump’s endorsement during her 2022 run for governor. For a time, people were even talking about her as a future running mate.

In 2022, Lake’s election denial, and her attacks on the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, may have cost her a race in which a significant number of Republicans cast their votes, instead, for Hobbs. But Lake didn’t see it that way. In fact, she wouldn’t even admit that she lost. It wasn’t just that Lake was being a sore loser—she went to court to challenge the results, and to argue that she should be installed in the governor’s mansion. She wrote in her memoir—last year—that she was the “lawful governor” of Arizona and traveled the state whipping crowds into a frenzy about the race that had been stolen from her. Her attempts to overturn that election did not wind down when she began to campaign in earnest for a different office. They are still ongoing. There’s a common refrain in politics that losing candidates tend to fight the last war. Lake turned that line into performance art.

If Gallego’s message was a reminder to Democrats of how they win in Arizona, Lake’s offered a sampler of the myriad ways in which MAGA candidates have found to lose. She spent a bizarre amount of time out-of-state, mostly at Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this year, Lake forced the state Republican party chairman to resign after secretly recording a conversation in which he suggested she sit out the Senate race. She went back and forth and back again on the state’s territorial abortion ban, which—before it was repealed—outlawed all abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Lake, who is being sued by Maricopa County’s Republican recorder for defamation for her assertions that he helped rig the vote against her, had a tendency to clam up when she was asked about her election denial during the campaign. “Why are we looking backward?” she asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “I’m looking forward.”

But she couldn’t resist one last glimpse over her shoulder. On election eve, at a rally on the courthouse steps in Prescott, a heavily Republican enclave two hours north of Phoenix, Lake was joined by a who’s who of election deniers, including Wendy Rogers, who previously called for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to be thrown in prison, and Abe Hamadeh, who continued to contest his 280-vote loss in the 2022 attorney general’s race even as he ran for Congress. When it was her turn, she thanked Hamadeh for challenging the results. “When they did to us what they did to us in 2022 and everyone else ran and hid,” she complained. “Guess who stood with me and said, ‘Damn it, we’re going to fight’?” 

“We have elections that are run so horribly,” Lake complained. She wanted the crowd gathered in the chilly November night to “give the people running our elections whiplash” by making the result “too big to rig.”

Campaign season didn’t end for Lake on election day, though. On Thursday, she got one last piece of bad news: The state supreme court rejected Lake’s final appeal in her attempts to overturn her 2022 defeat. Her Senate dreams are over. Her campaign for governor finally is too.

The problem with holding a election-night watch party in the mountain time zone is that by the time people start to roll in, the night will have already taken a turn. After racking up historic wins during the Trump era, Arizona Democrats entered the 2024 election hoping to keep the positive results coming. But at the party’s official celebration at an upscale hotel and conference center in north Phoenix on Tuesday, the mood started off anxious.

When I asked Mary Kuckertz, a mental-health professional from Tempe, how she was feeling, she used a term that to seemed to capture the spirit of the Democratic electorate: “Nauseously optimistic.”

At that point in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory was narrowing but still possible, and Kuckertz, a mental-health researcher, was thinking about what a second Trump term would mean. “So much funding got cut when Trump was president—all of these really phenomenal programs that we’re bringing these mental health services to children and families who really needed it, so many of those services have totally gone by the wayside,” she said. “I can’t handle more trans kids not getting access to basic human care.”

Arizona was the epicenter for the popular front against Donald Trump and his allies, and the people in the room were a reminder of what this coalition of moderate Republicans, Native Americans, Black and Latino voters, and college-educated whites had accomplished over the last eight years. Attendees heard from Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated election-denier Kari Lake two years ago; and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who defeated election denier Mark Finchem that same year; and Sen. Mark Kelly, who defeated Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters in 2022 and Trump-backed Rep. Martha McSally two years before that. The volunteers and organizers in the room had flipped a Senate seat in 2018 and knocked Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office in 2016. And on Tuesday, when almost everything else was looking grim, they had delivered a historic policy win—passing Prop 139, a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to an abortion in the state to the point of viability. It wasn’t particularly close.

These were major accomplishments—the product of years or organizing and tactical ticket-splitting. There was another possible silver lining, too: Lake could lose again, this time to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who predicted victory in a speech last night, but cautioned supporters that it might take time for the race to be called. (It still hasn’t been.) Gallego, a Marine veteran who was raised by a single mother, would be the state’s first Latino senator, and he ran well ahead of the presidential ticket—particularly among Latino men. He succeeded less through any sort of anti-Trump messaging than through an aspirational pitch for the American Dream and working-class economic priorities.

The longer things went on, though, the more dissonant it seemed to hear Harry Styles and “Mr. Brightside” blaring over the speakers while Steve Kornacki pointed at an increasingly crimson map. (Pick a state—it didn’t seem to matter.) The crowd dwindled, and people started to hit the cash bar with a bit more purpose. 

When I asked Denise Deubery, who was watching the MSNBC feed, how she was feeling, she told me “the best way to put it is nauseously optimistic.”

The phrase was apparently catching on. But the meaning was a little different. The nauseous part was obvious, of course, but as the networks prepared to call more states that would narrow Harris’ path to victory even more, why was Deubery optimistic? It wasn’t about Harris’ chances, she said, but about the work that had brought them all there.

“I’ve never been amongst more encouraging individuals that I’ll probably never meet again in my life,” she said. She’d been volunteering since September. The fight gave her hope. It was the type of thing you could build on. “I’ve never been more of a proud American.”

By the time Fontes spoke, to officially wind the ceremonies down, there were more photographers than partisans on floor. “Wipe that frigging sourpuss face off of your face,” he implored anyone listening. Determined to put a positive spin on things, he noted the high number of outstanding ballots to count in Maricopa, and asked Democrats to be patient as results trickled in over the coming days.

“The last thing in the world I want to see out of my Democratic Party is a lot of pearl-clutching, a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of naysaying,” he said. He wanted them to “continue moving forward with joy, whether or not you feel good about what Jake Tapper and the rest of those folks are saying on TV tonight.” Come morning, it was time to start curing ballots.

But there was no point in denying the obvious. 

“Lastly let me say this: If you’re going to drink: good—get an Uber or Lyft when you go home,” he said. “I want y’all to be safe, because we got a lot of work to still do.”

The problem with holding a election-night watch party in the mountain time zone is that by the time people start to roll in, the night will have already taken a turn. After racking up historic wins during the Trump era, Arizona Democrats entered the 2024 election hoping to keep the positive results coming. But at the party’s official celebration at an upscale hotel and conference center in north Phoenix on Tuesday, the mood started off anxious.

When I asked Mary Kuckertz, a mental-health professional from Tempe, how she was feeling, she used a term that to seemed to capture the spirit of the Democratic electorate: “Nauseously optimistic.”

At that point in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory was narrowing but still possible, and Kuckertz, a mental-health researcher, was thinking about what a second Trump term would mean. “So much funding got cut when Trump was president—all of these really phenomenal programs that we’re bringing these mental health services to children and families who really needed it, so many of those services have totally gone by the wayside,” she said. “I can’t handle more trans kids not getting access to basic human care.”

Arizona was the epicenter for the popular front against Donald Trump and his allies, and the people in the room were a reminder of what this coalition of moderate Republicans, Native Americans, Black and Latino voters, and college-educated whites had accomplished over the last eight years. Attendees heard from Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated election-denier Kari Lake two years ago; and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who defeated election denier Mark Finchem that same year; and Sen. Mark Kelly, who defeated Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters in 2022 and Trump-backed Rep. Martha McSally two years before that. The volunteers and organizers in the room had flipped a Senate seat in 2018 and knocked Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office in 2016. And on Tuesday, when almost everything else was looking grim, they had delivered a historic policy win—passing Prop 139, a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to an abortion in the state to the point of viability. It wasn’t particularly close.

These were major accomplishments—the product of years or organizing and tactical ticket-splitting. There was another possible silver lining, too: Lake could lose again, this time to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who predicted victory in a speech last night, but cautioned supporters that it might take time for the race to be called. (It still hasn’t been.) Gallego, a Marine veteran who was raised by a single mother, would be the state’s first Latino senator, and he ran well ahead of the presidential ticket—particularly among Latino men. He succeeded less through any sort of anti-Trump messaging than through an aspirational pitch for the American Dream and working-class economic priorities.

The longer things went on, though, the more dissonant it seemed to hear Harry Styles and “Mr. Brightside” blaring over the speakers while Steve Kornacki pointed at an increasingly crimson map. (Pick a state—it didn’t seem to matter.) The crowd dwindled, and people started to hit the cash bar with a bit more purpose. 

When I asked Denise Deubery, who was watching the MSNBC feed, how she was feeling, she told me “the best way to put it is nauseously optimistic.”

The phrase was apparently catching on. But the meaning was a little different. The nauseous part was obvious, of course, but as the networks prepared to call more states that would narrow Harris’ path to victory even more, why was Deubery optimistic? It wasn’t about Harris’ chances, she said, but about the work that had brought them all there.

“I’ve never been amongst more encouraging individuals that I’ll probably never meet again in my life,” she said. She’d been volunteering since September. The fight gave her hope. It was the type of thing you could build on. “I’ve never been more of a proud American.”

By the time Fontes spoke, to officially wind the ceremonies down, there were more photographers than partisans on floor. “Wipe that frigging sourpuss face off of your face,” he implored anyone listening. Determined to put a positive spin on things, he noted the high number of outstanding ballots to count in Maricopa, and asked Democrats to be patient as results trickled in over the coming days.

“The last thing in the world I want to see out of my Democratic Party is a lot of pearl-clutching, a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of naysaying,” he said. He wanted them to “continue moving forward with joy, whether or not you feel good about what Jake Tapper and the rest of those folks are saying on TV tonight.” Come morning, it was time to start curing ballots.

But there was no point in denying the obvious. 

“Lastly let me say this: If you’re going to drink: good—get an Uber or Lyft when you go home,” he said. “I want y’all to be safe, because we got a lot of work to still do.”

It feels strange to suggest that the second-most memorable thing that happened on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, this year was the former president of the United States getting shot in the face. But if Donald Trump wins the presidential election, the image that will be seared in my mind is that of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, jumping around the same stage a few months later—eyes weirdly vacant, a black MAGA hat splayed awkwardly on his head, his legs and arms outstretched in the shape of a knotted and overgrown X.

Musk had been a public Trump supporter since the summer, and a not-so-subtle conservative sympathizer for far longer. He was already pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unusual and untested field campaign in key swing states. And he had hosted a glitchy and uncomfortable conversation with Trump on X. But the appearance at that rally of a defense contractor who controls half the satellites in the night sky, the electric-vehicle charging network, and quite possibly the social media network where you found this article, felt like something ominous and new. 

Tim Walz—who told a crowd a few weeks after Musk’s appearance in Butler that the tech mogul was “skipping around like a dipshit”—was only trying to get one over on his counterpart when he called Musk Trump’s “running mate.” But it was not entirely wrong. It was Musk who lobbied Trump to put JD Vance on the ticket. Musk was the one funding the get-out-the-vote effort. Musk was the guy who turned one of the world’s biggest social media platforms into a black hole of anti-immigrant agitprop. Musk was the guy who was going to be given the keys to the domestic discretionary budget, federal budget, to find $2 trillion in cuts from just $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. Vance was the headliner at a rally in Scottsdale over the weekend, but Musk was a star in absentia, the name people kept bringing up on their own. He was “hilarious,” a voter told me. He was a “genius.” (He was also: “Not a very good speaker.”) Musk’s organizers swarmed the line outside to collect data for Musk’s PAC so that he could—well, it’s not really clear what the point of that was. That felt kind of Trumpian too.

From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it.

It is hard to say anything new about 78-year-old Donald Trump. Nine years after his first campaign event in Manhattan, even the ex-president himself seemed to be running out of steam sometimes, forgetting names and places, missing door handles, and eschewing his entire stump speech entirely to dance—if that’s the word—to a Sinéad O’Connor cover of a Prince song from 1985. But Musk did offer something different, if not in any of the things he had to say—the inevitable race science and disinformation and faux-heterodox drivel of someone discovering conservative message boards for the first time while also playing Starcraft—than in the relationship between money and power he represented. This was the oligarch election. And Musk was the richest and most powerful oligarch of them all.

One of the simpler explanations you often heard about Trump’s rise was that the electorate had been primed for someone like him. The conditions were all there for the right kind of demagogue—we had bad trade deals, scam culture, reality television, and the Electoral College. You could say the same about Musk and the billionaires whose spending set the terms for how the election would be conducted and what it would be about.

In Musk’s case, the work was made possible by landmark Supreme Court decisions more than a decade ago, which opened the floodgates to an ever-growing and frankly horrifying gusher of often untraceable cash into the political system. The rules on what those outside groups can and cannot do, and how closely they can coordinate, have become a little more toothless every cycle since. For one person to gain this much influence, a lot of other kinds of people and institutions have to lose it. Musk’s power has been enabled by the monopolistic growth of the internet economy, and the not entirely unrelated collapse of much of the hard-news media industry, online and off, and by a tax and regulatory climate that has allowed a small subset of people in Silicon Valley to grow not just rich, but nation-state rich.

But the oligarch election was not just about Musk. From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it. Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary challenge to Joe Biden was funded in large part by billionaire investor Bill Ackman. (Phillips even changed his campaign’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy after Ackman complained.) Sen. Tim Scott’s primary challenge to Trump was supposed to be bankrolled by Larry Ellison, but the money never materialized. And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign, while it lasted, was an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of Timothy Mellon, grandson of Andrew. Mellon, who was, at one point, the largest contributor to both the RFK Jr. and Trump campaigns, was sort of Musk, inverted—a scion of Gilded Age wealth who spent part of his share of family fortune on a fruitless search to find Amelia Earhart’s plane at the bottom of the sea.

(An aside: Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who was chosen for the ticket largely because of her perceived ability to fund it, once allegedly had an affair with Musk while married to Sergey Brin. According to a recent New York Times story, Musk once offered her his sperm, as part of his obsession with populating the world with children who share his genes. During the campaign, Musk similarly offered to father a child with Taylor Swift, following the pop star’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.)

Last month, Jeff Bezos unilaterally stopped his newspaper from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris… It was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term.

Musk’s former partner at PayPal, Peter Thiel, did not give as much money this cycle as he has in the past. But he also didn’t really need to. His contribution to the race was merely a vice presidential nominee—his former employee, Vance, with whom Thiel shares some unusual ideological influences. Vance got to the Senate because Thiel personally introduced him to Trump at Mar-a-Lago and spent $15 million to get him elected. He’s on the ticket now, in part, because Thiel, like Musk, urged Trump personally to pick him.

All this money, and the people throwing it around, often defined the terms of the debate. Trump said so explicitly at a fundraiser early in the campaign, promising fossil-fuel executives a host of goodies—including eliminating the electric vehicle mandate—if they ponied up $1 billion to support his bid. He supported a ban on TikTok in the United States. Then he changed his mind after a meeting with the Pennsylvania billionaire—and TikTok investor—Jeff Yass, who has given Republican outside groups and candidates upwards of $50 million. Incidentally, Yass was a shareholder in a company that merged with Trump’s media venture this year.

The money sloshing around, in pursuit of tax cuts and government contracts and something called “pronatalism,” has real consequences on real people. If there was a defining issue on the Republican side, it was the continuing attack on transgender athletes who compete—in astonishingly small numbers—in high school and college sports. It is impossible to overstate how much this issue dominated the airwaves of competitive Senate races.

Who was funding this onslaught? A peek at the disclosures of Senate Leadership Fund, a leading Republican outside group in Senate races, offered a revealing look. Leading the way was billionaire Ken Griffin, the Florida-based hedge-funder who once told his local paper that ultra-wealthy elites have “insufficient influence” in American politics. His $27.5 million was followed by $20 million from Paul Singer, a hedge-funder who grew his fortune by squeezing poor countries for debt repayments, and who appeared in the news most recently for flying Samuel Alito to Alaska on his private jet. Another top contributor was Stephen Schwarzman ($9 million), the private-equity mogul who once compared President Barack Obama’s efforts to close the carried interest loophole to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Marc Andreesen, the Silicon Valley mogul, chipped in a more pedestrian but still respectable $375,000—perhaps enough to buy a starter home someday in the new model city he’s trying to build from scratch in California. Throw in a few million from several different Waltons, and a big check from Rupert Murdoch, and SLF was flush.

I’ve mostly focused on Trump and his allies, and not Democrats, because this election in particular was asymmetrical. Donors were contributing to Republican super-PACs at a roughly 2-to-1 clip. No one on the left is fusing government business with high-dollar donations and media manipulation like Musk.

The election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out. .

But the Democratic campaign was shaped by the power of ultra-wealthy donors too. Conservatives talked incessantly about George Soros not just because of the subtext but because of the plain text—he gave $60 million to a super-PAC that supports Democrats earlier this year, while seeding left-of-center political organizing efforts across the country. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent $50 million. So has Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose philanthropic efforts have given him vast influence over the future of public health and education. The right-wing populists and the demagogues might be full of shit. But their punches often land for a reason.

In the three-week interregnum between President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate and his eventual departure from the race, some of the most important voices were the megadonors—the shadow party within the party. And in the punch-drunk weeks that followed, as Harris set out to define what her candidacy would be about, everyone from Mark Cuban to Barry Diller to Reid Hoffman came forward with the same suggestion—that perhaps Harris could replace Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who has been the tip of the spear of the current administration’s anti-trust enforcement. When the people funding the campaign are naming the bureaucrats they want fired, that’s oligarchy, too.

But the election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out. 

When I mentioned Musk’s donations to a voter at the Vance rally in Scottsdale, she was nonplussed.

“Look at what Zuckerberg is doing on the left with his money,” she said.

But seriously, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing with his money: Not very much! A former supporter of immigration reform efforts, who helped pay for poll workers across the country a few years ago, Zuckerberg has largely given up on political activism, the New York Times reported recently. He has made peace with Trump, who has said Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” for taking down Covid misinformation during the pandemic. After Trump was shot, Zuckerberg called the former president a “badass.” They even spoke by phone. 

In seemingly abandoning any efforts to maintain a functioning online space, and actively throttling real political news, Zuckerberg created a vacuum that other powerful actors could fill. Facebook no longer really cares about politics or moderation or the appearance of impropriety now. The company is happy to take huge amounts of money from Musk for misleading advertisements that pretend to be coming from Harris.

Last month, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, unilaterally stopped his newspaper, the Washington Post, from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, on the grounds that he believed newspaper endorsements contributed to a declining trust in news media. And while few people will miss one more sternly worded editorial about Donald Trump, it was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term. It fit into a pattern of elite timidity. The Times recently reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—like a number of other prominent business titans—quietly supported Harris, but were afraid to say so publicly. The billionaires aren’t going to save us. They might not even try.

When Tim Stringham arrived at a “Veterans for Harris” canvassing launch on Sunday in a Phoenix shopping center alongside Sen. Mark Kelly and Rep. Ted Lieu of California, the 35-year-old first-time candidate took a moment to acknowledge the obvious.

“You know that times are strange when the candidate for recorder gets to come up here and speak with a US Senator and a United States congressman,” he told the 30 or so volunteers who had packed into the narrow room for the start of a critical afternoon of knocking on doors.

Stringham, a former JAG attorney, is the Democratic candidate for Maricopa County recorder, an office that’s responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots in a county of more than 4 million people. In a normal year, it’s one of those vital but mostly anonymous jobs, like assessor or auditor, that voters are only aware of—if they’re aware of it at all—from yard signs. But Maricopa’s elections, as Kelly pointed out a few moments later, have not been normal for quite a while. The fight for a few downballot races like Stringham’s will determine the future of the democratic process in a county that in recent years has become ground zero for election denial.

“Before I talk about the presidential election, I want to talk about the county recorders race,” the former astronaut told the canvassers in Phoenix. “The guy we had, Steve Richer, the Republican, did a fantastic job. And nothing against Tim here…but he did a really good job, and we actually owe him a lot. He sort of, like, maybe saved democracy.”

Stephen Richer, as I reported for a recent story and an episode of Reveal, drew national praise for standing up to election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 and 2022 elections, while working to make his county’s voting process more transparent. But he was vilified by members of his party, including the 2022 Republican gubernatorial nominee—and 2024 US Senate nominee—MAGA loyalist Kari Lake, who blamed him for their losses that year. In July, right-wing state representative Justin Heap defeated Richer easily in the primary. While Heap has not outright said that he believes those recent elections were stolen, he welcomed the backing of Lake and other prominent election deniers. 

“He lost to a right-wing MAGA sycophant for Donald Trump,” Kelly told the volunteers getting ready to knock on doors. Stringham “has to win—make sure you tell them that it’s really important that they get to that part of the ballot where they vote for Tim. Otherwise, we might have an issue here, once we get to when folks get sworn in for those positions.”

And it’s not just about the recorder race. Not far away, at another canvassing event on Sunday, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs helped get out the vote for Daniel Valenzuela, a former firefighter who is running for the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. The Republican-controlled board, which basically is the county’s governing council, “is in 50 plus lines” of business, Valenzuela explained, from education to public safety. But board members have drawn the ire of the far right for their handling of elections, where they’re responsible for Election Day voting and tabulation. Two Republican supervisors who have drawn the ire of election deniers for certifying the last two elections, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, chose to retire this year. Another, Jack Sellers, was defeated in his primary by an election denier. 

“I mean, these are solid supervisors regardless of party, sensible supervisors,” Valenzuela told me. “Two of them decided not to run for re-election, and one of them lost in his primary, and it wasn’t close. And so what is the common thread there?” Now he was running for Gates’ old seat, in part, as a check against the anti-democratic impulses on the right.

With just a few days left until Election Day, Stringham had more or less stopped trying to find and persuade undecided voters and was trying to track down known supporters and Democrats who hadn’t yet voted, to remind them of the importance of picking candidates for every option on the county’s two-page ballot. But reaching crossover voters was a huge part of his campaign—as it has been for every Democrat who’s won elections statewide or in Maricopa County in recent years. And Stringham believes that defending the election process in Maricopa is a winning issue. 

“I think the truth is that most Arizonans actually like our election system,” he said. “We get a lot of complaints about things like the mail being slow, or, ‘Why hasn’t my ballot arrived yet?’ There really aren’t a lot of people who say, ‘We want vote by mail to go away.’ That really doesn’t exist.”

His comments were a dig at Heap, who joined Republicans in the legislature in an unsuccessful effort to do just that. One way Stringham can tell his argument resonates? Republicans seemed to be trying to steer away from election denial as a campaign issue in the final stretch.

“Turning Point right now is out there encouraging everybody to vote early,” he said, referring to the political action committee, founded by Charlie Kirk, which is responsible for much of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the state. “They’re doing the same thing we just did—rustling up ballots. So they’re believing in the system, right?”

Stringham believed that the GOP has realized their “election denial strategy has failed, and they’re trying to pivot away from it.” He pointed to their avoidance of any questions about election denial, and how it has been abandoned as a talking point. His opponent is a perfect example of this new dynamic. “He not only voted early, but he literally is sending out text messages that say he’s running to make voting elections boring. He just took Richer’s tagline!” Stringham said. “So they’re sort of just trying to forget the world that happened in the last two, three, four years.”

That is not to say that the election deniers have given up. Lake is still appealing her loss in the 2022 governor’s race—in fact, the state supreme court will take another look at her arguments in the case on November 6. There is no shortage of “Stop the Steal” candidates on the ballot, and Republicans are laying the groundwork to contest the results across the country should Trump fall short once again. But Stringham was on to something. For now, at least, Republican leaders are trying to get their voters to trust the process, not reject it.

At a Trump rally on Saturday in Scottsdale, Charlie Kirk leaned into the message that Republicans control their own destiny. All they had to do was “chase” the 400,000 Republican ballots that had not yet been turned in. At one point, he asked people in the crowd to take a look at the small, hangar-like space in which he was speaking. “This seating section right here has about 280 people,” he said. “Our Attorney General in this state became Attorney General by 280 votes. And there were 200,000 Republicans that got ballots that did not submit them in the midterm election.”

“We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

The Democratic AG, Kris Mayes, drew boos from the crowd when Kirk mentioned her recent announcement that she was instructing her criminal division to investigate Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney. “She’s trying to investigate the speech of Donald Trump, but you know what? That’s our fault, not her fault, because we didn’t turn out the vote,” he said. “We easily could have found 300 more votes. We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

There was the usual chatter about making the election, as Donald Trump Jr. put it, “too big to rig.” But on an individual level, the voters I spoke with felt encouraged by their experiences with the system. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that almost everyone had voted by mail, something Republicans like Kirk have been pushing hard since 2022—in contrast to Trump’s past assertions that it was just a way for Democrats to steal elections. Some of them said they were encouraged by the text alerts they’d received from the county recorder’s office, which, per the county, updates voters when their ballot has been “prepared, mailed, received, verified and counted.” An added benefit to voting early is those voters were spared the sorts of Election Day annoyances—like overheating printers or long lines—that Republicans in the past have cited as proof of a plot against them.

Then again, there may be a simpler reason to explain this sudden sunniness about the process: Most recent polls show Donald Trump ahead in the state. If those results hold, no one will need to conjure conspiracy theories to explain the results—they’ll happily accept them.

When Tim Stringham arrived at a “Veterans for Harris” canvassing launch on Sunday in a Phoenix shopping center alongside Sen. Mark Kelly and Rep. Ted Lieu of California, the 35-year-old first-time candidate took a moment to acknowledge the obvious.

“You know that times are strange when the candidate for recorder gets to come up here and speak with a US Senator and a United States congressman,” he told the 30 or so volunteers who had packed into the narrow room for the start of a critical afternoon of knocking on doors.

Stringham, a former JAG attorney, is the Democratic candidate for Maricopa County recorder, an office that’s responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots in a county of more than 4 million people. In a normal year, it’s one of those vital but mostly anonymous jobs, like assessor or auditor, that voters are only aware of—if they’re aware of it at all—from yard signs. But Maricopa’s elections, as Kelly pointed out a few moments later, have not been normal for quite a while. The fight for a few downballot races like Stringham’s will determine the future of the democratic process in a county that in recent years has become ground zero for election denial.

“Before I talk about the presidential election, I want to talk about the county recorders race,” the former astronaut told the canvassers in Phoenix. “The guy we had, Steve Richer, the Republican, did a fantastic job. And nothing against Tim here…but he did a really good job, and we actually owe him a lot. He sort of, like, maybe saved democracy.”

Stephen Richer, as I reported for a recent story and an episode of Reveal, drew national praise for standing up to election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 and 2022 elections, while working to make his county’s voting process more transparent. But he was vilified by members of his party, including the 2022 Republican gubernatorial nominee—and 2024 US Senate nominee—MAGA loyalist Kari Lake, who blamed him for their losses that year. In July, right-wing state representative Justin Heap defeated Richer easily in the primary. While Heap has not outright said that he believes those recent elections were stolen, he welcomed the backing of Lake and other prominent election deniers. 

“He lost to a right-wing MAGA sycophant for Donald Trump,” Kelly told the volunteers getting ready to knock on doors. Stringham “has to win—make sure you tell them that it’s really important that they get to that part of the ballot where they vote for Tim. Otherwise, we might have an issue here, once we get to when folks get sworn in for those positions.”

And it’s not just about the recorder race. Not far away, at another canvassing event on Sunday, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs helped get out the vote for Daniel Valenzuela, a former firefighter who is running for the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. The Republican-controlled board, which basically is the county’s governing council, “is in 50 plus lines” of business, Valenzuela explained, from education to public safety. But board members have drawn the ire of the far right for their handling of elections, where they’re responsible for Election Day voting and tabulation. Two Republican supervisors who have drawn the ire of election deniers for certifying the last two elections, Bill Gates and Clint Hickman, chose to retire this year. Another, Jack Sellers, was defeated in his primary by an election denier. 

“I mean, these are solid supervisors regardless of party, sensible supervisors,” Valenzuela told me. “Two of them decided not to run for re-election, and one of them lost in his primary, and it wasn’t close. And so what is the common thread there?” Now he was running for Gates’ old seat, in part, as a check against the anti-democratic impulses on the right.

With just a few days left until Election Day, Stringham had more or less stopped trying to find and persuade undecided voters and was trying to track down known supporters and Democrats who hadn’t yet voted, to remind them of the importance of picking candidates for every option on the county’s two-page ballot. But reaching crossover voters was a huge part of his campaign—as it has been for every Democrat who’s won elections statewide or in Maricopa County in recent years. And Stringham believes that defending the election process in Maricopa is a winning issue. 

“I think the truth is that most Arizonans actually like our election system,” he said. “We get a lot of complaints about things like the mail being slow, or, ‘Why hasn’t my ballot arrived yet?’ There really aren’t a lot of people who say, ‘We want vote by mail to go away.’ That really doesn’t exist.”

His comments were a dig at Heap, who joined Republicans in the legislature in an unsuccessful effort to do just that. One way Stringham can tell his argument resonates? Republicans seemed to be trying to steer away from election denial as a campaign issue in the final stretch.

“Turning Point right now is out there encouraging everybody to vote early,” he said, referring to the political action committee, founded by Charlie Kirk, which is responsible for much of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the state. “They’re doing the same thing we just did—rustling up ballots. So they’re believing in the system, right?”

Stringham believed that the GOP has realized their “election denial strategy has failed, and they’re trying to pivot away from it.” He pointed to their avoidance of any questions about election denial, and how it has been abandoned as a talking point. His opponent is a perfect example of this new dynamic. “He not only voted early, but he literally is sending out text messages that say he’s running to make voting elections boring. He just took Richer’s tagline!” Stringham said. “So they’re sort of just trying to forget the world that happened in the last two, three, four years.”

That is not to say that the election deniers have given up. Lake is still appealing her loss in the 2022 governor’s race—in fact, the state supreme court will take another look at her arguments in the case on November 6. There is no shortage of “Stop the Steal” candidates on the ballot, and Republicans are laying the groundwork to contest the results across the country should Trump fall short once again. But Stringham was on to something. For now, at least, Republican leaders are trying to get their voters to trust the process, not reject it.

At a Trump rally on Saturday in Scottsdale, Charlie Kirk leaned into the message that Republicans control their own destiny. All they had to do was “chase” the 400,000 Republican ballots that had not yet been turned in. At one point, he asked people in the crowd to take a look at the small, hangar-like space in which he was speaking. “This seating section right here has about 280 people,” he said. “Our Attorney General in this state became Attorney General by 280 votes. And there were 200,000 Republicans that got ballots that did not submit them in the midterm election.”

“We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

The Democratic AG, Kris Mayes, drew boos from the crowd when Kirk mentioned her recent announcement that she was instructing her criminal division to investigate Trump’s comments about Liz Cheney. “She’s trying to investigate the speech of Donald Trump, but you know what? That’s our fault, not her fault, because we didn’t turn out the vote,” he said. “We easily could have found 300 more votes. We easily could have found 400 more votes. It’s easy to complain, but we can only complain if we collapse on the finish line, everybody.”

There was the usual chatter about making the election, as Donald Trump Jr. put it, “too big to rig.” But on an individual level, the voters I spoke with felt encouraged by their experiences with the system. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that almost everyone had voted by mail, something Republicans like Kirk have been pushing hard since 2022—in contrast to Trump’s past assertions that it was just a way for Democrats to steal elections. Some of them said they were encouraged by the text alerts they’d received from the county recorder’s office, which, per the county, updates voters when their ballot has been “prepared, mailed, received, verified and counted.” An added benefit to voting early is those voters were spared the sorts of Election Day annoyances—like overheating printers or long lines—that Republicans in the past have cited as proof of a plot against them.

Then again, there may be a simpler reason to explain this sudden sunniness about the process: Most recent polls show Donald Trump ahead in the state. If those results hold, no one will need to conjure conspiracy theories to explain the results—they’ll happily accept them.

Elon Musk’s $150 million pro-Trump super-PAC is one of the biggest campaign-finance stories in years—maybe ever. It’s the first time a presidential campaign has completely outsourced much of its get-out-the-vote operation to an outside group. And so far, it has been more X than SpaceX.

Musk has overhauled his staff at least once, been sued by the city of Philadelphia, and taken criticism from Republicans who fear that putting a billionaire novice in charge of turnout operations in a nailbiter election just might cost former President Donald Trump the whole thing. The early returns are, as he might say, concerning. The Guardian reported last month that 24 percent of all door-knocks in the state had been flagged as fraudulent by the PAC; in one case, according to the report all 796 door-knocks attributed to one now-fired canvasser had been faked. According to a recent story in Wired, it’s not even clear if some of the people working for the PAC know they’re working to elect Trump.

“It was reported in the New York Times yesterday, I don’t know if anybody saw the article, but there was a canvasser here who was knocking on doors for Donald Trump, and simultaneously managed to be on a golf course 7,000 miles away,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told a room full of volunteers at a Democratic field office in Phoenix on Sunday. “So that’s their operation.”

Unlike most field campaigns, Musk’s mercenaries don’t hold big canvassing launches with coffee and donuts and VIPs, so I wasn’t sure if I’d even encounter them on the ground in Arizona. But it turns out you don’t have to go looking for Musk’s PAC; at Trump campaign events, they’ll come to you.

Almost as soon I slipped into line for J.D. Vance’s rally on Saturday, at the offices of a Scottsdale weapons manufacturer, I encountered a pair of tablet-toting America PAC organizers, walking up and down the line asking people for their information. It was the biggest canvassing day of the entire cycle—all across Maricopa County, groups of volunteers were fanning out into subdivisions for one last push. But these people with tablets were after something a bit more banal. 

“Hey guys,” asked a man in a Smokey the Bear t-shirt and a safari hat, “Have we signed the bill to protect the First and Second Amendment?”

Behind me, a woman started to fill out the survey, but stopped when it asked for her phone number, even though she was assured it would only be used to confirm she was who she said she was.

“Anybody else interested in signing the petition that’s for the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms?” the man with the tablet asked.

He turned to a guy in a baseball cap: “Hey man, can we get you to sign as well to support the First and Second Amendment?”

The voter couldn’t—he was still registered to vote in Tulsa, and the petition is limited to residents of the seven most competitive swing states.

When the organizer walked away, the Oklahoman turned to the woman who had declined to give her phone number. “He seems fishy,” he said of the organizer.

The woman did her best impression of the signature-gatherer. “Where are you from? Where are you from?”

Many people I talked to at the rally were in the same boat: The operation by the PAC, which was not formally connected with the event, seems a little sus. These voters didn’t want to be rushed into signing something on the spot. “I wasn’t sure if it was just a way for them to get our information,” one woman told me. Which, to be fair, it is.

But attitudes toward Musk himself were a lot more favorable. In fact, voters almost invariably brought him up on their own, as someone who had given the campaign, and the prospect of a second Trump term, a new dimension. “He isn’t a very good speaker,” Alan Travis told me, as we waited in line, but it “makes a big difference” to have him on board, because of what he perceived to be a cross-partisan appeal.

Stacie Boucher, a California transplant who says she fled liberal policies, empathized with Musk’s relocation to a more conservative state—in his case, Texas. While the billionaire has spent much of the final stretch in Pennsylvania, where he also has business interests, Musk’s long shadow was felt on stage and off in Scottsdale.

“How would you like to let Elon Musk loose on the bureaucracy?” Donald Trump Jr. asked the crowd in his warmup address for Vance.

When Vance later promised to fire bureaucrats, someone in the crowd behind me shouted simply, “Elon!”

After the event, I saw no sign of the people with tablets. But if the petitions—and the $1 million lottery they fuel—do not serve an obvious benefit to the campaign at this point, they’ve certainly presented an opportunity for entrepreneurially minded Trump supporters. Just past the exit, a woman named Chere Oliver, wearing a white hat that identified her as a “Trump Force Captain,” had set up a folding table surrounded by yard signs—some from the campaign, and some more original creations. Voters could pose for a photo next to a sign that said “Gang Members for Harris” and an Avengers-style poster that said “Team Unity”—featuring Trump as Captain America, and Musk just over his left shoulder, between Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. For $10, you could buy a Trump yard sign that featured dogs and cats in front of waving American flags.

Trump rallies are a festival of such knick knacks. But Oliver’s biggest hustle was there on the table. While the official campaign signs were free for anyone to take, she was asking everyone who did to sign the America PAC petition too—and to make clear that she was the one who’d referred them. For convenience, she’d included her phone number and email address; anyone in a hurry should just scan a QR code for the petition and take a photo of her information. Because the PAC was offering $47 for each referral, the Trump volunteer stood to make a lot of money if enough fellow supporters abided by her honor system. Oliver had recently lost her job and was banking on this to help cover expenses. She said she’d referred hundreds of people already. So far, she told me, she’d only received $94 for her efforts, which she chalked up to delays in the verification process. 

Her goal was to get 10,457 signatures, she said—Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020.

Elon Musk’s $150 million pro-Trump super-PAC is one of the biggest campaign-finance stories in years—maybe ever. It’s the first time a presidential campaign has completely outsourced much of its get-out-the-vote operation to an outside group. And so far, it has been more X than SpaceX.

Musk has overhauled his staff at least once, been sued by the city of Philadelphia, and taken criticism from Republicans who fear that putting a billionaire novice in charge of turnout operations in a nailbiter election just might cost former President Donald Trump the whole thing. The early returns are, as he might say, concerning. The Guardian reported last month that 24 percent of all door-knocks in the state had been flagged as fraudulent by the PAC; in one case, according to the report all 796 door-knocks attributed to one now-fired canvasser had been faked. According to a recent story in Wired, it’s not even clear if some of the people working for the PAC know they’re working to elect Trump.

“It was reported in the New York Times yesterday, I don’t know if anybody saw the article, but there was a canvasser here who was knocking on doors for Donald Trump, and simultaneously managed to be on a golf course 7,000 miles away,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told a room full of volunteers at a Democratic field office in Phoenix on Sunday. “So that’s their operation.”

Unlike most field campaigns, Musk’s mercenaries don’t hold big canvassing launches with coffee and donuts and VIPs, so I wasn’t sure if I’d even encounter them on the ground in Arizona. But it turns out you don’t have to go looking for Musk’s PAC; at Trump campaign events, they’ll come to you.

Almost as soon I slipped into line for J.D. Vance’s rally on Saturday, at the offices of a Scottsdale weapons manufacturer, I encountered a pair of tablet-toting America PAC organizers, walking up and down the line asking people for their information. It was the biggest canvassing day of the entire cycle—all across Maricopa County, groups of volunteers were fanning out into subdivisions for one last push. But these people with tablets were after something a bit more banal. 

“Hey guys,” asked a man in a Smokey the Bear t-shirt and a safari hat, “Have we signed the bill to protect the First and Second Amendment?”

Behind me, a woman started to fill out the survey, but stopped when it asked for her phone number, even though she was assured it would only be used to confirm she was who she said she was.

“Anybody else interested in signing the petition that’s for the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms?” the man with the tablet asked.

He turned to a guy in a baseball cap: “Hey man, can we get you to sign as well to support the First and Second Amendment?”

The voter couldn’t—he was still registered to vote in Tulsa, and the petition is limited to residents of the seven most competitive swing states.

When the organizer walked away, the Oklahoman turned to the woman who had declined to give her phone number. “He seems fishy,” he said of the organizer.

The woman did her best impression of the signature-gatherer. “Where are you from? Where are you from?”

Many people I talked to at the rally were in the same boat: The operation by the PAC, which was not formally connected with the event, seems a little sus. These voters didn’t want to be rushed into signing something on the spot. “I wasn’t sure if it was just a way for them to get our information,” one woman told me. Which, to be fair, it is.

But attitudes toward Musk himself were a lot more favorable. In fact, voters almost invariably brought him up on their own, as someone who had given the campaign, and the prospect of a second Trump term, a new dimension. “He isn’t a very good speaker,” Alan Travis told me, as we waited in line, but it “makes a big difference” to have him on board, because of what he perceived to be a cross-partisan appeal.

Stacie Boucher, a California transplant who says she fled liberal policies, empathized with Musk’s relocation to a more conservative state—in his case, Texas. While the billionaire has spent much of the final stretch in Pennsylvania, where he also has business interests, Musk’s long shadow was felt on stage and off in Scottsdale.

“How would you like to let Elon Musk loose on the bureaucracy?” Donald Trump Jr. asked the crowd in his warmup address for Vance.

When Vance later promised to fire bureaucrats, someone in the crowd behind me shouted simply, “Elon!”

After the event, I saw no sign of the people with tablets. But if the petitions—and the $1 million lottery they fuel—do not serve an obvious benefit to the campaign at this point, they’ve certainly presented an opportunity for entrepreneurially minded Trump supporters. Just past the exit, a woman named Chere Oliver, wearing a white hat that identified her as a “Trump Force Captain,” had set up a folding table surrounded by yard signs—some from the campaign, and some more original creations. Voters could pose for a photo next to a sign that said “Gang Members for Harris” and an Avengers-style poster that said “Team Unity”—featuring Trump as Captain America, and Musk just over his left shoulder, between Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Jr. For $10, you could buy a Trump yard sign that featured dogs and cats in front of waving American flags.

Trump rallies are a festival of such knick knacks. But Oliver’s biggest hustle was there on the table. While the official campaign signs were free for anyone to take, she was asking everyone who did to sign the America PAC petition too—and to make clear that she was the one who’d referred them. For convenience, she’d included her phone number and email address; anyone in a hurry should just scan a QR code for the petition and take a photo of her information. Because the PAC was offering $47 for each referral, the Trump volunteer stood to make a lot of money if enough fellow supporters abided by her honor system. Oliver had recently lost her job and was banking on this to help cover expenses. She said she’d referred hundreds of people already. So far, she told me, she’d only received $94 for her efforts, which she chalked up to delays in the verification process. 

Her goal was to get 10,457 signatures, she said—Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020.

It started, according to court filings, with a tweet. On August 18, Maria Bartiromo, the Fox News Host, alerted her 1.4 million followers on X to a development that might not, at first glance, seem like news: She was hearing troubling reports of lines at the DMV. The information had come to Bartiromo fourth-hand. The wife of a friend of a friend had recently taken her 16-year-old to three different offices to get a driver’s license, which in Texas is administered by the Department of Public Safety. At the first two, she encountered “a massive line of immigrants getting licenses” inside, and “a tent and table outside…registering them to vote.” The post blew up on X, where it has been viewed 2.3 million times. 

There was plenty of reason to be cautious about this particular game of telephone. A local Republican Party chair investigated Bartiromo’s source’s source’s wife’s claims himself and found no evidence they were true. A local election administrator also found the allegations unfounded. Nothing described in the tweet, on its face, was even illegal. But fears of renegade registrars would not die. The next day, an investigator working for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton arrived at a DPS facility outside San Antonio for an undercover operation. “I was notified that voter registration was possibly occurring in or about the area surrounding the driver’s license office,” the officer wrote in his formal report.

As a test, the investigator asked the young man registering voters—a volunteer deputy registrar with a non-profit called Jolt, which promotes civic engagement among Latinos in the state—if he could bring a form home to his daughter. (He made positive identification of “cards I have encountered multiple times in the execution of my duties,” the investigator confirmed, sounding as if he had just unearthed a stash of fentanyl, “which I recognize to be voter registration cards.”) The registrar said he could not—Texas has strict rules about handling such applications. Instead, he suggested that the investigator fill out a form on her behalf. The officer declined and walked away. The registrar’s advice, he concluded, was “not only incorrect, but illegal” 

This, Jolt would later argue in a lawsuit in federal court, was also wrong. The undercover agent could have registered his daughter on the spot, as long as she was eligible and he had her permission—both of which he would have been assenting to under penalty of perjury. It was all right there in the county’s training video. But the attorney general’s office was undeterred. Two days later, Paxton announced that there was an open investigation into possible unlawful efforts to register non-citizens to vote. And on August 30, after Jolt protested that Paxton was interfering with their work, he sent the group a formal request to open up its books or face the consequences. In court filings, the agency would later credit the initial tip to reporting from an “award-winning journalist.”

MAGA leaders charged that NGOs, backed by shadowy left-wing funders, were facilitating the mass migration to help the Democratic Party win elections. Evidence of such a conspiracy has been lacking. Creating the illusion of such evidence has fallen to men like Paxton.

The Jolt investigation fit a years-long pattern. Four years ago, citing massive fraud but no evidence, Paxton carried water for Trump’s Big Lie by filing a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to strip four states Joe Biden won of their electors, so that Republican legislatures could appoint them instead. Now, the state’s top law enforcement official has used the powers of his office to spin a new election conspiracy. Wielding dubious tweets and flimsy pretexts, he has used the myth of large numbers of non-citizens voting to intimidate aid groups on the border, interfere with voter-registration efforts, and purge real citizens from the rolls. For a man who has spent much of his nine years in office under a cloud of personal and professional scandal, his headline-seeking ploy has offered a chance at redemption—and perhaps even an inside track at a promotion.

Paxton and other Texas Republicans have long sought to use fears of election malfeasance to their advantage. His predecessor as attorney general, the current Gov. Greg Abbott, once led an investigation into alleged voter fraud that involved spying on a woman in her own bathroom. In the runup to the 2020 election, the Houston Chronicle reported, Paxton’s office spent 22,000 hours to root out fraud that Trump and his allies claimed was rampant, but only produced 16 prosecutions, none of which resulted in jail time. But you could trace the start of Paxton’s current crusade to the spring of 2022, when Paxton was locked in a bitter runoff primary and still managing fallout from his efforts to overturn the election. 

On May 6 of that year, the State Bar of Texas sued Paxton’s top deputy over his role in the Electoral College case, charging that he had violated ethics rules by participating in a knowingly frivolous lawsuit. (The bar would eventually sue Paxton too; both cases are still ongoing.) A few hours later, Paxton shot back with major news of his own: He was investigating the bar’s charitable foundation, for “possibly aiding and abetting the mass influx of illegal aliens.”

The announcement was part of a pattern—a complaint from a prominent conservative served as a pretext for Paxton to go after his perceived opposition. In this case, the AG’s office said it was acting off a complaint from Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, a former sheriff of Fort Bend County in the Houston suburbs who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. The issue was that the nonprofit had donated to legal-aid organizations that work with immigrants—which, in the AG’s phrasing, meant that it was possibly “providing grants to organizations that support, fund and encourage illegal immigration.” That investigation was followed by an announcement of more probes, targeting three immigrant-rights nonprofits that the bar foundation had supported, again alleging that their work was possibly “aiding and abetting the invasion of illegal aliens.” 

Paxton’s go-to weapon in those investigations was a consumer-protection tool called a Request to Examine, which allows the office—with limitations—to gain access to the books of corporations and nonprofits in the state. In February, his office sent an investigator to surveil Annunciation House, a 50-year-old Catholic shelter network in El Paso that offers food, clothes, and educational services to migrants, and then hand-delivered a request to examine its records, demanding it comply within 24 hours. After the organization asked for more time and clarification as to what it was actually obligated to produce, Paxton filed a lawsuit to try to shut the group down. His office argued that by providing aid services, the organization was operating a “stash house” and engaging in “human smuggling.”

It is not actually a great mystery why Catholics devote themselves to assisting those who need help. But Paxton’s legal campaign tapped into a conspiracy that has become almost an article of faith on the right, spread by figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance. The Biden administration hadn’t just mismanaged the border-security apparatus. These MAGA leaders charged that NGOs, backed by shadowy left-wing funders, were facilitating the mass migration of people to the United States to help the Democratic Party win elections through some combination of massive fraud and demographic shifts. It is a plot to steal not just one election, Musk has argued, but every future election—because once this imagined conspiracy goes into effect, Democrats will be unstoppable. Evidence of such a conspiracy has been lacking. Creating the illusion of such evidence has fallen to men like Paxton.

The new election lie began on the border and expanded outward from there. In April, two brothers from Long Island, operating under the moniker of American Muckrakers, posted a photo of a flier they claimed to have found inside an outhouse in Matamoros, reminding migrants in the Mexican border city to vote for Joe Biden. The flier, which bore the name of a local migrant aid NGO, appeared to have been translated into Spanish via an app and featured an outdated phone number, according to the New York Times. The NGO called it a hoax. But the story traveled fast. After the Heritage Foundation’s Project Oversight posted it, the story was picked up by Musk and Fox News. The flier was flown to Washington, where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) wielded it during the impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. And within a few days, Paxton—citing the evidence of right-wing social media influencers—began investigating three more migrant aid organizations, one of which was operated in El Paso, and two in the Rio Grande Valley.

For Paxton, these kinds of announcements were all in a day’s work. But to the groups that find themselves on the receiving end, they’ve invited threats and harassment, and added new obstacles to fulfilling their mission. In a statement that she said she had been cleared by her lawyers, Andrea Rudnik, director of Team Brownsville, one of the nonprofits Paxton has sought records from, said that the campaign had “made it more difficult to do our work, advocate for our clients, and freely express ourselves. It has also instilled a greater sense of fear in us that people in need won’t be able to get basic assistance.” The investigation, she said, was not just “an abuse of power,” but “it shows a lack of empathy.” She worried about who would do the work should they close.

“He’s gone after a lot of these organizations that are very, very small, and he’s using it for nefarious purposes to sow distrust in our electoral system by pushing a lie in order to create distrust in our elections.”

The courts have mostly rejected Paxton’s efforts. A judge blocked Paxton’s attempts to depose Rudnick in August. In El Paso, he received a more stinging rebuke. A federal judge threw out his subpoena of Annunciation House and accused the AG of merely seeking “a pretext to justify its harassment of Annunciation House employees and the persons seeking refuge.” Paxton’s behavior, he said, was “outrageous and intolerable.”

Paxton was embarking on a cynical “fishing expedition,” says Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing Team Brownsville and Las Americas, another border group that has been targeted by the AG. (She was also Paxton’s 2022 Democratic opponent.) 

“He’s gone after a lot of these organizations that are very, very small, and he’s using it for nefarious purposes to sow distrust in our electoral system by pushing a lie in order to create distrust in our elections.”

Paxton has not exactly run away from that assertion. “The reality is, the plan from the beginning [was to] get these people here as fast as possible and get them voting,” he said in a June interview with—who else?—Maria Bartiromo. It was the only thing that would make Democrats competitive this fall: “This is the biggest threat to our democracy, our republic, that I think we’ve seen since who knows when.”

If targeting Catholics and retired teachers prepping meals on the border was the foundation of Paxton’s new election conspiracy, the next logical step was to target groups, like Jolt, that actively register voters in the state’s larger metro areas—again, under the pretense that they were enabling illegal non-citizen voting. The AG’s case has been sloppy. Paxton’s attorneys asserted in court, for instance, that they launched their investigation in response not just to Bartiromo’s Ferris Bueller tweet, but also a viral video posted on X by a self-described “Alpha MAGA Male,” who filmed himself asking a Jolt registrar if “illegal aliens” could vote. That’s not just flimsy, but also impossible—the video was posted after the AG’s office dispatched its investigator to Universal City.

“As best I can tell,” says Mimi Marziani, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and prominent civil rights litigator who is representing Jolt in the case, “he is abusing the power of his office to do something that is promoting his own interest, and his allegiance to former President Trump.”

It wasn’t just Jolt. Paxton has gone after a wide swath of groups that organize Latino communities in the state. In August, he filed a lawsuit to shut down a Houston-based non-profit called Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, or FIEL, ostensibly on the grounds that the group had violated rules on political speech by nonprofits by criticizing Abbott and Trump, as well as a new state law empowering law enforcement to arrest people they suspect of having entered the country illegally. That same month, his office initiated a series of early-morning raids that his office said was in response to allegations of vote-harvesting by a local political operative. 

As part of that investigation, armed law enforcement agents showed up at the homes of elderly members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a century-old civil rights organization that runs voter registration drives and had filed a lawsuit against SB1, a restrictive new voting statute Abbott signed into law in 2021. Among the people whose home was raided was Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic candidate for state representative in an open South Texas seat that Republicans are trying to flip. According to the Texas Tribune, the raid stemmed from an investigation that began in 2022. Castellano has not been charged with any crime, nor has anyone else.

Later that summer, Paxton’s office went to court to stop three of the state’s biggest counties—Bexar (San Antonio), Travis (Austin), and Harris (Houston)—from using their offices to run voter-registration drives. They had approved plans, or (in the case of Harris were considering proposals), to send voter registration forms and other information to voting-age citizens the county had deemed eligible. Filling out a form was only the first part of the process. A county office would then have to verify the information. Then the Texas secretary of state’s office—part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration—would have to verify it too. Nonetheless, Paxton tried to stop them, arguing that informing people of their constitutional rights in such a manner could lead to fraudulent registrations from non-citizens.

“As best I can tell, he is abusing the power of his office to do something that is promoting his own interest, and his allegiance to former President Trump.”

“[A]s you are aware, the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies have saddled Texas—and the entire country—with a wave of illegal immigration that has resulted in ballooning noncitizen populations across our State,” Paxton wrote in a September letter to Bexar County officials. “It is more important than ever that we maintain the integrity of our voter rolls and ensure only eligible voters decide our elections.”

But the capstone to Texas Republicans’ big push—and Paxton’s years-long campaign to argue that immigrants, with the help of sinister left-wing forces, were poised to spoil the election through massive fraud—was the voter rolls themselves. Here he was tapping into an infamous tradition. In 2019, the Abbott-appointed secretary of state David Whitley resigned after an attempted voter purge incorrectly flagged at least 25,000 eligible voters as potential non-citizens. This summer, the governor announced that the state had found 6,500 non-citizen voters on the rolls and was referring 2,000 people to Paxton’s office for prosecution for having voted as non-citizens. A subsequent investigation by the Texas Tribune and Pro Publica found that the actual number of people identified by the secretary of state was 581—not 6,500—and that at least some of the people on the list had documents proving their citizenship.

Paxton aimed a bit higher. In September, he sent the federal government a list of 450,000 voters who did not include a Texas driver’s license number on their voter registration forms, and asked Washington to cross-reference this list with immigration databases. 

“This list is essentially anyone who doesn’t have their driver’s license number memorized or doesn’t have an ID—which we know is disproportionately people of color—but there’s no indication that people are non-citizens or that they have improperly registered to vote,” says Ashley Harris, a staff atttorney with the ACLU of Texas, whose group urged the federal government not to comply with Paxton’s request. “It’s just people that register with their Social Security number, or, in some cases, older voters who have been registered to vote for so long that it predates the federal requirements.”

The immigration check would have opened up still more problems—for instance, that it might flag people who have been naturalized as citizens. And anyone caught up in this purge would have to “jump through extra hoops to preserve their voter registration” with just days or weeks left before the deadline. Ultimately, the Biden administration declined to cooperate, but Paxton still got what he wanted: He has cited the standoff as evidence that Democrats are willfully enabling massive fraud “by enabling non-citizens to illegally vote.”

In waging legal battle after legal battle with small nonprofits and community groups, and spreading fears about a stolen election that hasn’t yet transpired, Paxton is helping not just his party but also himself. Paxton’s subservience to Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election may have got him in trouble with the state bar, but it might have also saved his job, as he survived a bitter primary and then an impeachment trial in successive years. Now, his willingness to do the bidding of Trump and his allies has earned him a possible seat at the table in a future Republican presidential administration. Trump said in May that he’d even consider Paxton to be his next attorney attorney general.

In the campaign’s final days, Paxton has remained at the beck and call of conservative activists. Last week, after the Department of Justice ordered Musk to halt his $1 million daily lottery for Trump-supporting registered voters in swing states, the attorney general shot back. 

He was filing a Freedom of Information Act Request, he announced, to “investigate the federal agency’s intimidation” of the world’s richest man, by “selectively targeting Elon Musk’s voter registration drive.”

It started, according to court filings, with a tweet. On August 18, Maria Bartiromo, the Fox News Host, alerted her 1.4 million followers on X to a development that might not, at first glance, seem like news: She was hearing troubling reports of lines at the DMV. The information had come to Bartiromo fourth-hand. The wife of a friend of a friend had recently taken her 16-year-old to three different offices to get a driver’s license, which in Texas is administered by the Department of Public Safety. At the first two, she encountered “a massive line of immigrants getting licenses” inside, and “a tent and table outside…registering them to vote.” The post blew up on X, where it has been viewed 2.3 million times. 

There was plenty of reason to be cautious about this particular game of telephone. A local Republican Party chair investigated Bartiromo’s source’s source’s wife’s claims himself and found no evidence they were true. A local election administrator also found the allegations unfounded. Nothing described in the tweet, on its face, was even illegal. But fears of renegade registrars would not die. The next day, an investigator working for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton arrived at a DPS facility outside San Antonio for an undercover operation. “I was notified that voter registration was possibly occurring in or about the area surrounding the driver’s license office,” the officer wrote in his formal report.

As a test, the investigator asked the young man registering voters—a volunteer deputy registrar with a non-profit called Jolt, which promotes civic engagement among Latinos in the state—if he could bring a form home to his daughter. (He made positive identification of “cards I have encountered multiple times in the execution of my duties,” the investigator confirmed, sounding as if he had just unearthed a stash of fentanyl, “which I recognize to be voter registration cards.”) The registrar said he could not—Texas has strict rules about handling such applications. Instead, he suggested that the investigator fill out a form on her behalf. The officer declined and walked away. The registrar’s advice, he concluded, was “not only incorrect, but illegal” 

This, Jolt would later argue in a lawsuit in federal court, was also wrong. The undercover agent could have registered his daughter on the spot, as long as she was eligible and he had her permission—both of which he would have been assenting to under penalty of perjury. It was all right there in the county’s training video. But the attorney general’s office was undeterred. Two days later, Paxton announced that there was an open investigation into possible unlawful efforts to register non-citizens to vote. And on August 30, after Jolt protested that Paxton was interfering with their work, he sent the group a formal request to open up its books or face the consequences. In court filings, the agency would later credit the initial tip to reporting from an “award-winning journalist.”

MAGA leaders charged that NGOs, backed by shadowy left-wing funders, were facilitating the mass migration to help the Democratic Party win elections. Evidence of such a conspiracy has been lacking. Creating the illusion of such evidence has fallen to men like Paxton.

The Jolt investigation fit a years-long pattern. Four years ago, citing massive fraud but no evidence, Paxton carried water for Trump’s Big Lie by a filing a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to strip four stated Joe Biden won of their electors, so that Republican legislatures could appoint them instead. Now, the state’s top law enforcement official has used the powers of his office to spin a new election conspiracy. Wielding dubious tweets and flimsy pretexts, he has used the myth of large numbers of non-citizens voting to intimidate aid groups on the border, interfere with voter-registration efforts, and purge real citizens from the rolls. For a man who has spent much of his nine years in office under a cloud of personal and professional scandal, his headline-seeking ploy has offered a chance at redemption—and perhaps even an inside track at a promotion.

Paxton and other Texas Republicans have long sought to use fears of election malfeasance to their advantage. His predecessor as attorney general, the current Gov. Greg Abbott, once led an investigation into alleged voter fraud that involved spying on a woman in her own bathroom. In the runup to the 2020 election, the Houston Chronicle reported, Paxton’s office spent 22,000 hours to root out fraud that Trump and his allies claimed was rampant, but only produced 16 prosecutions, none of which resulted in jail time. But you could trace the start of Paxton’s current crusade to the spring of 2022, when Paxton was locked in a bitter runoff primary and still managing fallout from his efforts to overturn the election. 

On May 6 of that year, the State Bar of Texas sued Paxton’s top deputy over his role in the Electoral College case, charging that he had violated ethics rules by participating in a knowingly frivolous lawsuit. (The bar would eventually sue Paxton too; both cases are still ongoing.) A few hours later, Paxton shot back with major news of his own: He was investigating the bar’s charitable foundation, for “possibly aiding and abetting the mass influx of illegal aliens.”

The announcement was part of a pattern—a complaint from a prominent conservative served as a pretext for Paxton to go after his perceived opposition. In this case, the AG’s office said it was acting off a complaint from Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, a former sheriff of Fort Bend County in the Houston suburbs who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. The issue was that the nonprofit had donated to legal-aid organizations that work with immigrants—which, in the AG’s phrasing, meant that it was possibly “providing grants to organizations that support, fund and encourage illegal immigration.” That investigation was followed by an announcement of more probes, targeting three immigrant-rights nonprofits that the bar foundation had supported, again alleging that their work was possibly “aiding and abetting the invasion of illegal aliens.” 

Paxton’s go-to weapon in those investigations was a consumer-protection tool called a Request to Examine, which allows the office—with limitations—to gain access to the books of corporations and nonprofits in the state. In February, his office sent an investigator to surveil Annunciation House, a 50-year-old Catholic shelter network in El Paso that offers food, clothes, and educational services to migrants, and then hand-delivered a request to examine its records, demanding it comply within 24 hours. After the organization asked for more time and clarification as to what it was actually obligated to produce, Paxton filed a lawsuit to try to shut the group down. His office argued that by providing aid services, the organization was operating a “stash house” and engaging in “human smuggling.”

It is not actually a great mystery why Catholics devote themselves to assisting those who need help. But Paxton’s legal campaign tapped into a conspiracy that has become almost an article of faith on the right, spread by figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance. The Biden administration hadn’t just mismanaged the border-security apparatus. These MAGA leaders charged that NGOs, backed by shadowy left-wing funders, were facilitating the mass migration of people to the United States to help the Democratic Party win elections through some combination of massive fraud and demographic shifts. It is a plot to steal not just one election, Musk has argued, but every future election—because once this imagined conspiracy goes into effect, Democrats will be unstoppable. Evidence of such a conspiracy has been lacking. Creating the illusion of such evidence has fallen to men like Paxton.

The new election lie began on the border and expanded outward from there. In April, two brothers from Long Island, operating under the moniker of American Muckrakers, posted a photo of a flier they claimed to have found inside an outhouse in Matamoros, reminding migrants in the Mexican border city to vote for Joe Biden. The flier, which bore the name of a local migrant aid NGO, appeared to have been translated into Spanish via an app and featured an outdated phone number, according to the New York Times. The NGO called it a hoax. But the story traveled fast. After the Heritage Foundation’s Project Oversight posted it, the story was picked up by Musk and Fox News. The flier was flown to Washington, where Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) wielded it during the impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. And within a few days, Paxton—citing the evidence of right-wing social media influencers—began investigating three more migrant aid organizations, one of which was operated in El Paso, and two in the Rio Grande Valley.

For Paxton, these kinds of announcements were all in a day’s work. But to the groups that find themselves on the receiving end, they’ve invited threats and harassment, and added new obstacles to fulfilling their mission. In a statement that she said she had been cleared by her lawyers, Andrea Rudnik, director of Team Brownsville, one of the nonprofits Paxton has sought records from, said that the campaign had “made it more difficult to do our work, advocate for our clients, and freely express ourselves. It has also instilled a greater sense of fear in us that people in need won’t be able to get basic assistance.” The investigation, she said, was not just “an abuse of power,” but “it shows a lack of empathy.” She worried about who would do the work should they close.

“He’s gone after a lot of these organizations that are very, very small, and he’s using it for nefarious purposes to sow distrust in our electoral system by pushing a lie in order to create distrust in our elections.”

The courts have mostly rejected Paxton’s efforts. A judge blocked Paxton’s attempts to depose Rudnick in August. In El Paso, he received a more stinging rebuke. A federal judge threw out his subpoena of Annunciation House and accused the AG of merely seeking “a pretext to justify its harassment of Annunciation House employees and the persons seeking refuge.” Paxton’s behavior, he said, was “outrageous and intolerable.”

Paxton was embarking on a cynical “fishing expedition,” says Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing Team Brownsville and Las Americas, another border group that has been targeted by the AG. (She was also Paxton’s 2022 Democratic opponent.) 

“He’s gone after a lot of these organizations that are very, very small, and he’s using it for nefarious purposes to sow distrust in our electoral system by pushing a lie in order to create distrust in our elections.”

Paxton has not exactly run away from that assertion. “The reality is, the plan from the beginning [was to] get these people here as fast as possible and get them voting,” he said in a June interview with—who else?—Maria Bartiromo. It was the only thing that would make Democrats competitive this fall: “This is the biggest threat to our democracy, our republic, that I think we’ve seen since who knows when.”

If targeting Catholics and retired teachers prepping meals on the border was the foundation of Paxton’s new election conspiracy, the next logical step was to target groups, like Jolt, that actively register voters in the state’s larger metro areas—again, under the pretense that they were enabling illegal non-citizen voting. The AG’s case has been sloppy. Paxton’s attorneys asserted in court, for instance, that they launched their investigation in response not just to Bartiromo’s Ferris Bueller tweet, but also a viral video posted on X by a self-described “Alpha MAGA Male,” who filmed himself asking a Jolt registrar if “illegal aliens” could vote. That’s not just flimsy, but also impossible—the video was posted after the AG’s office dispatched its investigator to Universal City.

“As best I can tell,” says Mimi Marziani, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas and prominent civil rights litigator who is representing Jolt in the case, “he is abusing the power of his office to do something that is promoting his own interest, and his allegiance to former President Trump.”

It wasn’t just Jolt. Paxton has gone after a wide swath of groups that organize Latino communities in the state. In August, he filed a lawsuit to shut down a Houston-based non-profit called Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, or FIEL, ostensibly on the grounds that the group had violated rules on political speech by nonprofits by criticizing Abbott and Trump, as well as a new state law empowering law enforcement to arrest people they suspect of having entered the country illegally. That same month, his office initiated a series of early-morning raids that his office said was in response to allegations of vote-harvesting by a local political operative. 

As part of that investigation, armed law enforcement agents showed up at the homes of elderly members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a century-old civil rights organization that runs voter registration drives and had filed a lawsuit against SB1, a restrictive new voting statute Abbott signed into law in 2021. Among the people whose home was raided was Cecilia Castellano, a Democratic candidate for state representative in an open South Texas seat that Republicans are trying to flip. According to the Texas Tribune, the raid stemmed from an investigation that began in 2022. Castellano has not been charged with any crime, nor has anyone else.

Later that summer, Paxton’s office went to court to stop three of the state’s biggest counties—Bexar (San Antonio), Travis (Austin), and Harris (Houston)—from using their offices to run voter-registration drives. They had approved plans, or (in the case of Harris were considering proposals), to send voter registration forms and other information to voting-age citizens the county had deemed eligible. Filling out a form was only the first part of the process. A county office would then have to verify the information. Then the Texas secretary of state’s office—part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration—would have to verify it too. Nonetheless, Paxton tried to stop them, arguing that informing people of their constitutional rights in such a manner could lead to fraudulent registrations from non-citizens.

“As best I can tell, he is abusing the power of his office to do something that is promoting his own interest, and his allegiance to former President Trump.”

“[A]s you are aware, the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies have saddled Texas—and the entire country—with a wave of illegal immigration that has resulted in ballooning noncitizen populations across our State,” Paxton wrote in a September letter to Bexar County officials. “It is more important than ever that we maintain the integrity of our voter rolls and ensure only eligible voters decide our elections.”

But the capstone to Texas Republicans’ big push—and Paxton’s years-long campaign to argue that immigrants, with the help of sinister left-wing forces, were poised to spoil the election through massive fraud—was the voter rolls themselves. Here he was tapping into an infamous tradition. In 2019, the Abbott-appointed secretary of state David Whitley resigned after an attempted voter purge incorrectly flagged at least 25,000 eligible voters as potential non-citizens. This summer, the governor announced that the state had found 6,500 non-citizen voters on the rolls and was referring 2,000 people to Paxton’s office for prosecution for having voted as non-citizens. A subsequent investigation by the Texas Tribune and Pro Publica found that the actual number of people identified by the secretary of state was 581—not 6,500—and that at least some of the people on the list had documents proving their citizenship.

Paxton aimed a bit higher. In September, he sent the federal government a list of 450,000 voters who did not include a Texas driver’s license number on their voter registration forms, and asked Washington to cross-reference this list with immigration databases. 

“This list is essentially anyone who doesn’t have their driver’s license number memorized or doesn’t have an ID—which we know is disproportionately people of color—but there’s no indication that people are non-citizens or that they have improperly registered to vote,” says Ashley Harris, a staff atttorney with the ACLU of Texas, whose group urged the federal government not to comply with Paxton’s request. “It’s just people that register with their Social Security number, or, in some cases, older voters who have been registered to vote for so long that it predates the federal requirements.”

The immigration check would have opened up still more problems—for instance, that it might flag people who have been naturalized as citizens. And anyone caught up in this purge would have to “jump through extra hoops to preserve their voter registration” with just days or weeks left before the deadline. Ultimately, the Biden administration declined to cooperate, but Paxton still got what he wanted: He has cited the standoff as evidence that Democrats are willfully enabling massive fraud “by enabling non-citizens to illegally vote.”

In waging legal battle after legal battle with small nonprofits and community groups, and spreading fears about a stolen election that hasn’t yet transpired, Paxton is helping not just his party but also himself. Paxton’s subservience to Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election may have got him in trouble with the state bar, but it might have also saved his job, as he survived a bitter primary and then an impeachment trial in successive years. Now, his willingness to do the bidding of Trump and his allies has earned him a possible seat at the table in a future Republican presidential administration. Trump said in May that he’d even consider Paxton to be his next attorney attorney general.

In the campaign’s final days, Paxton has remained at the beck and call of conservative activists. Last week, after the Department of Justice ordered Musk to halt his $1 million daily lottery for Trump-supporting registered voters in swing states, the attorney general shot back. 

He was filing a Freedom of Information Act Request, he announced, to “investigate the federal agency’s intimidation” of the world’s richest man, by “selectively targeting Elon Musk’s voter registration drive.”

A few days before the start of early voting, Michelle Vallejo, a 33-year-old Democrat, was greeting a dozen or so supporters in a shady corner of a municipal park in Edinburg, Texas, when she received a visit from an old friend. The volunteers, who had shown up to grab walk lists and water bottles for a pre-election canvass, were filling her in on the latest developments in their ongoing efforts to protect yard signs from being defaced and removed. Vallejo, who is challenging first-term Republican Rep. Monica de la Cruz in a rematch of one of Texas’ closest US House races last cycle, listened politely, in a blue t-shirt that featured her name between a pair of exclamation marks, and running shoes embossed with the Texas flag.

The guest was US Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who now represents a safely Democratic seat in the Houston area but was raised in the district in rural Jim Wells County. The 74-year-old Garcia has served as both surrogate and life-coach during Vallejo’s short political career. They recently spent three hours together raising money for Vallejo’s campaign over Zoom. Vallejo calls her “My tía, my godmother, my political mom.” Garcia says, “She’s grown as a candidate—you know, like all candidates, she listens to some of my advice, and sometimes she doesn’t.” Today, Garcia had brought a gift—a pink-and-white t-shirt that said “Comadres con Kamala.”

“Comadres love to talk,” Garcia told the volunteers a few minutes later, using an affectionate term for old friends or godmothers. “They love to chisme”—gossip. She urged them to hit the doors with that same energy. Bug family members. Text friends from the carpool pickup line. Check in on ex-boyfriends. “We’ve got to make her campaign and Kamala’s campaign the big chisme for the next 20 days.”

The 15th district, which stretches like a rusty fishhook from the Rio Grande, a few miles south, to the city of Seguin northeast of San Antonio, is a big district with even bigger stakes. Democrats are hoping to flip the seat as part of their quest to take back the House of Representatives this fall. But to do that will require coming to terms with why the district has become so close. Democrats routinely won the area by double digits until 2020, when, thanks to huge swings among Tejano voters, Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez barely held on against an underfunded Republican, de la Cruz. The shifts in the district were stunning: Trump improved his showing in Hidalgo County (which includes Edinburg and McAllen) by 24 points. In rural Brooks County, voters delivered a 34-point improvement to the GOP. Jim Wells went red for the first time since 1972. 

Conservatives hailed a historic demographic realignment in South Texas, and redrew the maps to make the district slightly more Republican. Gonzalez promptly migrated to a neighboring district that is safer but still competitive. With the party on the defensive in 2022, national Democrats triaged Vallejo’s race, and de la Cruz defeated Vallejo by 12,000 votes. But it wasn’t exactly a red wave either. After spending big, Republicans managed to flip just one of the three races they targeted. This cycle, the DCCC believes Vallejo can win, and the campaign has received support on the airwaves from an affiliated outside group, House Majority PAC. The group recently released a survey showing Vallejo just three points behind—within the margin of error. 

The election in the Rio Grande Valley offers a glimpse of just how much the debate over border security has shifted during the Trump years. Criticism of Joe Biden’s border policies have been a potent political issue in the district. And Vallejo, who ran as progressive in her first campaign, has sought to project a tougher image in her second run. It is a test of whether Democrats’ have found a message that works in a border region that, as much as anywhere else, embodies the evolution of both political parties in the Trump era.

From the moment Trump delivered his first remarks of the 2015 campaign, the border—and the wall he planned to build along it—was the symbolic heart of the MAGA movement, and the backlash it engendered. It was a “racist” wall, Texas Rep. Colin Allred said during his first run for Congress, promising to help tear it down himself. It was an “immorality,” said former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Hillary Clinton called it “useless.” Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Hakeem Jeffries, and Kamala Harris called it “Medieval.” Activists, and even candidates, talked about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and of halting the growth of the Border Patrol itself.

But that rhetoric largely ended with Trump’s first term. “We saw the shift as soon as Biden was in office,” says Michelle Serrano, a co-director of Voces Unidas RGV, a non-profit that opposes border “hyper-militarization.” With a Democrat in the Oval Office, many of the policies stayed the same, but the resistance to those policies seemed to fade. “It felt like crazy town,” she told me. “Like nobody was talking about it, even though we were talking about it.”

Now, in Trump’s final campaign, Democrats have completed their transformation. At a recent CNN town hall, Harris mocked the former president for only building “2 percent” of the wall he promised. (Trump built 458 miles, often replacing far less obtrusive earlier barriers with 20-foot steel slats.) Like many Democrats on the ballot this fall, she now touts her support for a Republican-drafted bill that Trump killed, which decoupled border-security funding from comprehensive immigration reform and included $650 million funding to continue wall construction. Harris’ campaign has produced ads touting her tough-on-the-border credentials. One spot even featured footage of the wall that Trump’s administration built. 

Vallejo, who was raised in the district and co-owns a popular flea market with her family in Mission, Texas, ran for the seat last cycle as an unabashed progressive, after being endorsed early on by the political wing of La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), which was founded by United Farmworkers leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and now organizes on behalf of residents of border colonias. She promised to fight for Medicare for All and campaigned with Bernie Sanders in the final weeks of the campaign. During that race, Vallejo “attacked the border wall as a failure,” Michelle Garcia reported for Mother Jones that year.

Today, no one would necessarily confuse Vallejo with Henry Cuellar, the now-indicted conservative Democratic congressman from Laredo who has spent decades beating a drum for more border-security projects. But her rematch with de la Cruz offers a glimpse of how candidates with more progressive backgrounds are navigating a set of issues that have nudged some Hispanic voters inside and outside the district to the Republican Party. In August, she released an ad saying that “our community is being overwhelmed by the chaos at the border, and it’s time to get serious. I’ll work with Republicans and Democrats to add thousands of new Border Patrol agents—and take on the cartels and human trafficking.”

It ends with her standing on the Rio Grande. “We’ve had enough talk,” Vallejo says. “It’s time to secure the border.”

After the ad came out, Politico reported that some longtime supporters were furious at the law-and-order rhetoric, and that board members of LUPE Votes were even considering pulling their endorsement. The group stuck with her, and has been turning out voters on her behalf.

“There was a response online, but also what we saw at the doors and what we saw among our voters is that it allowed us to take leadership on this issue,” Vallejo told me, after the canvassers had received their instructions and begun to trickle out. “It allowed us to have that conversation about what we actually can do, and we know that you could do both. You could secure the border and also work to implement legislation that’s based on humanity and the reality of what people are experiencing here in our communities. We are a border region. We’re always going to be a border region, and it’s important that we modernize our legislation so that there’s a timely, legal, humane way for people to access citizenship and what they’re seeking when they come asking for help.”

She expresses support for Republican Sen. James Lankford’s bill which would have increased Border Patrol funding and allocated millions of dollars for wall construction. Another ad running in the district, from House Majority PAC, features aerial footage of the border wall while boasting that Vallejo will work with both parties to secure more resources for border protection. When I asked Vallejo what she meant by the phrase “secure the border,” she talked about “the flow of fentanyl and drugs and human trafficking through our ports of entry,” and the need for technology and manpower to “stop the flow of those harmful things into our homes.”

But Vallejo also emphasizes the need to make the judicial process work for immigrants—to “clear up the backlog of people who’ve been living in the shadows for, if not decades, their entire lifetime,” and for “improving access to legal representation.” Unlike some Democrats, she still talks a lot about a “pathway to citizenship” for people who currently lack legal status. 

That message resonates with supporters like Florentino Guerrero, who is now retired after working for 20 years as a customs officer. “I’ve just seen the mess that Trump and even [Vallejo’s] opponent have done here on the border,” he told me. “I started with Bush, right after 9/11. There was no problem on the border. Then eight years with Obama there was more immigrants going back than coming. Then we got Trump and it was chaos—separating families and all that stuff. And he had the majority in Congress to change the immigration laws and he didn’t do it.”

Vallejo’s message is that in all the politicization, the actual needs of her community are given short shrift. And it’s not just about immigration politics. Foremost among those is health care, which she often discusses in personal terms, as someone whose family often traveled across the border for medical attention. Vallejo does not call for “Medicare for all” like she did in her first campaign, but now floats lowering the age of the program to expand coverage described her position as “access to affordable healthcare any way that we could get it.” The campaign, and its backers, have placed a huge emphasis on protecting abortion rights, rejecting old assumptions that Democrats in the region are too socially conservative to be moved by such appeals.

“My own OBGYN told me this year that all of her residents are no longer with her, and that she’s very alarmed for her patients and the women and families that she cares for, because the care just isn’t there anymore,” Vallejo said.

One Vallejo ad features a testimonial from Lauren Miller, a Texas woman who had to flee the state for health care because one of the two twins she was expecting was non-viable.

Eventually, Garcia, Vallejo’s congressional mentor, wandered over to the picnic bench where we were sitting to join the conversation with her newly appointed comadre. Her big thing was that they needed to “knock and drag”—that is, ”we just have to do a better job of dragging people out of their homes or work and to making the time to actually vote.” Even with the new national investments in the race—Democratic groups have outspent Republicans by a more than two-to-one margin—she was “a little disappointed that I didn’t see the heightened activity that I would have wanted.”

“Quite frankly, and I know this will piss off some of my national friends, I just don’t think that they get South Texas,” Garcia complained. She’d spent the previous two days campaigning with Cuellar—who is, improbably, cruising to re-election—and Gonzalez, who faces an expensive rematch with former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores. “You know, they focus so much on New York and California, sometimes maybe Chicago. But what’s good in New York doesn’t necessarily work well here in South Texas.”

When her colleagues did come to the area, it was for one or two days, and their focus was often on “the whole border discussion.” She wanted politicians to pay attention to the way people actually lived and worked in the region, and to understand the value of immigration. Vallejo, who chose her words carefully during our interview, opened up.

“I think that there is a missing voice in the conversation about what is the most effective path forward—immigration challenges, border challenges, they’re not something that you could fix with a tagline, they’re not something that you could fix with a talking point,” Vallejo said. “It’s going to take discussion and it’s going to take nuance to be able to drive forward the solution that we need to serve our families. Our communities are dynamic. They are multi-generational. They’re experiencing many challenges economically, like Congresswoman Garcia said, that are not understood. And that’s why I feel very strongly that we need voices like mine speaking on behalf of my community. Who knows what it’s like to work with our immigrant communities, our multi-generational communities. I myself am a daughter of Mexican immigrants, very proudly, and I know that my family hasn’t been met in the place that they’re at with what we need from our own government, whether that’s local, state or national.”

“And I’m sure she’s going to sponsor my DREAM Act,” Garcia said, jumping in, referring to the long-stalled effort to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented residents who came to the US as children.

“Definitely,” Vallejo said.

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.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Space X and Tesla, and the world’s richest man, is convinced that immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States without legal authorization are destabilizing American democracy. It sounds like another conspiracy theory from a man who spouts a lot of them. But on Saturday, the Washington Post reported on one such figure, hiding in plain sight:

Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by the Washington Post.

As the Post story laid out, Musk was working for his first company, an online business and city directory called Zip2, while living in the United States, officially, as a student. But he never actually took classes at Stanford University—a precondition for staying in the US. A former board member, Derek Proudian, supplied the story’s money quote. The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.” 

The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.” 

Musk has been cagey about his immigration status during his first years as an entrepreneur, but as the story makes clear, his brother, Kimbal, has often made light of it, describing himself and his very famous sibling in public forums as “illegal immigrants.” 

It’s tempting to call this a big bunch of hypocrisy. Musk has, after all, spent more than $100 million to elect a candidate who promises the mass deportation of immigrants who have overstayed their visas. But I think that overlooks both what’s driving his demands for immigration restrictions and misreads his vision for the world. Musk does not really have a problem with South African computer programmers skirting the rules. He, like Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has a problem with the specific kinds of migrants coming from specific kinds of places. In a 2023 response to an antisemitic X user who claimed that Western Jews deserved no sympathy because they invited “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Musk wrote, “You have said the absolute truth.” 

What makes migrants undesirable, to the people demanding these crackdowns, is not their status but who they are and why they’re here. It’s why Vance can say that Haitians with legal status are “illegals” anyway. As a proponent of scientific racism, Musk believes migrants from the Global South are being imported as part of a massive plot to reshape the country’s demography and elect Democrats forever. This is delusional in so many different ways—not the least of which is its ignorance of the long-term voting patterns of immigrant groups themselves—but it is not hypocritical any more than it is hypocritical to embrace restrictions on speech in support of Palestinians and Turkish dissidents but to reject restrictions on the speech of right-wing Brazilians. The animating principle is not supposed to be consistent and objective. His position merely reflects the animus and preference of a red-pilled bigot. What does the oligarch want? He wants what he wants.

With a little more than a week to go before Election Day, the presidential race is expected to come down to just seven states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. But the two biggest campaign events this weekend weren’t scheduled for any of them. On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris rallied with Willie Nelson and Beyonce in Houston, where early voting is already underway. And on Sunday, former president Donald Trump is set to appear at Madison Square Garden with his disbarred attorney and a long list of the weirdest people you know.

Trump is on a bit of a blue-state swing. He appeared at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in September promising to win New York. Earlier this month, he went to Coachella, in Southern California, where he introduced supporters to the vital concert-festival experience of “waiting for shuttle buses that never show up.” Last week he went to a barber shop in the Bronx.

None of these visits lack immediate value. Both New York and Texas have big races that matter a lot to the national parties—six races in New York could determine control of the House; Texas’ Senate race could determine control of the Senate, and the state is close enough on paper that it may well be a part of Democrats’ presidential strategy sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Trump’s visit to reliably blue California could affect the down-ballot races that could swing the House. Getting control of Congress is half the battle; the candidates for president want to actually be able to do things as president, after all.

And to both Trump and Harris, these dips into enemy territory serve their larger messages: Texas, on the one hand, and New York and California, on the other, represent the sort of outcomes they’re promising to steer the nation away from. The Houston event was organized around the theme of protecting reproductive rights, using as its backdrop a state that has—thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court justices—now criminalized abortion with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you want to see what Trump’s policies get you, just take a look at a state where, according to a study released in January, 26,000 women who have been impregnated by a rapist since the Dobbs decision have been left without access to care that was once their right. For his part, Trump uses his blue-state hosts to paint a picture of American Carnage 2.0—buildings taken over by Venezuelan gangs; rampant homelessness; crime crime crime.

But in doing so, Trump in particular has made clear something that should be obvious but which a lot of observers on both sides often don’t acknowledge: He has a ton of supporters in these places, albeit almost certainly not enough to win either state. Still, he received more votes in NYC alone than he did in 16 states in 2020—eight of which he won—and his popularity has, according to the polls, ticked upwards over the last few years. A New York Times poll this week showed a 14-point shift in the city since the last presidential election. He got more votes in the five boroughs than he did in the entire swing state of Nevada, while more California voters supported him than in any other state. One of the reasons the national popular vote appears to be so close this year is that Trump is more popular in the places that aren’t nominally competitive.

Of course, we don’t have a national popular vote, as much as Tim Walz might wish otherwise. But Trump’s tactic exposes the absurdity of the Electoral College, and it does so in so flagrant a manner that perhaps even the people who have benefited from that system might start to notice. It was one thing when candidates only focused on the key Electoral College states, where every vote counts. But he is spending the last days of the campaign, speaking to people whose votes mean very little to the Electoral College, in the hopes that it might redound to his benefit somewhere else. Once you accept that the people in these states matter—or at least some of the people in these states—and that you’re going to be campaigning there anyway, it’s harder to argue that their votes shouldn’t.

At the end of every event on Ted Cruz’s 53-stop campaign swing through Texas, the state’s junior senator invites supporters to line up and sign his bus. People scrawl their names and their hometowns. Someone wrote “End Human Trafficking” behind the driver’s side mirror. A lot of people write Bible verses; Psalm 91—“No weapon forged against me shall prosper”—is a popular one. People have plugged a plumbing company, a YouTube channel, and even Cruz’s own podcast. A “Free Palestine” message has been crossed out. A “Zodiac 2024” message has not.

The campaign’s slogan, emblazoned in big letters on the front, is “Keep Texas, Texas.” But as Cruz attempts to fend off Democratic Rep. Colin Allred in one of the year’s tightest US Senate races, one simple message written in gold marker on the door captured the essence of his path to victory: “CA Refugee 4 Ted!!”

This is the great irony of the embattled Republican’s reelection bid: For a party that complains about Democrats “importing” voters from across the border, it is Texas Republicans who are relying on migration to remain in power. The people he is seeking to protect Texas from, according to the data, are Texas-born residents (who backed his 2018 opponent, Beto O’Rourke). The people he is hoping will save him are, in no small part, transplants. The result is that the politics that Cruz pitches on the campaign trail is less about addressing the lived reality of Texas—a high-tax and low-services state with poor public health outcomes and a fragile power grid—than about preserving the image it projects to the world. It is a contest, in a sense, between Texas and Texas.

In the backyard of a brewery in the Hill Country town of Boerne on Saturday night, this sense of an imperiled legacy was palpable. It was not just the de rigueur “Don’t California My Texas” T-shirts—I kept running into voters who had moved to the state in recent years, attracted by the particular brand of freedom that people like Cruz espouse. Cheryl Grosso moved from Washington state three years ago during the pandemic. “My biggest thing is child sex trafficking,” she said. I met a former Democrat who had supported Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 presidential primary before fleeing California and its Covid-19 restrictions. “The left went crazy,” she said, “thinking men can be women” and “shutting down businesses.” I asked her if she’d consider voting for a Democrat again.

“I left that behind,” she said. “I shed it like an old skin.”

Cruz’s remarks were a constant reminder of this Texas that was under attack. “How many of you all drove a truck here tonight?” he asked. A mass of hands went up. “This is Texas,” he said. But Democrats’ electric-vehicle mandates would threaten that frontier way of life. “Who the hell is Kamala Harris and Colin Allred to tell you what kind of car or truck you buy for your family?” 

“If there were a vacancy on the city council in San Francisco Colin Allred would be one heck of a candidate—he’d be tough to beat,” Cruz said, “But thank God this is Texas!”

A supporter shouted that Allred should be given a one-way ticket to California.

“How about we just put him on a jackass, head it north and slap its ass?” Cruz said. 

Who was this man, and why did he sound like he was in Blazing Saddles?

“This is a battle between sane and crazy. These people are nuts. Tim Walz waves like this,” Cruz said at another point, opening and closing his hand somewhat like a bird, in what I took to suggest an effeminate manner. “What the hell is that? You do that in Texas, you’ll get your ass kicked.”

I don’t think it’s true that Texans will kick your ass if you wave at them like that, although I’m pretty sure I know who I’d call nuts if they did. But that we don’t do that kind of thing around here is Cruz’s message in a nutshell. Much of his rhetoric onstage—like the message on the accompanying campaign literature, and the message in tens of millions of dollars in campaign ads—was that Allred holds outsider values that make him a threat to their idea of Texas. In particular, he is a threat to Texas women and girls.

“He has voted repeatedly in favor of boys competing in girls’ sports,” Cruz said, “in favor of men competing in women’s sports…Colin Allred has voted not only in favor of boys’ and girls’ sports, but he’s voted in favor of boys in girls’ bathrooms, boys in girls’ locker rooms, boys in girls’ changing rooms.”

Allred and Kamala Harris “are both open border radicals who are both desperately trying to cover up their record and lie to the voters,” he said a little while later. What was the difference? “Well, you might say he’s a man, she’s a woman. But do we know how he identifies?”

It is hard to overstate just how much of Cruz’s attempt to win a Senate race in the world’s eighth-largest economy is about the prospect of transgender students competing in high school sports. He talked about it a ton. Appended to the anti-trans panic was a countervailing vision of masculinity, Texas style. 

“Did anyone happen to see Trump’s speech at the Al Smith dinner?” Cruz asked. “I have to say my favorite line of it was he said, ‘Have you guys seen this White Dudes for Kamala?’ And he said, ‘You know, I’m not really worried, because all their wives and all their wives’ lovers, are voting for me.’”

“Bring back alpha males!” a woman behind me shouted. 

This riff on cuckolded men was a sort of strange reference coming from Cruz, a guy who has devoted his recent life to the man who smeared his own wife. And amid all this bravado were obvious signs of weakness. The premise of “Keep Texas, Texas,” after all is that it’s possible you might not. Historically, this sort of existential crisis seems to correlate most strongly with Cruz appearing on the ballot. He won reelection by less than 3 points in 2018, the same year Gov. Greg Abbott was reelected by 13. While some recent polls have shown Cruz and Allred within the margin of error, no one expects Donald Trump’s final margin to be so close. Cruz is still a good bet to win—perhaps especially because Trump is a good bet to win by a wider margin—but he has become a high-floor, low-ceiling kind of guy; there is only so much juice you can really have as the guy who saved bathrooms.

The surest sign that Cruz still has real work in the final weeks of the race to do was the fact that he spent a fair bit of time talking about the work he actually does. Cruz, who has sought to depict himself during the campaign as a bipartisan leader in Washington, spoke at length about his efforts to deliver a nonstop flight between Washington, DC, and San Antonio. He’d worked hand in hand with leaders from heavily Democratic Bexar County. He’d even worked with Pete Buttigieg! It was the sort of deal that the bacon-delivering legislators of Texas’ past—your LBJs, your Jims Wright—used to wrangle before breakfast. Cruz spoke of it like he’d just acquired Louisiana.

If the direct flights don’t save him, the unceasing attack on Allred’s stance on trans rights still might. The spots have hit hard enough that Allred recently responded with a direct-to-camera ad stating that he did not support “boys in girls sports.” It was one of the first things people would bring up when I asked about Allred. And it elicited some of the harshest reactions from the crowd during Cruz’s remarks.

As I waited for the event to begin, I met a voter named Erica Herbert, who was holding a “Women for Cruz” sign. She acknowledged that she had reservations about the Republican candidate. Herbert supported abortion rights and was worried about the state’s hard-right drift—fitting the profile of the kind of person Democrats are banking on to flip the seat. But after watching Cruz’s recent debate with Allred, Herbert considered Cruz “the lesser of two evils.” She wasn’t sure exactly what exactly to believe, but the high school sports issue settled the matter; she wasn’t going to vote for a candidate who could do such a thing. Cruz can be a difficult politician to love, but he is never more adept than when he’s telling voters what they have to lose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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