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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just a few years ago, Elon Musk seemed to be just another Silicon Valley billionaire with no true political compass. He once described himself as “half-Republican, half-Democrat” and often donated money to candidates from both parties. But all that seemed to change during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tha’ts when Musk started taking much more right-wing stances about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and many other divisive political issues, often spreading misinformation in the process.

Today, Musk has donated almost $120 million of his own money to get Donald Trump reelected. He recently campaigned with Trump at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where he said he wasn’t just MAGA, he was “dark, gothic MAGA.”

In this Reveal podcast extra, host Al Letson talks about Musk’s political evolution with Mother Jones senior reporter Anna Merlan, who’s been covering the many ways Musk has tried to influence the 2024 election.

“There have always been billionaires and titans of industry who get involved in politics,” Merlan says. “But I think the scale of Musk’s involvement is really different because it’s not just that he’s a billionaire. It’s not just that he’s endorsing Trump. It’s also that he controls a powerful and widespread communication medium.”

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

Listen in the player above, or subscribe to Reveal wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump may be a known quantity. He’s been a public figure for decades, a television star, and president from 2017-2021. But a second Trump term would present something the United States has never experienced before. Not a would-be authoritarian in the White House—that was Trump’s first term—but a would-be authoritarian who could actually accomplish the task of transforming the federal government into a tool of political repression.

Trump is promising to do things in a second term that he didn’t get close to achieving in his first: rounding up, detaining, and deporting millions of immigrants, using the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies, and deploying the military against Americans he’s identified as “the enemy from within.”

“Usually, it’s worse.”

It’s an agenda much bolder and much more authoritarian than what he accomplished in his first term, when low points included a ban on people from certain Muslim countries from entering the US, family separation at the border with children held for weeks in cells, withholding weapons from Ukraine in an attempt to get dirt on his political opponent (the reason for his first impeachment), and a bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The finale was a violent attack on the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. (Hence the second impeachment.)

But there is another, frightening list of the things that Trump wanted to do, but, thanks to hurdles in his own administration, he wasn’t able to. He wanted to deny disaster relief to California because it’s a blue state. He wanted the military to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs. He wanted the military to seize voting machines after he lost re-election.

There was also significant pushback to Trump from outside the government. There were massive popular protests, and a torrent of litigation from groups like the ACLU. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post added a slogan to its homepage and print editions: “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” a phrase Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had borrowed from a speech by Bob Woodward.

Some of that opposition to Trump is alive and well. Trump’s former chief of staff, General John Kelly, went on the record warning that Trump is a fascist. The Cheneys are voting for Harris. But some things seem to have changed in recognition of what Trump might do if re-elected. The Post opted not to endorse a candidate this year, a decision that came from Bezos, who has lucrative Pentagon contracts. The Los Angeles Times, also owned by a billionaire, likewise declined to endorse. It’s a chilling sign if acquiescence is already the response of America’s richest men.

To get a sense of what a second Trump term would be like, and what guardrails would remain to box in his authoritarian ambitions, I spoke to Steve Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die with co-author Daniel Ziblatt. We spoke on Friday, when Levitsky and Ziblatt published a New York Times op-ed chastising America’s business and religious elites for sitting on the sidelines during this momentous election. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We already lived through one Trump term. Why should we be expecting, possibly, a dramatically different result in a second Trump term? The consensus among experts in authoritarianism like yourself is that a second could prove really catastrophic.

Just to begin, several cases immediately come to mind—Nicaragua and Hungary—where the second term around was considerably worse than the first. Autocrats learn from their mistakes. Folks whose primary goal is to concentrate power learn how to do it. In the case of Trump, we have to remember he didn’t expect to win in 2016. He had no plan. He had no experience. He had no team. Very importantly, he relied heavily on mainstream Republican Party officials and technocrats to govern. He had no clue how to manipulate the machinery of government. In fact, he was shocked and appalled to learn that the machinery of government didn’t just operate at his whim, that he was unable to manipulate a range of state institutions for his own political and personal ends.

Reince Priebus, the RNC chair, was his first chief of staff. He used to apparently dissuade Trump from his worst impulses by telling him they would do it “next week.”

Exactly. There were adults in the room who prevented him from doing a lot more damage, who found ways to to distract him, or to dissuade him from his worst instincts. He learned that he if he’s going to wield the machinery of government for his own ends, he needs to purge and pack the government with loyalists, as much as he possibly can. It’s much more likely that he’ll be able to wield, for example, the Justice Department against critics and rivals. He’ll be able to launch investigations and even prosecutions, often for petty infractions against all kinds of people, hundreds and even thousands of people.

I don’t think Trump’s control over the courts will be sufficient for him to actually jail his rivals, but you can do a hell of a lot of damage investigating and trying and attempting to prosecute people. You can dissuade hundreds, even thousands of people to stay out of politics, to avoid the kind of harassment that a federal investigation can involve.

The largest difference, though, is that now Trump thoroughly controls the Republican Party. He did not have that control in 2016 but now there is no other faction outside of MAGA. His cabinet will be a Trump loyalist cabinet, which is not the case in 2016. It’s very unlikely that you will see much pushback from the Senate or the House, and there is a very good chance that if Trump wins the presidency, the Republicans also win the House and the Senate. You’ve got a pretty friendly Supreme Court. He’ll have a better sense of what he wants to do. This is really night/day from 2016.

Some of the people that have come out and called Trump a fascist have been generals who worked for him, Mark Milley and John Kelly. Kelly cited Trump’s threat to use the military against the “enemy within” as a reason he spoke out. Trump has said he wants to send the military into Democratic cities. Is the military an area where you see susceptibility to authoritarianism, or would it be more of a bastion against crossing certain lines?

We don’t know, because we haven’t seen anything like this, perhaps since the Civil War, where you have a professionalized military that’s asked by a civilian leader to to violate the Constitution or to help him abuse power. That puts military leaders in a terrible bind, because, on the one hand, in a professionalized military, you’re duty bound to both the Constitution and the president, and when the President is asking you to choose between the Constitution the president, it’s a very, very difficult bind. It’s really hard to anticipate how the military will respond.

I think the military itself will find itself divided. It’s very hard to say whether Trump will make the effort to pack the military. The military commanders are still going to be adults, certainly relative to the people in the Trump cabinet. I think they’ll be much more difficult to push around than Trump’s cabinet. But at the end of the day, if he insists, and they are trained to obey civilian authorities, so if Trump orders them under the Insurrection Act to go and shoot protesters in the legs like he wanted to during the Black Lives Matter protests, the military is going to have a hard time disobeying it. Until he’s stopped by the courts or by his own people, if the President wants to try to turn the military into a weapon, yeah, he may be able to go part of a ways towards doing that.

I read the New York Times piece you published today on the role of civil society. It doesn’t seem like you’re very impressed with what civil society has done so far. Do you believe it would still be a guardrail in a second Trump presidency?

The US has a pretty vibrant civil society and it played a pretty important role in the first Trump presidency. We created pro-democracy organizations, bankrolled by wealthy business people. There was a lot of societal pushback in 2016 and 2020.

We are concerned that a lot of church leaders and business leaders, politicians and university leaders, too, are just fearful and wanting to accommodate themselves. They’re trying to position themselves so that they don’t have it too bad under a Trump presidency. That kind of uber pragmatism, when democracy is on the line, is very dangerous. It’s not a great sign that somebody like [JPMorgan CEO] Jamie Dimon, who has a lot of influence in financial circles, is unwilling to come out and repudiate Trump as an authoritarian. This guy should be a business leader. The private sector should be standing up. Most CEOs are going to vote for Harris, but they’re unwilling to take a strong public position, and that may have some effect in the election, because voters still do respond to elites. If all the elites who say in private how terrified they are of Trump, if they were all to hold a press conference and say it in public, it would move the electorate enough to hand the election clearly to Harris. So it matters that these guys are behaving in such a fearful, hyper pragmatic way.

And it’s a bad sign for what will happen if Trump wins the presidency. It suggests that, much like we’ve seen in other countries like Hungary and Turkey, you’ll see an awful lot of business people willing to be co-opted and unwilling to bankroll opposition organizations. I think the private sector and our civil society is big, diverse, and wealthy enough that you’re going to see a pretty healthy opposition. But not enough. To see how influential university presidents, Catholic leaders, and business people remain on the sidelines is worrisome.

What is your best case scenario for a second Trump presidency?

The best case scenario is that we muddle through. That Trump lacks the energy or the ambition to fight too many fights, that his performance in office is somewhere between poor and mediocre, [Republicans] lose the midterm elections, and we have a dysfunctional four years. And he can’t get JD Vance or his son or whoever he wants to be the candidate in the 2028 election.

I think about who would run in 2028 since Trump is disqualified from a third term.

There’s a decent chance we’ll see a President Vance in the next four years if Trump is elected.

Mike Pence turned out to be one of those guardrails on January 6. Vance has said he would have approved the fake slates of electors.

Vance has a better grasp of reality than Trump, which, I suppose, is comforting. We know he’s a hyper pragmatist. He will say anything to further his ambitions. I mean, that’s true of all politicians, to a degree, but this guy really takes it to the next level.

There’s one world where this new rightwing Catholic ideology and blood and soil nationalism that he’s grasped on to in recent years, that he really believes that stuff, and that he’s pretty ideologically driven. You combine somebody with actual talent and discipline and skill with an ethno-nationalist ideology, and it’s scarier than Trump, because at least Trump is inept and has no discipline or patience.

Or, he may just want power, and may decide that the safest route, the more pragmatic route, is to sort of head back to more traditional Republican territory. I have no idea which of those two scenarios would happen.

Countries that have gone the authoritarian route, they still have elections, but they aren’t really fair elections, where people can actually express their preference or have it be accepted. Could that happen in the US in four years?

I have no doubt that if Trump has a horse in the 2028 election, that he will try to use the machinery of government to tilt the playing field, and that you may see some real abuse in Republican-controlled states. There could be a certain amount of unfairness. I don’t think there’ll be anywhere near enough unfairness that people will be not be able to express themselves at the ballot box.

The Democratic Party has the advantage of being a unified opposition party, which you don’t see in places like Hungary or Nicaragua or elsewhere. It’s an electorally viable party. It has a shitload of money. And that’s not going to change. Trump is not, I think, going to be able to do what Putin did, or Orban did, or Chavez did, which is squeeze the private sector, all the private sector so much that nobody is willing to finance the opposition. That’s a really critical thing to be able to do. You can really tilt the playing field when you do two things: when you get the media to self censor, either because you put your guys in control of the media, private or public, and you bully the private sector into not financing the opposition or media. When you can do that, then you really have tilted the playing field. I don’t think Trump’s gonna be able to do that. We may well slide into a mildly authoritarian regime. I think Democrats will be able to contest and and quite possibly win.

There are voters who are really disaffected. I’m thinking particularly of young voters who say democracy isn’t working for them. They don’t have faith in the system, and they’re thinking about voting for Trump, or not voting, or voting a third party, because they just want to burn the whole thing down and start over. Is there any plausible way that electing Trump does that? And a better government, like a Phoenix, rises from the ashes?

What do you mean? What Phoenix?

I don’t know. Is there a lesson from history that would show that if Trump wins, then maybe we can get something better out of it?

Usually, it’s worse. With a populist, you’re just pretending to burn the house. You’re basically just punching the establishment in the gut. Just watch them squirm. But most of the time, people elect a populist, and the populist is predictably mediocre or poor in their performance, and the really discontented people who voted for him end up in a slightly worse place. Once in a while, though, the populist will be so bad, it will kind of cure people of their democratic discontent, and they become a little bit more committed to democratic institutions.

But most of the time, it just makes things a little bit worse. That’s the best case scenario.

Content warning: The story discusses childhood sexual abuse.

In Polk County, Florida, where its sheriff has said his department will “go to the ends of the earth” to arrest child predators, one child victim was left wondering how she ended up on the other side of the law. 

Taylor Cadle was 12 years old when she disclosed to a trusted adult that her adoptive father had been sexually abusing her since she was 9. Law enforcement was quick to respond, and almost just as quick to suspect that Taylor had made up the allegations. The lead detective, Melissa Turnage, began to question Taylor aggressively, even threatening her with returning to foster care if she continued with her allegations.

“I told her time and time and time and time again that I am not the liar here,” Taylor said of the detective. 

Despite Taylor’s pleas, Turnage eventually sought criminal charges against her for lying to police. 

For the Emmy-winning Center for Investigative Reporting and Netflix documentary Victim/Suspect, I found hundreds of others nationwide who, like Taylor, began as alleged victims reporting sexual assaults to police, and ended up criminal suspects. My reporting uncovered shocking police missteps in several of those investigations. All of those alleged victims remain adamant that their reports were truthful. 

In a surprising development in her case, Taylor vindicated herself. With our partner PBS News Hour, I went to Polk County to meet her—and hear how she finally put her abuser in prison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immaculate may appear to be all about evil nuns. In the movie’s grisly opening, four nuns break a runaway sister’s leg. Another holy mob tries to skewer the protagonist, Sister Cecilia, like a shish kebab just after she takes her final vows—and before she unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Halfway through the film, Cecilia catches two sisters slicing off a mouthy novitiate’s tongue. Candles burn, incense wafts, and their habits conceal evil intentions.

But the real villain is the parish priest. A former geneticist who’s found his calling trying to engineer the next messiah, he inseminates Cecilia with DNA pulled from—wait for it—one of the nails used to crucify Jesus Christ. Producer and lead actor Sydney Sweeney said she and the rest of the crew behind Immaculate “never really looked at a lot of nun films.”

It appears that they never really looked at a lot of actual nuns, either. Immaculate is hardly the first horror film to commit this sin. Nuns, with their unmistakable silhouettes, have long been made caricatures by the horror genre, revealing that, long before JD Vance became a VP candidate, society was never comfortable with unmarried, childless women, much less those living communally. The fact that nun horror is most often set in earlier eras—­usually back when nuns were sporting habits and chanting in Latin—feels like a middle finger to these women, who had some measure of self-determination in a world long before the Western women’s rights movement.

Tales of satanic nuns are older than film itself. For centuries, the expectations imposed on cloistered women were as constricting as the social roles available to them and the walls surrounding them—and speculation ran wild. Some of these accounts went on to inspire late-20th-century nunsploitation films, like Convent of Sinners in 1986, which laid the foundation for modern movies like Immaculate.

These days, nuns are an endangered species. The numbers peaked at about 180,000 American sisters in 1965, but declined to fewer than 36,000 by 2023. In 2009, more than 90 percent of American sisters were age 60 or older. While nun characters have appeared in films of all stripes, from a soul-searching novice in Ida to Whoopi Goldberg’s comedic turn in Sister Act, the horror genre seems especially, and lucratively, fixated on them. The Conjuring series, which includes The Nun and The Nun II, is one of the highest-grossing horror franchises of all time. Nuns also star in—or haunt—such recent releases as The First Omen (2024), Sister Death (2023), Deliver Us (2023), and Consecration (2023).

“[Nuns] are figures that, for Americans, are very other,” said Ryan Duns, a Jesuit priest and author of the new book Theology of Horror. “And there’s a fascination with that.” Yet nun horror films reflect society’s larger discomfort with these independent women and conveniently ignore that for many real-life nuns, forgoing secular marriage and childbearing has freed them to perform invaluable academic, artistic, and social justice work.

Today’s nun horror can best be understood through its progenitor: nunsploitation. This genre, often as blood-soaked as it is pornographic, was popularized in ’70s Europe, largely as a critique of the Catholic religion. Whereas the church believed that vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience could bring women closer to God, these films seemed to posit that such strictures were more likely to turn women into wanton, slutty psychopaths.

Italian director Joe D’Amato clearly had a score to settle in his 1986 flesh flick Convent of Sinners, which he made under the name Dario Donati. The film liberally draws from Denis Diderot’s 18th-century novel La Religieuse, a seminal work of anti-­Catholic criticism. Convent of Sinners is one of three major film adaptations, with Jacques Rivette’s The Nun (1966) and Guillaume Nicloux’s The Nun (2013). Rivette’s take is considered an arthouse classic, and Nicloux’s premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, but Convent of Sinners aimed lower. A foremother of today’s nun horror, the film features exorcism, sexual hysteria, and lots of ominous harpsichord, plus a ­demon-purging douche.

For many women in the past, “marriage, prostitution, and the convent were about the only choices.”

Unlike today, when evil nuns tend to appear in the background, they’re often front and center in early nunsploitation films. In Convent of Sinners, heroine Susanna faces off against a predatory lesbian abbess and her scorned second-in-command. The former wants to show Susanna the ways of the flesh; the latter is so jealous that she poisons Susanna and stages her alleged possession. An opening intertitle quotes La Religieuse: “What need has Christ of so many foolish vergins [sic] and the human race of so [many] victims?”

La Religieuse excoriated cloistered life as repressive and intolerable. According to Craig A. Monson, author of the 2010 book Nuns Behaving Badly, there was some truth to that assessment. For many women in the past, “marriage, prostitution, and the convent were about the only choices,” Monson explains, and each came with (usually male) supervision. A woman’s purpose was dictated either by her husband, her male relatives, a brothel owner, or the church. The Council of Trent in the mid-1500s, which called for “the enclosure and safety of nuns,” stipulated that unless approved by a bishop, a nun could not “go out of her convent, even for a brief period, under any pretext.” There was no such thing as a mental breakdown for being shut away against your will, but there was such a thing as demonic possession.

Still, while filmmakers like D’Amato may have had some valid points about Catholic repression, they loved to show as much female nudity and sexual violence as possible while making them. Convent of Sinners opens as Susanna is graphically raped by her father and ends with a still of her lifeless, topless form. All the frames in between feature more naked breasts than a French beach in June. As a novice, Susanna sheds her secular clothes and puts on special underwear in front of the entire convent. Later, in a bathing area, the sisters frolic naked, splashing each other with water and giggling. While two nuns are doing laundry, one laughs to her companion, “Whenever I have to wash these, I think of dirty habits.”

Many nunsploitation films masqueraded as sex-positive propaganda, but leave it to men to fetishize a ­population of women who have opted out of sexual life altogether. (A nunsploitation sex scene is comparable to two “sexy nun” costumes from your local Spirit Halloween come to life and robotically feeling each other up.) These films also serve as anti-Catholic vehicles, casting nuns as repressed to the point of psychosis (or, gasp, lesbianism). The church might not look great, but neither do these filmmakers’ opinions of women. The best sisters in these films end up dead like Susanna, doe-eyed martyrs to a supposedly progressive cause.

Sigmund Freud famously posited that certain men are unable to be aroused by the women they love and unable to love the women who arouse them. This “psychical impotence,” more commonly known as the Madonna-whore complex, sums up the cinematic nun nicely. She is either too pure, forced by some evil external force to the brink of ruin, or, as with the oft-used Mother Superior trope, she is the one doing the ruining. The moral of the Conjuring franchise—which wildly fictionalizes the lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren, two real-life Catholics and paranormal investigators—is that no evil can truly harm those with enough faith in the Christian God. The franchise’s The Nun and The Nun II have become easily the most successful nun horror films, grossing more than $630 million to date. While it’s refreshing to see our pious protagonists not being brutalized, sexualized, or exorcised, these women are barely human in an entirely different, even nostalgic way: They’re practically divine.

This franchise seems to be an effort to memorialize the days when nuns were shut away and, quite literally, holier than thou. “Catholicism has not historically modernized the way that other religious traditions have. There’s something atavistic about it,” Duns, the Jesuit priest and academic, told me when I asked why horror movies are still so obsessed with habit-sporting nuns and collared fathers. “These are people who dwell in our midst, but they’re tied to a past we don’t quite understand.” He pointed out that this must have felt especially true after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, which, in an attempt to collapse the distance between clergy and laypeople, dictated, among other things, that Mass could be conducted in vernacular languages and nuns’ traditional floor-length habits could be jettisoned. “All of a sudden,” Duns noted, “you show up to Mass the next week and the priest is facing you, he’s now speaking your language, and the liturgy that had composed your sense of space, time, and the sacred has evanesced.” So why does the big screen always show habited nuns chanting in Latin?

The Nun films, set in the decade before Vatican II, seem to long for these bygone rituals while exploiting them. In the first film, one nun tormented by Valak—a demon who manifests as a nun—is so pious that she would rather kill herself than be a vessel for evil. Another nun, Sister Irene, takes her vows to become “a true bride of Christ,” and is able to weaponize an actual vial of Jesus’ blood. The Nun II takes this even further. Turns out Sister Irene is a direct descendant of St. Lucy, the patron saint of the blind, and the visions she’s been having are holy rather than delusional. (Convenient!) This time, the power of her prayer turns barrels of wine into demon kryptonite, Christ’s blood.

Because convent life “is this weird, sealed, matriarchal thing,” Elle Carroll, the author of Vulture’s “18 Essential Nunsploitation Films,” tells me, “there’s this automatic assumption that insane things must be going on. They must be up to something, be it truly everything from demonic possession to silly, softcore-porn lesbianism.”

In reality, the something many nuns have gotten up to over the centuries is innovation, unencumbered by wifely duties or childbirth. Intentionally or otherwise, Catholic nuns were the original female separatists, and convents were often the best option for self-sufficient women. Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana flourished as a singer, organist, and composer from within her convent in 17th-century Italy. Hildegard of Bingen, who made groundbreaking contributions to music and medicine in the 12th century, was a Benedictine nun. The 20th-century artist Corita Kent, who joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 at age 18, made indelible contributions to pop art with her political serigraphs and advocated for Catholic progressive reform during Vatican II.

“They must be up to something…from demonic possession to silly, softcore-porn lesbianism.”

Their self-government opened opportunities to develop scholarly, artistic, or technical pursuits that Monson, the author of Nuns Behaving Badly, says “would not have been readily available in the world.” He acknowledges that some nuns “got their jollies out of being super-pious,” but others were “more intellectual, whether it was in music or in writing or in becoming accountants—even running the finances” for their convents.

The Roman Catholic Church is still one of the biggest charitable organizations in the country, and without its legions of female volunteers, these efforts would grind to a halt. Many nuns see such good works as a specific part of their calling—take the Dominican Sisters of Hope, based just north of New York City, who name “poverty, eco-justice, civil rights, access to health care, and access to education” among their key issues. The St. Louis–based Daughters of Charity work in health care, prisons, and social services. Pope Francis is reportedly friendly to nuns, but in 2012, the Vatican under arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI accused the largest umbrella organization for nuns of promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” Their crimes? Voicing support for the Affordable Care Act and, allegedly, mentioning “patriarchy.”

Perhaps nuns terrorize the big screen because their social role is so complex. In a society where the value of exclusively female spaces remains confusing, nuns are reduced to objects of fear (or derision). In nun horror, elderly nuns are always the most monstrous. The nubile protagonists in Immaculate and Convent of Sinners are preyed upon for their fertile wombs and pert physiques, and that the predators are their mothers superior speaks volumes.

In a society where churchgoing is on the decline, horror movies may serve a unique purpose. Duns, the Jesuit priest and academic, said he’s witnessed rampant religious alienation among his undergraduate students, but the horror genre offers a novel outlet for existential angst. “Interpersonal communication and shared ritual has been displaced, and I think relocated into horror,” he told me, where “you confront mortality, evil, the meaning of life.” Monsters—psychopathic serial killers, vampires, malicious ghosts—serve this purpose, but assigning that baggage to an actual class of women suggests a deeper problem. Few other professions feature so heavily in horror films, but why? Because these women used to dress strangely? Because they have faith? Because they’ve opted out of the usual marriage-and-children script?

With habit reform nearly 60 years in the rearview mirror and many nun horror films painting Catholics as godless hypocrites, it’s hard not to feel as though that last reason is the one with the most sticking power. After all, if Cecilia had just stayed in the Midwest and done the “normal” thing, there wouldn’t be a movie, would there?

Steve Bannon emerged Tuesday from four months in federal prison. He was tanned, supposedly “empowered,” and obviously eager to again help Donald Trump lie about election results if he loses.

Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress after he ignored a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee. The former Trump strategist—who claimed “executive privilege” allowed him to blow off the committee in 2021, even though he had last worked in White House in 2017—likely could have avoided prison if he’d negotiated with the panel or shown up and asserted his Fifth Amendment rights.

But he presented himself on his War Room show and in a press conference Tuesday as a freedom fighter.

“If you’re not prepared to be thrown in prison by this weaponized justice system, then you’re not prepared to stand up and fight for your country,” Bannon said after serving his sentence at a low-security prison in Connecticut.

Bannon insisted in his press conference that the 2020 election “was stolen” from Trump and said he would again urge Trump to declare victory on election night even if the results, yet again, are unclear and ballots are still being counted.

The War Room host said Trump, who had falsely claimed victory after 2 am on election night four years ago, erred only by failing to lie about the results at “11 o’clock,” instead. This year, Bannon said, “if the votes come in like it looks like they’re gonna come in, he should step up and inform American citizens of exactly what’s going on and not keep people in the dark like was done in 2020.”

Bannon insisted that he urged Trump to declare victory in 2020 because “the Democrat Party was going to steal the election with illegitimate mail in ballots.”

But that’s not what Bannon said in 2020. In an audio recording from an October 31, 2020, meeting, which I reported in 2022, Bannon said that Trump planned declare victory on election night even if he was losing.

“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory,” Bannon said. “Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s the winner.”

Bannon explained pretty clearly back then that Trump intended to take advantage of a perception that he was ahead, even if the reality differed. Because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail, their ballots would take longer to be counted. That would give them “a natural disadvantage,” Bannon said at the time. “And Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”

Special counsel Jack Smith cited Bannon’s statement in an October 2 motion as one of various pieces of evidence indicating that Trump before Election Day 2020 had formulated plans, if he faced defeat, to use a “false declaration” of victory to attempt to steal the election.

In 2024, Democrats are again more likely to vote by mail. In Pennsylvania, Democrats are reportedly voting by mail at twice the rate of Republicans. Trump may again have a chance to try to use the “red mirage” to convince his followers that he’s being cheated.

Bannon may be in an interlude between prison sentences. He is set face trial in December in New York for allegedly defrauding donors to a charity that claimed to be raising private funds to help build Trump’s promised wall along the Mexican border.

But until then, Bannon will have the chance to once again “go the mattresses,” as he put it, to help Trump return to the White House.

Genuine question: Do influential white people routinely tell members of the white community to not vote?

Every four years, it seems like noteworthy figures within the Black community repeat a familiar refrain: Black voters should withhold their vote to prove a point.

In 2020, it was musician Ice Cube, and in 2024, it’s activist Dr. Umar, both using their considerable platforms to push a consistent, if overused, message to Black people: Don’t vote until politicians make concrete promises to you. These calls for inaction are often mistaken for activism and overlook the fact that both major parties have made commitments to Black voters in past and present elections.

“Have you ever noticed,” I ask in a new video, “that conservative white voters are rarely, if ever, told they should withhold their vote?”

“Have you ever noticed,” @garrison_hayes asks in a new video, “that conservative white voters are rarely, if ever, told they should withhold their vote?”

His new video looks at why that is. WATCH pic.twitter.com/OLeRwYZtzW

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 29, 2024

I explain that Christian Nationalists have a long history of supporting policies aimed at reducing the voting population in order to accomplish, as my colleague Ari Berman describes it, “minority rule.” Consider Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation—the recent force behind Project 2025. In 1980, during a far-right conference in Dallas, Weyrich made his hostility toward democracy clear: “Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The strategy is obvious: It fundamentally relies on Black voters staying home.

I have extensively covered the ongoing debate surrounding Black voting this election cycle. Watch my in-depth exploration of the rise of the Black MAGA movement below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the polls are right, the United States is headed for the largest Election Day gender divide in history. Women will cast a ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris by 54 percent to 42 percent, according to the latest New York Times/Sienna poll, while men will vote for former President Donald Trump, 55 percent to 41 percent. The gap is even more extreme among voters under 30, with 69 percent of young women picking Harris, but only 45 percent of young men choosing the vice president.

The march towards any kind of greater equality…has never been straight in this country.

Gender is, in many ways, the defining feature of this election, and the contrast between the candidates could not be more stark. There is Harris, who could be the first woman president, or Trump, whom a jury found liable for sexual assault. More critically for voters to consider, this is the first presidential election after the fall of Roe v. Wade. In choosing between Harris and Trump, voters are choosing between a candidate who wants to again make abortion legal across the country, and a candidate who refuses to rule out signing a nationwide ban. 

The issue is one of the ways this election has become a referendum on women’s place in society, a revisitation of progress made since the women’s movement. One party wants to put a woman in the White House, the other wants to send women back into their own homes to focus on childbearing. In a post-Roe world, this is far more than any symbolic referendum: Access to abortion is about health care, but also about a woman’s ability to decide the course of her life. As Trump’s campaign promises a return to a patriarchal society, his is not a vision of an equal society, where both sexes benefit from equal rights. Instead, it’s a zero-sum contest where one sex prevails.

Helping his cause is that, on the other side of the ledger, men also feel their future is on the line. Again and again, young males report feeling directionless and emasculated by modern society. They report wanting to be able to earn enough money to support a family, like their fathers or grandfathers did. Trump has courted these men by presenting himself as the epitome of masculinity, describing himself as the protector of women while associating himself, as he did at his convention, with wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off—a combination of paternalism and hypermasculinity that, if the polls are right, carries significant appeal.

To make sense of these currents, I spoke with Notre Dame political scientist Christina Wolbrecht, whose scholarship focuses on the politics of women’s rights. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Polls are showing a bigger gender gap this year than ever before. Do you have any reason to doubt this? 

The usual cause of the gender gap is not abortion, it’s not women’s issues. It really has more to do with different preferences among men and women on social welfare issues, on support for education, and health care. The truth is—and I’ll put a big asterisk on this, because we live in a post-Dobbs world—that men and women don’t vary dramatically in their preferences when it comes to abortion rights. 

The post-Dobbs asterisk is this: since Roe, the status quo has favored the pro-choice side. And until two years ago, I would have told you that there are single issue pro-life voters whose number one issue was stopping abortion. I would have told you, pre-Dobbs, that pro-choice people are not that way. The world has changed now. No longer do pro-choice people have the status quo. They are instead fighting to get it back. And they’re the ones that are desperate to change policy.

So now that the status quo has changed, we’ll see if that draws people to the polls or influences their vote.

Threat is a mobilizer. This is why, according to the NRA, they’re always coming for your guns, right? Because fear gets people to donate and vote. And now they really are killing women and denying them health care, and that may be more mobilizing.

When I think about the very real possibility of a gender gap bigger than previous cycles, it seems to me that abortion would have to be a big part of that, because there’s so much on the line for women: decisions about if they want kids and when, what they can afford, and what job they have—everything is wrapped up in that.

I think that’s all true, but that doesn’t mean that other things aren’t as or more important. So yes, you want to control your fertility, but you also live in a town where all the manufacturing has left and you don’t have access to jobs and you’ve been told it’s the fault of immigrants. Or you are really worried about foreign trade and how it’s affecting your company. At the end of the day, things like education and wealth and occupation have always driven vote choice. It’s not always clear to me that abortion can overcome those things. Among some people, it can be true that you want to be able to control your fertility and and have access to abortion, and you don’t like what’s happening to women in the states with bans, but you also don’t really like immigrants very much, or you hold sexist beliefs. 2016 was the first time that people’s views on sexism predicted whether they vote Democratic or Republican, and that has remained true since. Both men and women can be sexist. It may be the case that abortion will change everything. But if it does, that’s going to be unprecedented, because it hasn’t in the past.

Staying on that theme of sexism predicting your vote, I want to ask you about men. It does seem like men are moving toward Trump, particularly young men. Trump’s campaign stands for a restoration of traditional gender norms that is appealing to some men. The idea seems to be that men are suffering as gender roles are changing. 

There’s traditional sexism that’s like, ‘It’s better women stay home with the kids, and a man’s place is in business, and women are more naturally caring.’ It’s very gender stereotypical. What you were really talking about is gender resentment: ‘Women get stuff just for being women, women are always accusing men of stuff they didn’t do, I can’t tell jokes at work anymore because there are women around.’ That sense that the advance of women limits me, that’s to say, a man, is really powerful. And we’ve seen an association with [that] and voting for Republicans. It’s similar to racial resentment, which is a little different than traditional racism. It’s more focused on, again, ‘People get all these advantages I don’t get, and it’s unfair.’

After the 2016 election, surveys showed that people who voted for Trump were more likely to say, ‘It’s harder to be white, there’s more racism towards white people.‘

Racial resentment was an important predictor in 2016, as was gender resentment. That continued in 2020 and I absolutely, 100 percent assume it will continue in 2024. In general, men are more likely to hold those sorts of gender resentment views. There are a lot of women who feel like they lose out from women’s equality; it’s probably fair to say more with older women.

Resentment sexism seems to be cropping up more with younger men in terms of feeling like, ‘I have no future, I can’t make any money, I can’t buy a house, there’s no place for me in society right now.‘

There’s been talk for months of this idea that young men are becoming very conservative and young women are becoming very liberal. There are debates amongst the more statistically-minded pollsters about what the data really show. What’s interesting is that a lot of that isn’t so much the movement of men, but it is the movement of women.

Let me circle back to the two types of sexism you described. We’re seeing a lot of messaging around the resentment piece, particularly targeted at young men. There also actually seems to be a lot of what you described as traditional sexism. I think especially of JD Vance and his derision of childless cat ladies, his comments that the role of grandmothers is to take care of their grandkids and that women are more fulfilled by having kids. 

To make the connection to race again—because I do think they belong together—ten years ago, we talked about racial resentment as dog whistles. The dog whistles are gone. People are just coming out and saying outwardly racist things: ‘These people aren’t as smart. They’re rapists and murderers.’

You are absolutely correct that a lot of what has been brought to people’s attention, about JD Vance in particular, is exactly what you said. It’s out and out. ‘It’s better if women are at home and men are working. What’s wrong with Taylor Swift, she’s 33 years old and doesn’t have a child, because that’s women’s purpose in life.’ I don’t think it’s a mistake.

On the flip side, masculinity appears to be a big part of Trump’s draw. He has Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt at the convention, he talks about how he is going to protect women. That all seems like stuff in the traditional sexism bucket. There’s this clip of Stephen Miller, Trump’s close adviser, giving dating advice. He told men to “wear your Trump support on your sleeve” to “show that you’re a real man” and “not a beta.” The obvious message is if you want to be masculine, then you vote for Trump.

It’s a huge, huge piece of it. The gender resentment we were just talking about is a strong man who provides for his family, is the leader, is the decision maker. We’re seeing that a lot in this election. [There’s a] comparison to Tim Walz. Donald Trump’s the above-it-all, wealthy traditional man. Tim Walz has all these male skills. He’s going to fix your gutter. He coached football. He has a traditional family. But he’s also community-oriented. Nobody thinks Donald Trump ever helped anybody do anything. Whereas part of the Tim Walz brand is this idea that he’s always the guy who lends a hand.

He’s the Democrats’ alternative version of what it means to be a man who is not threatened by women.

I gotta tell you, I’ve been studying women in politics for 30 years. It’s insane. This is not where we were going.

What do you mean?

That I succumbed to one of the greatest myths in American history, which is this idea that the road to progress is straight and continually forward. I was 14 when the first woman was on a presidential ticket, and that was a big deal in my household. And so, of course, then we’re going to have a woman presidential candidate, and we’re going to elect the first woman vice president. And in some ways, that’s right. In the last three presidential elections, women have been at the top of one of the tickets in two of them. That’s remarkable, given our history.

But the reality, the thing that I know in my more experienced and knowledgeable brain, is that the march towards any kind of greater equality and breaking down hierarchies has never been straight in this country. We’ve made leaps and bounds on things, and then taken them back. That struggle over what is the future, and what does the United States look like, and what kind of people are we going to be, and how are we going to live? It has really been very pointed in this election.

There’s the narrative about women’s place being raising kids at home. But with access to abortion being also on the ballot, it’s not just rhetoric anymore. Maybe women will just have to stay home—or more women than want to.

Do people truly understand what is at stake in this election? Is it getting through to women that this really is limiting access—not just to abortion, but to birth control, to control over your children and how they’re raised, and all those types of questions? More broadly, that a Donald Trump presidency almost certainly leads to a dramatic corrosion of the state of American democracy. Rights and freedoms and liberties are also on the ballot. There are probably some psychologists that could explain how it’s hard for our brains to grasp something that significant.

I see that meme all the time showing women in Iran in the ‘40s and ‘50s, where they had all sorts of freedoms and were very cosmopolitan. And then a different kind of government comes in and shuts all of that down. If we’ve learned anything in the last eight years, it’s that the United States is not as special as we thought, that the erosion of rights is very, very real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has volunteered as a trauma surgeon in Ukraine, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. But when he went to Gaza in March and April of this year, it changed him. Sidhwa had never seen so much horror in his life.

“There’s nothing like Gaza right now,” he said. “Almost 100 percent of Gaza’s population is homeless and displaced…does that sound like a place where people are going to survive?”

With international journalists banned from Gaza and Palestinian journalists openly targeted by the Israeli military, international medical aid workers have become some of the few people able to tell the world about the toll of the war.

Sidhwa has spent the past six months speaking widely about his time in Gaza. He went to the Uncommitted movement panel at the Democratic National Convention, wrote an article for Politico about what he’s seen, and organized a group of nearly 100 doctors to sign a letter to President Joe Biden begging him to stop sending weapons.

When the New York Times approached Sidhwa to write for its opinion section about what he saw in Gaza—widespread starvation, collapsed sanitary systems—he took it as an opportunity. He went beyond writing from his own experience and corroborated his account with 64 other doctors. In particular, he was haunted by something he saw again and again: children shot in the head.

“Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die,” he wrote. At first, he thought this was an anomaly, the work of “a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby.” But when he asked other health care workers, he found that dozens were seeing the same thing.

After his essay in the Times was published, prominent right-wing accounts on X and Instagram, as well as publications like the New York Sun and Israel Hayom, began insisting that the CT images included in Sidhwa’s essay—showing bullets embedded in children’s skulls—had been photoshopped and that Sidhwa was a propagandist desperate for the fall of Israel.

The New York Times did something unusual in response: It released an editors’ note defending its own fact-checking process. “While our editors have photographs to corroborate the CT scan images, because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos—of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck—were too horrific for publication,” Times editor Kathleen Kingsbury wrote. “We made a similar decision for the additional 40-plus photographs and videos supplied by the doctors and nurses surveyed that depicted young children with similar gunshot wounds.” 

Sidhwa found the pushback odd. “I don’t really care about Palestinian nationalism. In fact, I don’t really care about any nationalism as a concept,” he told me. The issue, he said, is simpler than that: “My government, meaning me, is involved in major crimes, and I don’t want that.”

On October 18, as reported by the Washington Post, Israel banned six medical aid organizations—including the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), which Sidhwa has worked with—from entry to Gaza going forward. The WHO received no explanation from Israel as to why. 

I spoke with Sidhwa by Zoom between surgeries about his work in Gaza, his advocacy since then, and why he’s still hoping—even now—that the US government might be pressured to change course. 

Let’s go back to before all the media attention. How did you end up going to Gaza? 

So a very large number of physicians, and especially surgeons, have been killed and probably about an equal number have fled.

Mark Perlmutter, he was involved in a telemedicine project with Gazans. He’s an orthopedic surgeon. He was looking at pre- and post-op X-rays, and he was like, “What on earth is this stuff? Who’s doing these operations?” He found out it was just junior residents or sometimes medical students. And he asked, “Where’s your attending?” And they said, “Well, he’s dead.” 

We said: Well, we will go provide that service.

I was at European Hospital from March 25 to April 8. At that time, European Hospital was easily the best-resourced city block in all of Gaza—and it was still a total disaster. There were 10,000 to 15,000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital. I walked the hospital grounds several times. I was able to find four toilets, so 10,000 to 15,000 people, four latrines, one water spigot.

I got the chance to go to Rafah, before it was obliterated, and drive through Khan Younis. And while we’re driving through, there was a group of four boys, probably like 10 to 12 years old. Young kids. They’re going through a garbage heap, trying to find anything, and they’re working together to do it. It’s pretty obvious that this wasn’t the first time they had done this. 

On the way through Khan Younis, I told the driver to stop. He said it’s not safe, but I asked him to stop, just for a second. I got out and I looked around. 

I don’t think, if I grew up at this intersection, I would know where I am. There weren’t any buildings that were more than 3 feet tall anymore. It looked like an atomic bomb hit the place.  

Since your New York Times article came out, you’ve been the subject of a backlash campaign, with people claiming to be former law enforcement officers suggesting that the X-rays of children with bullets in their skulls embedded in the article were fabricated. What’s your reaction to those claims? 

The article polled 65 American health care workers—doctors, nurses, one paramedic—and gathered their experience in the Gaza Strip. How many of them saw children who had been shot in the head? How many of them regularly? How many of them saw malnourishment and easily treatable infections? How many of them saw infants die from malnutrition or dehydration? How many saw such extreme, universal psychiatric distress in small children, to the point that small children were actually suicidal? 

It’s 65, which represents, as far as I can tell, about half of the health care workers in the US that have been to Gaza since October 7 [of 2023]. 

The New York Times fact-checking process is fanatical. It’s beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. I don’t know if people realize it took months to write this. It was an incredible effort of time and resources, on my part and theirs—the team of four people working on it. 

So then when all this manufactured nonsense from people claiming to be either doctors or ballistics experts, none of whom are either one of these things, came up…

I asked them: Guys, how are we going to prove that? They’re like: Oh, Feroze, we have photographs of these kids. We have the entire CT image on video. Like, there’s no question. I saw 13 kids who had been shot in the head. So there were almost certainly more kids who came in when I wasn’t in the ER, got shot in the head, died, and were sent directly to the morgue. 

On the occasions where the child survived, and I think this only happened once, honestly—on the occasion when the child survived long enough and there was family available in the ICU the next day to ask what happened—they would say, the kids were just playing. I never heard from a family that they were in a crossfire, that there was lots of fighting and the bullet went through the window; I never heard that. 

What do you think people are getting out of ignoring the evidence here? When you spoke at the Uncommitted press conference at the DNC, you referenced the book Slavery by Another Name and talked about what Douglas Blackmon calls “moral rationalization”—when people know something’s wrong and illegal and continue to do it anyway. Is that part of what’s happening here?

The book is about how slavery was resurrected in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. And it’s quite literally chattel slavery was just reinstituted in the South, maybe on a smaller scale, but nevertheless reinstituted. And this is under Northern occupation, with the Northern judicial systems, you know? 

It’s interesting, because you read through it and you think, how could this have happened? Like, slavery was a large part of the reason for the war, and then after the war…the whole society just knew when to lie and when to tell the truth. They knew who to beat up and who not to beat up. They knew who to kill, who not to kill, who to torture, who not to torture.

I don’t remember the exact words I used at the DNC, but I said something like, lying became a virtue. It just turned all of our normal moral values on their head when the whole society committed to this transparently and obviously immoral enterprise. 

It’s hard not to see that here. 

I hope the fact that this piece was published in the New York Times—and you gotta remember that the Times opinion section reached out to me, I didn’t go to them—I hope that it represents a change in the elite consensus around Gaza.

I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding. They say, “Oh, look, the mainstream is becoming pro-Palestine.” I seriously doubt that. I think there’s a recognition that the Israelis have kind of gone nuts in Gaza and that American objectives there have been achieved. And the extent of what has been done to Gaza—it takes about 10 minutes just to describe the actual extent of destruction and devastation of the Gaza Strip in any accurate form.

How does it feel to see people online refusing to believe these images are real?

I think that’s just, it’s completely amongst die-hard believers.

I’m not Israeli, I’m not Jewish, I’m not Palestinian, I’m not Arab, I’m not Muslim, I’m not Christian—like, I don’t know how much further away I can get from the conflict. It’s just got nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I’m an American.

After this is done, we Americans need to take a long, hard look at ourselves. What does it say that the United States doesn’t have a mainstream political party for which genocide is just a no-go? 

The US entered four or five caveats to its signing of the of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So it basically immunized itself from the convention. And yeah, that was [under then-President Ronald] Reagan. But still, we don’t have a mainstream political party that is opposed to genocide on principle. 

That’s very scary, given the power of the state that we live in. My intention in writing the piece was to bring people to such realizations. It doesn’t seem to have worked. 

Beyond your media work, you helped lead this effort to send Joe Biden a letter signed by, I think, 99 volunteer medical professionals who served in Gaza. And in that letter, you all asked him to meet with you and support an arms embargo. Have you received any response to that letter from the administration?

No, nothing, which is quite frustrating. I don’t know how often almost a hundred doctors send a letter to the president of the United States, but it doesn’t happen very often. So I’m kind of surprised that we received literally no response whatsoever. 

I’m not that important of a person, I understand that. But I mean, on that letter are veterans, are reservists, are people whose names don’t sound scary like mine: Monica, Nina, Mike, Mark, Adam. It’s not just people that you can dismiss, and yet they’re dismissing them. It’s a little scary to see the American elite kind of ignoring its own. You kind of wonder how extreme that can get. 

There’s no shortage of information about this. It’s not like Brett McGurk [the White House coordinator for the Middle East] and people like him and [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken—they know what’s going on. They’re not idiots. They can read English, just like I can. There’s no way they didn’t see that New York Times piece, or at least one of their aides did and told them about it. 

If I could, I’d say: “Mr. Biden, the Israelis have decided to turn Gaza into a howling wilderness, and there are a million children there. You don’t have to let the Israelis keep spitting in your face like this. You can just tell them the money’s gone, the arms are gone. Withdraw from Gaza, withdraw from the West Bank, remove the settlements.” 

Did you stay in touch with the folks you met at European Hospital? What have you been hearing from them? 

There was a young man whose name was Abdulrahman Al-Najjar. And he was a third-year med student, a smart kid. If he was born in the US, he really would have gone far. He was probably 21 or 22 when I met him. The medical students were all at European Hospital because it was the safest place to be, and they had all been displaced from Gaza City and were living in tents just like everybody else. But they would come to the hospital, and they would help run the ER. Even the first-year med students, who know literally nothing about anything, they just came and did their job, and these are 18- and 19-year-old kids. 

But Abdulrahman, he was a good kid. He wanted to be a plastic surgeon or maybe a neurosurgeon. And I remember when I left, he said: “Don’t remember Gaza like this. Come back when there’s no war, and we’ll go to the beach and we’ll have tea. And that’s how you should remember Gaza.” He’s a sweet kid, smart, you know? 

He was killed in an airstrike on August 31. That’s the same day Hersh Goldberg-Polin is thought to have been killed. The 23-year-old Israeli American guy who was taken hostage at the music festival and was found dead in a Hamas tunnel, probably executed before he could be rescued. 

When I saw the pictures of him in the news, I thought, good lord, he looks exactly like Abdul. If you look at them side by side, they’re almost identical human beings. They have the same smile. They have the same ears, the same nose. And I didn’t find out Abdul was dead until the day after. 

I’m still in touch with some people. They don’t have much cell service. And my Arabic is as close to zero as you can imagine, so it’s hard. 

As you know, six medical aid groups were banned from sending doctors to Gaza, including PAMA, the group that you’ve worked with. What was your reaction to that? 

It’s kind of wild. COGAT, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories—the part of the Israeli government that’s supposed to coordinate between humanitarian groups and the military—COGAT apparently provides nothing to the WHO in writing. I couldn’t believe that. I was like, this is insane, what are you talking about? All of this is just by word of mouth. It’s actually not even clear how many organizations have been banned or who they are. So who the hell knows?

They were western NGOs—some were American, some were Canadian, and one was from Australia or New Zealand. But they have Arab boards. That’s all it is. Arab names on their boards. It’s just outrageous. They knew they could get away with it, and they did. No one even claims that there has ever been a security incident associated with any of these people that any of these groups have brought to the territories. 

It tells you something about our own society. I just got an email five minutes ago from the [Kamala] Harris campaign saying, oh my God, Michigan is in play, and we’re so screwed. Like, yeah, that’s your fault. I’m sure everybody wants to vote because they’re so frightened of Donald Trump. I mean, it’s a sensible thing to be frightened of; I am, too. 

But all she would have to do is get on TV and say, “Israel has banned several Arab-led western NGOs, I find this totally unacceptable, and when I’m president, I will tell the Israelis they have to reverse that immediately.” If she did that, she’d probably get, like, 90 percent of that Arab vote back. She won’t even do that. It’s pathetic. It’s so crazy how committed this administration, including very clearly its vice president, is to this insane project of just obliterating Gaza. It’s just a fanatical dedication to this project, and it’s weird. 

There’s been some speculation that the ban might’ve had to do with how doctors like yourself are serving as these sort of de facto international spokespeople. What do you think about that? 

I’ve had several people tell me this is my fault, for the New York Times article. And I have to tell them, honestly, you might be right. I don’t think you are, but it’s entirely possible, you know? They were trying to help people. They feel like that’s been cut away from them. They’re angry about it. If they want to blame me for it, that’s understandable. 

The Israelis have always had veto power over who goes in when. I suspect that this has been in the works for a while, and the timing probably just is happenstance, but I can’t prove it. I don’t know.

You mentioned wanting to go back. Why do you want to go back to Gaza? 

I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t want to leave. I think it’s kind of a universal thing. Everybody, as they exit, suddenly has an existential crisis, like, why do I get to leave and these people have to stay? 

And then you’re thinking, man, I’ve got to come back somehow. These people need help, they need protection. They need a hand to hold. They need—anything. 

When the vans were coming to pick us up, we had all gathered there at 8 in the morning, 7:30 in the morning. The sun’s just come up. And there was this security guard who was there with his one-and-a-half-year-old, 2-year-old son, just kind of playing with him, babying him, you know. I remember Mark, like, force-feeding the kid all the candy he had left over. At one point, the conversation stopped, and we all just kind of looked at each other, and then we looked at that kid, and we were all thinking exactly the same thing. Why does this kid have to live in this Hobbesian hellhole of violence and hunger and fear and terror, and we just get to leave?

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

On a blisteringly sunny October day in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of Christians gathered on the National Mall for a day of intense prayer. A self-proclaimed prophet from Colorado named Lou Engle had summoned them for an event he called the “Esther Call on the Mall” because, he said, he had a dream in which the nation’s capital was filled with “a million Esthers,” a reference to the Old Testament queen who stood up for her people against the wicked king Haman. “You’ll say to your children and your grandchildren that you were there when God gathered the Esthers to save a nation,” Engle promised in a trailer video for the event.

Esther’s people, of course, were the imperiled Jews, and not by accident, Engle’s prayer rally took place on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. The speakers, a racially diverse group, praised Jesus, but, on a stage festooned with Israeli flags they also often prayed in Hebrew. Some in the crowd wore Jewish prayer shawls and stars of David and blew shofars, the rams’ horn that ancient Israelites used to call troops to battle. Others told me they were fasting, just as observant Jews do on Yom Kippur. Engle and some of the other speakers bowed back and forth as they spoke looking as if they were engaged in the Jewish prayer practice of davening.

Fundamentalist Christians have long supported Israel because of their belief that the Jews are God’s “chosen people.” The modern Christian Zionist movement goes back to the Messianic Jewish movement of the 1970s, widely known as Jews for Jesus, who aimed to convert Jews to Christianity. Their approach, says Rabbi Jack Moline, the emeritus president of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, was, “‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’” Modern Christian Zionists, on the other hand, mostly aren’t looking to immediately bring any Jews to Jesus. Instead, says Moline, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.” But there’s a catch: In this scenario, most of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel will perish, and the remainder will finally accept Jesus—bringing about both “Armageddon and the elimination of the ‘Jewish problem,’” says Moline.

“‘The friendlier I can make Christianity to your Jewish experience, the more likely you are to embrace the one true religion, which is generic Christianity.’”

In the past few years, at the forefront of Christian Zionism has been a rapidly growing global charismatic movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose leaders, including Engle and many others who attended the march, believe God has commanded Christians to take over the government, in part because doing so will hasten this particular end-times scenario.

This movement has gained even greater propulsion since the Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza. Prominent NAR pastors have claimed that this conflict is the latest chapter in an existential spiritual war. Damon Berry, a religious studies professor at St. Lawrence University in New York, says NAR leaders believe “that what we’re doing politically on the ground [in Gaza] despite the incredible loss of life, is necessarily a battle raging between the forces of good and evil.” In this battle, NAR leaders see Trump as anointed by God to command the fight for the United States and Israel. Berry adds that they are convinced that “if we don’t support Trump, this is something that America would be judged for.” Some of the most influential Christian Zionist Trump supporters have served as spiritual advisers to the former president and their influence can be seen in some of his foreign policy decisions.

In this election, Christian Zionists’ pleas for their followers to support Israel at any cost are only growing louder. Leaders in this movement, including many of those present at the Esther Call, are working from the top down, leveraging relationships with key GOP leaders, including vice presidential candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

They are also working from the bottom up, warning their followers that God’s favor for the United States depends on Christians’ support for Israel. The Christian Zionist voting bloc is considerable: Nearly a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical. In a 2020 poll, half of evangelicals said that supporting Israel was “important for fulfilling biblical prophecy.” By back-of-the-napkin math, that’s about 41.5 million people—certainly enough to sway an election. The share of Republicans who support Israel has grown from half in the late ’90s to 80 percent in 2018, a Pew survey found. What’s more, some voters, especially younger ones, have said they plan to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel by not voting in the election, or even, as NPR reported earlier this month, casting a ballot for Trump—in fact, the former president is now the favored candidate among Arab American voters, an October poll found.

At the Esther Call event, Lou Engle stood before a row of Israeli flags and admonished the crowd. “You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God!” he cried. “If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”

“You can’t listen to what the media is telling you, you’ve got to align with the word of God! If we stand and bless Israel, He may save our nation!”

For decades, Christian Zionists have been working behind the scenes in Washington to strengthen US support for Israel, mainly through the powerhouse evangelical group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which was founded in 2006 by Texas minister John Hagee to bring together the patchwork of pro-Israel Christian groups. Another aligned group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the massive lobbying organization that advocates for pro-Israel policies (and spent aggressively in 2024 to sink progressive candidates who spoke out against the war in Gaza). A major breakthrough for Christian Zionists came in 2017 when the Trump administration answered their calls to officially recognize Jerusalem, a holy city for Christians, as the capital of Israel, and announced plans to relocate the US embassy there the following year. The United Nations criticized the move because Jerusalem is in the occupied territory of the West Bank. But Christian Zionists saw the move as a victory—and a further validation that Trump had been chosen by God to lead the United States in the world.

One prominent NAR leader, a South Carolina–­based pastor named Dutch Sheets, said in a broadcast that the embassy move “did something in the spirit realm. It aligned us in a significant way with Israel. I believe God was saying He is going to rain Holy Spirit oil down all over America.” In a 2018 interview on a Christian news show, Paula White-Cain, one of Trump’s major spiritual advisers, recalled telling him shortly after he made the decision, “Sir, you’ve done the right thing.” Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based former business strategist and a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, said the embassy move fulfilled “a prophecy” in the Bible that the Jews would be able to return to their land, and that Trump had been “stirred by the spirit of God.”

In reality, Trump had likely also been stirred by the spirit of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a fervently pro-Israel Orthodox Jew, as well as the many pro-Israel groups that had been lobbying hard on the issue (and stocking his campaign war chest). One of the main cheerleaders of the move was CUFI’s John Hagee. In 2017, before the embassy was officially moved, Hagee told a group of his supporters, “When I spoke to [Trump] in the White House about this several weeks ago, he said this very emphatically. He said, ‘Other presidents have failed you, but I will not disappoint the Christian community in this issue. I will stand with Israel, and we will at some point in time, move the embassy.’”

Trump’s goodwill with NAR leaders was tested a few years later when his administration tried to broker a peace deal between Israel and Palestine. Christian Zionists have long opposed the idea of a “two-state solution,” which would recognize the existence of both Israel and Palestine. During the Middle East peace talks of 2013, for example, televangelist Pat Robertson warned that if the United States recognized Palestine, God would punish Americans with a “natural disaster.” In 2019, a group of pastors, including Hagee, White, and Wallnau were invited to the White House for a briefing on a possible two-state solution. Afterward, Right Wing Watch reported, in a YouTube broadcast, Wallnau lambasted the plan. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”  

Negotiations for the two-state solution, of course, collapsed—and Christian Zionists seemed eager to forgive the administration’s blunder. During then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2019 trip to Jerusalem, a Christian Broadcasting Network journalist asked Pompeo, a devout evangelical Christian, “Could it be that President Trump is being raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace?” Pompeo responded, grinning, “As a Christian, I certainly believe that that’s possible.”

When Trump lost the 2020 election, some of the same NAR pastors who had praised Trump for moving the embassy—including Lance Wallnau, Dutch Sheets, and Paula White-Cain—emerged as leaders in the “Stop the Steal” campaign claiming that the election was stolen. In a 2022 broadcast, Sheets said that Trump had told him in a dream, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

Fast forward to October 7, 2023, when NAR pastors’ commitment to Israel became an all-out obsession. In a forthcoming paper for the religion studies journal Nova Religio, Berry, the St. Lawrence University religion scholar, chronicles how NAR pastors characterized the war in Gaza as part of “a cosmic battle between God and satanic forces.” Berry references a broadcast on Rumble titled “Is This WWIII?” that Wallnau published on October 8, 2023. In it, Wallnau claimed that Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel was the result of God punishing the United States for electing Biden, abandoning Trump, and allowing trans people to serve in the military. Because of these transgressions, Wallnau says, the United States has become “spiritually vulnerable.” In another podcast a few weeks later, Wallnau returned to those themes, warning his 21,000 viewers that the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses aimed “to deconstruct the legitimacy of the United States and Israel.”

Berry also quotes Jonathan Cahn, a rabbi and NAR-aligned charismatic Christian. Cahn, who also spoke at the Esther Call event, has said in the past that even to utter the word “Palestine” was “to take part in a war against the promise of God and the will of God.”

To some NAR adherents, paradoxically, the October 7 attack and all the bloodshed that followed was actually good news. NAR pastor Cindy Jacobs, another leader in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, told the crowd on the Mall that God had warned her about Hamas’ attack—but he also told her that “after the dark time, Israel would come into a great revival”—presumably, the prelude to Christ’s return.

What exactly that “great revival” might look like in the near term is a matter of some debate. While many of the NAR leaders make no secret of their disdain for a two-state solution, a new guard of Christian Zionist groups seems to have realized that loudly calling for Palestine’s obliteration doesn’t play well with younger Christians. Take the Philos Project, a decade-old nonprofit with an annual budget of $8 million whose mission is to “promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East.” The group, which in 2020 received a $9.4 million grant from the public charity National Philanthropic Trust, says on its website that it supports “some variant of the two-state solution—ideally a Jewish state with a Palestinian minority and a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.”

Yet elsewhere, Philos leaders express a different set of beliefs. As the New Republic recently reported, its founder Robert Nicholson appeared last year on a podcast hosted by the pro-life activist Lila Rose during which he warned that Islamist terrorists aligned with Hamas were likely flowing into the United States over the southern border, thanks to lax US immigration policies. On Facebook in January, the organization’s executive director, Luke Moon, posted a photo of himself in Israel proudly signing a bomb that was “bound for Hezbollah.” That summer on Facebook, he posted a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus giving the thumbs-up sign, accompanied by the slogan “Jesus Was a Zionist.” Philos Project leaders devoted a recent podcast episode to debunking what they called a “conspiracy theory” that AIPAC wields political power.

“Jesus was a Zionist.”

Philos Project is platformed by powerful groups and people. In January, Moon spoke at the inaugural event of the National Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism, a post-October 7 initiative of the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. In addition to the Philos Project, other groups involved in the effort included the MAGA group America First Policy Institute, the conservative Christian organizations the Concerned Women of America, the old guard Christian right Family Research Council, and the Independent Women’s Forum.

On October 7, 2024, the Philos Project hosted an event in Washington, DC. The stated purpose was to recognize the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel, but it also served as a quasi-campaign stop: The event was headlined by vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.

By positioning itself as a thought leader, Philos Project exerts its influence far beyond politicians. One prominent example involves Mike Cosper, an opinion writer for the leading Christian magazine Christianity Today. In 2022, Cosper earned a following among progressive Christians with a wildly popular investigative podcast about a scandal-plagued Seattle megachurch. The following year, Cosper decided to turn his attention to the war in the Middle East. In a podcast series called “It’s Complicated,” Cosper promised to travel to the Middle East to unpack the nuances of the war, to “meet the people whose lives have been shaped by this conflict, this war, and this hope.”

As it turned out, Cosper’s reporting included the voices of only a few Palestinians. Ultimately, in a March 2024 Christianity Today cover story, he compared Hamas to campus protesters, writing, “Hamas uses an Islamist and nationalist ideology to demonize Jews, and the academic Left uses anticolonial ideology to do the same.” What Christianity Today did not disclose to its 4.5 million online readers was that Cosper’s fact-finding missions to the Middle East was actually a junket organized by the Christian Zionist Philos Project.

After the Esther Call event in DC, Engle’s group sent out an email urging attendees to donate to a consortium of Christian Zionist groups run by an Alabama-based Christian Zionist named Heather Johnston, who also spoke at the Esther Call. On her groups’ websites, Johnston says that her journey progressed from the life of an ordinary Christian mom “to passionately seeking God and the world of international politics.” The flagship program Johnston runs, the US Israel Education Association, has conducted tours to Israel for congressional representatives since 2011. Their promotional materials give off the veneer of neutrality; the website promises, for example, that congresspeople will learn about “efforts to build an integrated economy between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank as a grassroots peace movement.”

In contrast, on social media, Johnston writes about her “risk-taking relationship with Jesus” and waxes hawkish about Israel. Earlier this month in a post about Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the globetrotting chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she called on Biden to “speed up weapons shipments to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs,” noting that there had been “delays due to human rights concerns, but McCaul emphasizes their necessity for Israel’s defense as tensions rise in the Middle East.”

 In her posts, Johnston regularly mixes her own Christianity with a little folksy Judaism—one mini-essay, for example, explains how New Testament characters showed “chutzpah.” Her connections to power brokers are also fodder, as she regularly posts photos of herself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she calls “a dear friend of mine,” “King Bibi,” and a “strategic genius.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, she wrote in a post last November, “is a brilliant leader and God’s favor is resting on Him.”

At the Esther Call event, Johnston read a text message she said she had received from him. “He told me, ‘I genuinely wish I could be there with you today because I believe it has never been more important for us to stand together and pray together for the peace and security of Israel, and to speak with moral clarity about the fateful battle we are in between good and evil, light versus darkness.’”

But her work is not restricted to the US. She also runs an Israel-based group called the National Leadership Center, which trains Israeli youth in leadership skills in partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Education. The group’s headquarters are in the West Bank, which is referred to as “Samaria” on the website. “In the last 13 years there has been a noticeable change in the spiritual climate of the nation,” the group’s promotional materials say. “We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”

“We believe we are contributing to and seeing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy that hearts of stone will be turned to hearts of flesh.”

Another prominent Christian Zionist leader is Michele Bachmann, the former Republican representative from Iowa and 2012 presidential hopeful. Bachmann is a board member of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and earlier this year, she helped found a new institute for studies about Israel at Regent University, a Christian college in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The institute, Bachmann said at its opening, would “help expand national and global understanding of the Jewish state.” Around the same time, Bachmann partnered with Philos Project’s Moon and several other Christian leaders to create the Conference of Presidents of Christian Organizations in Support of Israel. “We’re in a magic moment right now, a very special moment, when I’ve seen more flowering than I’ve ever seen in my life between the Christian community and the Jewish community,” she told the Jewish News Syndicate.

Part of this commitment appears to be a hardline rejection of the rights of Palestinians. Last year, in remarks at a conference hosted by the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, Bachmann said of Palestinians, “They need to be removed from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park.” In an October 2023 appearance in Los Angeles, Bachmann theorized that “wokeness” in Israel prevented the military from anticipating the attack. “It’s entirely possible that perhaps the intel service in Israel also had wokeness and decided not to pass the information along,” she said. She blamed “a spiritual, demonic presence” for the Hamas attack.

Christian Zionism isn’t just happening at the national level. This summer, while I was reporting a story about the New Apostolic Reformation in Pennsylvania, I attended a service at the Lord’s House of Prayer, a NAR-adjacent church in the city of Lancaster. That morning, a young Christian couple from Jerusalem, Yair and Anna Pinto, stood at the pulpit. (They didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article, nor did the Philos Project, Johnson, and Bachmann.) Yair, a fighter with the Israeli Defense Forces who documents his experiences for the Christian media outlet Trinity Broadcasting Network, told us how God had protected him as he rode in a tank through Gaza. Anna talked about misinformation circulating about Hamas’ October 7 massacre.

“They’re just on social media, TikTok University, saying, ‘Oh, here, this is what happened. My poor Palestinian friends, massacred by this great army, the most inhumane army in the world.’” But that was a distortion of reality, she said. The real enemy was Hamas—the opposite of what young people hear on social media. “My heart goes out to the teens because ours is a world where we have people who define themselves as ‘they’ or ‘it’ or a cat or a dog or a unicorn—I think we’ve got a glimpse of this evil, and it’s just spreading, like a root in a tree.”

Some Jewish people welcome the support of Christian Zionists, and it’s not hard to see one compelling reason why: Pastors are fundraising powerhouses, whose contributions are helping to rebuild areas of Israel that are ravaged by the war. According to the Associated Press, in the weeks immediately following Hamas’ attack, John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel raised $3 million to support Israeli first responders. Sean Feucht, a pastor who has organized a series of prayer rallies on the steps of state capitols, led a pro-Israel rally at New York’s Columbia University. (The Philos Project’s Luke Moon was a fellow organizer.)  Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia-based NAR-aligned pastor who served as a spiritual adviser to Trump, recently pledged to donate $15 million to Israel; he has received awards and accolades from Jewish leaders for his efforts to help Israel rebuild after the attacks.

Other Jews bristle at the appropriation of their culture—which, says Moline, of Interfaith Alliance, can feel transactional. For many Christian Zionists, he says “there’s something important in Jewish practice and Jewish belief, and they want to absorb it. They want it to become part of who they are. It increases a sense of legitimacy.” The appropriation can also seem like a bit of a grift: Get your special edition Israeli army shofar here for only $555! Grab a “solidarity mezuzah” to protect your home for just $18! As Moline put it, “It’s like saying to a Catholic, ‘Where can we get some of those communion wafers? They’re so delicious!’”

It can also appear that there is something transactional about Christian Zionists’ support—they need the Jews to hasten the second coming of Christ. Michele Bachmann said in 2015 that she wanted to “convert as many Jews as we can” (though she later apologized). Southern California pastor Jack Hibbs, who presides over the influential Calvary Chapel network of NAR-affiliated churches and was a leader in the Stop the Steal campaign, said on Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk’s TV show last year that Christians must “look past the sins of Israel and the sins of the Jew and give them the hope of Jesus.” As Mother Jones has reported, Hagee of Christians United for Israel said in 1999, “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.” (He also later apologized.) 

Religion historian Daniel Hummel, who leads the Lumen Center religious studies research institute in Madison, Wisconsin, points out that Christian Zionists’ support does not extend to all Jewish people. Christian Zionists, says Hummel, often express scorn for non-religious and cultural Jews. Indeed, even amid all the fetishization of Israel and Judaism at the Esther Call event, some speakers blamed America’s problems on George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has become a target of antisemitic conspiracy theories all over the world. “American Jews are really dividing over whether they should even support Israel,” says Hummel. “And Christian Zionists see this as endemic of a deeper problem within secular liberal Judaism.”

Trump himself has expressed that same disdain for liberal Jews. In 2019, he called Jewish people who vote for Democrats “very disloyal to Israel.” Earlier this year, he said, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

Despite Trump’s seeming ambivalence about American Jews, as the election approaches, NAR pastors seem more convinced than ever that the former president has been divinely to lead the defense of Israel and God’s “chosen people.” Last year, a few weeks after October 7, Engle, the prophet, announced his intention to make Israel “the Goliath” of his crusade (abortion was his “bear,” he said, and the LGBTQ movement was his “lion,” the NAR research X account @SometimesPDX reported.)

This past July, Jentezen Franklin spoke at the prayer breakfast at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, telling the attendees that he believed that God had providentially saved Trump from being assassinated. A month later, at a sermon at the Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, Franklin gave a sermon about godly voting. “Whether we like it or not, [the Jews] are still his chosen people,” he said, holding a Bible up and waving it around emphatically. “God has blessed America because we have blessed and stood with the nation of Israel. And when you vote for anyone who is anti-Israel, you literally are voting against every part of this book, from Genesis to Revelation.”   

At the Esther Call, the dozen or so attendees I talked to all told me that supporting Israel was a top issue for them in the presidential election. Toward the end of the day, I met Donna Neiman, a middle-aged woman who had traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the rally. She was carrying a shofar, and wearing lion earrings, which she said represented Jesus as the “lion of Judah.” Jesus, she said, “was born in Israel. He’s coming back in Israel. And if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you’ve got to watch Israel, because Israel is precious to him. It’s the apple of his eye.” Because of this, she said, Israel was a top concern for her in the election, which was why she had decided to cast her vote for Trump. “It’s Trump—he’s the only one, and he literally got on his knees the day when that that attack came on him, when they tried to shoot his ear,” she said, her voice raspy with emotion. “Yes, that is what it is! He will pray for Israel!”

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in late October, Janelle Stelson, the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, entered Broad Street Market, a historic food hall in Harrisburg. “If I seem a little off,” she explained to me and another reporter, she had just come from a funeral. But now, grasping campaign signs in one hand, she was looking for breakfast among the Caribbean food stalls and Amish bakeries—and some voters.  

Stelson made her way through the market with relentless friendliness, calling out “hey sister!” with her free hand outstretched. After a decades-long career as a local television anchor, she was a familiar face to many. As Stelson greeted passersby, Richard Utley, a retired government employee, told me that he’s “known Janelle a long time,” both from the evening news and from politics. “She’s got the best chance to beat Scott Perry,” he said.

Stelson has tried to make this race a referendum on Scott Perry, the firebrand conservative and six-term incumbent. She argues that Perry has lost sight of his constituents’ needs and come to exemplify the dysfunction in Congress. “The fact that Washington is broken resonates with everyone,” Stelson told me. “They want somebody who’s going to attend to their basic needs.”

In the market, she talked to voters about issues ranging from the rising cost of living to the shortage of reproductive healthcare providers. As Stelson nimbly navigated conversations, I could see how television journalism could provide transferable skills for electoral politics. As an anchor, she reported on these same issues dozens of times. Stelson had also covered this story before: the story of a political challenger making a case for ousting the incumbent. In her black funeral wear, Stelson was warm and effusive, doling out good sound bites. She expertly framed shots for the news photographer, pivoting so her campaign signs always faced the camera as she cooed over babies, hugged the elderly, and examined cookies.  

Pennsylvania has emerged as the center of the political universe, as both presidential campaigns identified it as crucial to their Electoral College math. Doors are brimming with campaign literature, highways are crowded with competing billboards, and voters inundated with automated texts. In the state’s 10th district, Perry is facing his most difficult race yet, and one that may help to determine whether the GOP can hold onto its slim majority in Congress. 

A retired Pennsylvania Army National Guard brigadier general, Perry made a name for himself as a Trump loyalist and former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. As my colleague David Corn wrote in 2021, a Senate Judiciary Committee report revealed that Perry played a crucial role in former president Donald Trump’s effort to recruit Justice Department officials to investigate and overturn 2020 election results. Though the FBI briefly seized his cell phone, Perry has maintained his innocence and insisted that he was never under investigation. Still, his involvement has been costly—FEC reports show that Perry has spent at least $300,000 from his campaign donations on legal fees. Undeterred, Perry has continued to sow doubts about the 2020 election, and, during his only debate with Stelson, repeated false claims that the post office had illegally shredded mail-in ballots. In response, Stelson reiterated that mail-in voting is a “tried and true method.” 

Perry also made national headlines as the Freedom Caucus made it increasingly difficult for the GOP to govern, threatening government shutdowns over spending bills and forcing Kevin McCarthy through 15 rounds of voting to become Speaker of the House—an ultimately short-lived tenure.    

Perry was initially elected in 2013 to the solidly Republican 4th Congressional District. In 2018, Pennsylvania’s congressional districts were completely redrawn by the state Supreme Court, making Perry’s new 10th district much more competitive, and he was reelected by less than three points. In 2022, the district lines were redrawn once again, though much less dramatically, condensing the district around Harrisburg and York. Perry fended off Democratic challengers in 2020 and 2022, both by around seven points. 

The district is fairly emblematic of the state at large: it is 70 percent white, with a median household income of $75,000 and about 35 percent of residents have at least a bachelor’s degree. Democrats say that the population is shifting in their favor. Cumberland and York counties, which are partially included in the district, are among the fastest growing counties in the state. “We’ve seen a lot of farmland convert to housing,” Matt Roan, chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, said. “These people tend to be younger families with higher levels of education.”

Still, Republicans lead Democrats by almost 6 points in party registration, while 14 percent of registered voters are not affiliated with a political party. Trump won the district by 4 points in 2020, but Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro won the newly redrawn district by 12 points in 2022. That was likely in part because Shapiro’s opponent, Doug Mastriano, ran a chaotic and poorly funded campaign and, despite being a Trump stalwart, was largely abandoned by the national party. “I would not underestimate Scott Perry,” Berwood Yost, director of the Floyd Institute for Public Policy Analysis at Franklin & Marshall College, told me. “He is a polished political operator. He knows his district and knows how to talk to voters here.” 

“I would not underestimate Scott Perry. He is a polished political operator. He knows his district and knows how to talk to voters here.” 

Stelson has run a commanding race against Perry, having significantly outspent and outraised him. Campaign finance reports show that Stelson has raised almost $2.5 million this year to Perry’s $800,000. The Cook Political Report just shifted the race towards Democrats, calling it a “toss up,” and one recent poll had Stelson leading by nine points. National Republicans seem to be concerned. Earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared in the district to campaign on Perry’s behalf. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Johnson-sponsored super-PAC, has spent more than $2 million on advertising for Perry ahead of Election Day, according to AdImpact. One of the group’s ads frames Stelson’s immigration stance as extreme, citing a candidate Q&A in which Stelson calls for fixing the asylum system and ensuring pathways to citizenship for Dreamers and “those who have been paying taxes for decades.” The ad’s voiceover declares, “Illegals get the invite, we foot the bill. That’s liberal Janelle Stelson.” 

Perry is the only Freedom Caucus member from the Northeast, and he is among the most vulnerable of the hardline Republicans up for reelection this year. Despite this, Perry has largely doubled down on his positions. “Should I just go along with Washington, DC, as most of my other colleagues did, just to moderate myself?” Perry said to the Associated Press for a recent story on the race. “No, I’m going to do the right thing every single time I have the opportunity.”

If Perry can be beat, Democrats are convinced they finally have the right candidate to do so. Stelson spent 26 years as a broadcast journalist at WGAL, an NBC affiliate based in Lancaster, where she became a mainstay on televisions across the Susquehanna Valley. Throughout the campaign, Stelson has leaned on her journalism experience, arguing that it has given her a unique vantage point on the problems afflicting the region. It also gave her a big boost in recognition: voters knew her name and face long before she announced her candidacy. Stelson won a crowded Democratic primary by twenty points, beating a former US Marine and the Democrats’ 2022 candidate, despite concerns that she lives a few miles outside of district lines. (She has promised to move if she wins the election.)

Stelson has attributed her decision to enter politics to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which she covered as the evening news anchor. “I had to look out into the camera and tell every woman watching that her rights have been rolled back 50 years,” Stelson told me as we sat at a picnic bench outside of the market. She ended up buying some cookies and a berry smoothie, which she periodically sipped while we spoke. She described Perry’s reaction to the Dobbs decision as “ecstatic”—he called it a “monumental victory for the unborn” on X—and pointed out that he has co-sponsored a restrictive abortion measure.

“I just realized at some point that I needed to move from the public service of telling about all our issues and concerns,” Stelson said, “to actually trying to do something about them.”

Stelson seems to relish coming off the sidelines and into the political arena. In an interview with Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett, Stelson said that, as a television anchor, she had moderated two of Perry’s previous debates. “I know where his soft underbelly is,” Stelson told Lovett, laughing. “Imma get him.” 

Stelson was a registered Republican until early 2023 and described her voting history to me as “independent”—she told the Washington Post that she had supported both John McCain and Mitt Romney’s presidential bids. This biographical detail has been helpful in convincing voters that she is a moderate Democrat. When I asked where she differed from the Biden administration, she said to me, “I think even in a really good marriage, you’re never going to agree with the other person all the time.” Stelson critiqued the president’s handling of the southern border, telling me that “we have to secure the border” and increase funding for law enforcement agents. 

As surveys show that Americans are increasingly exhausted by and skeptical about the federal government, both candidates have presented themselves as political outsiders. Stelson’s campaign website calls for fewer “career politicians,” and she says there are few better examples of this particular creature of Washington than her opponent, whom she argues has become more interested in “grandstanding” than addressing the needs of his district. She has pointed out that Perry voted against bills funding healthcare for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and housing homeless veterans—he was the only member of the Pennsylvania delegation to vote against the housing bill. When asked about it during their debate, Perry noted that he had been deployed in Iraq and argued that the bills would have bankrupted the VA, saying, “If everybody’s going to jump off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff?”

Perry has long presented himself as a maverick, telling voters in a recent ad that he “didn’t go to Congress to make friends.” He has argued that he is willing to vote his conscience even when it means angering other Republicans. During their debate, Perry defended his history of voting against spending bills, arguing that uncurbed government spending is contributing to inflation. Perry recently told the Atlantic, “When the stuff that is unaffordable, unnecessary, unwanted, outweighs the stuff that we need, I’m going to vote the way I need to.” 

“When the public sees you as this firebrand, controversial figure, making a pitch that ultimately you are constituent-driven becomes challenging,”.

But when your political brand is built on opposition and obstruction, it’s not easy to point to concrete accomplishments. “When the public sees you as this firebrand, controversial figure, making a pitch that ultimately you are constituent-driven becomes challenging,” Christopher Borick, Director of Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, told me. And Perry has alienated at least some of his Republican base, according to Craig Snyder, a Philadelphia-based consultant who is the director of Republicans Against Perry. The group is funded by the Welcome PAC, which supports moderate Democratic candidates. Snyder said that crossover Republicans will be motivated by a range of issues, from Perry’s election denialism and anti-abortion stance to his “constant support for shutting down the federal government.” 

In addition to appealing to independents, Stelson will need a number of these Republican voters to win. In the time we spent together in Harrisburg, a Democratic stronghold, Stelson encountered no Republican supporters. She likes to say that, “I’m a Republican, and I’m voting for you” are her “favorite words in the English language.” But I did get a sense of how the encounter would go when, outside of the food hall, Stelson met several older women in a tour group from Alabama. “I am running as a Democrat, but I used to be a Republican. So really I’m an American, is what I say,” Stelson told them. “I wish we’d stop this nonsense and work together and get something done.”

In a Southern drawl, one of the women said, “Amen.”