In about two weeks, nearly everyone in this Atlanta conference room will be out of a job. But tonight, on November 5, the Scripps News team has an election to cover.

“Nothing goes on the air unless it gets vetted through the control room, okay?” says Brian Donlon, a New Yorker who tempers his gruff side with wisecracks. As the outlet’s senior director of live programming, he cautions two dozen anchors, writers, producers, and editors a couple of hours before showtime at the organization’s HQ, “It’s not the Wild West.”

Like other newsrooms across the country, Scripps News was bracing for the worst—potential violence, claims of rigged voting, a deluge of disinformation. But it was also wrestling with its own reckoning: the unraveling of its national broadcast news operation and the imminent unemployment of roughly 200 colleagues.

Scripps News is a division of the E.W. Scripps Company, one of the nation’s largest local TV broadcasters and the owner of brands Court TV and Ion Television. Acquired by E.W. Scripps in 2014 under the moniker Newsy, and then rebranded two years ago as Scripps News, it was pitched as a neutral voice in a hyperpolarized media ecosystem, a just-the-facts national alternative for viewers tired of punditry and hyperbole. Available free via digital antennas and on streaming services, the 24/7 news operation racked up awards and accolades for its evenhanded coverage from industry players like the Radio Television Digital News Association and gained a growing audience.

But financially, Scripps News could not outrun the trends decimating the media landscape—dwindling ad dollars and increasing competition from social media, podcasts, Substacks, and partisan outlets. It’s a downward spiral that began with print. Since 2005, a third of newspapers have disappeared while others have been gutted after being swallowed up by venture capital firms; over the past three decades, the number of newspaper reporters in the US has dropped by nearly two-thirds.

National TV news platforms now are facing a similar reckoning. Ad buyers want large audiences, but ratings are falling. Even primetime viewership on election night, broadcast media’s Super Bowl, was down 25 percent across all networks, compared with 2020. CBS and NBC have slashed jobs, while CNN has instituted a new paywall and is reportedly poised for more rounds of layoffs. Many mainstream outlets are also leaning into opinion and divisiveness, none more so than Fox News, which consistently scores the highest ratings. In 2020, Fox pulled out all the stops to help Donald Trump propagate his stolen election claims, and as a result, it was eventually forced to pay Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest-ever media settlements of $787.5 million for amplifying the actually fake news that its technology was used to commit widespread election fraud. Despite the debacle, Fox continues to thrive: In October, Nielsen said the network had marked 91 consecutive quarters as the most-watched cable news channel during primetime hours.

More traditional outlets are “increasingly struggling to reach people on the right, and there are other news outlets that have really sought to cater to them,” says Benjamin Toff, co-author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. “So you have this polarization of news audiences as well, and I think that puts a lot of conventional news organizations that perceive themselves as trying to be politically balanced in an awkward position.” This trend dovetails with social media platforms growing “less and less interested in actually delivering news content,” Toff adds.

In addition to unforgiving market forces, Trump and his allies have relentlessly attacked and attempted to discredit news outlets. Lately, Trump backer Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in undermining mainstream journalism, has joined the action. While frequently blasting out conspiracy theories and misinformation on X, the platform he owns, he has simultaneously worked to sow distrust in the press. Since November 5, he has relentlessly told his more than 205 million followers they are a practical replacement for trained journalists: “You are the media now.”

Scripps News is just one of the latest victims in an industry under siege. By the time you read this, it will have laid off the majority of its staff and dramatically scaled back its mission, no longer operating as a round-the-clock broadcast news source, and transitioning to a local news and streaming-only model. Usually, we learn about the fall of media organizations retrospectively, in postmortems. I wanted to see one in its liminal moment between bustling existence and relative extinction. So I spent Election Day in the Scripps News offices.

As Donlon reaches the end of his talk to a division he’s led since October 2023, in a conference room packed with pensive staff and trays of pasta, he tries to maintain his business-as-usual approach—but nearly falters. “Thirteen months and now we’re here,” Donlon says, his voice cracking. “When we educate one viewer and tell them something they didn’t know the day before, we did our jobs. That’s the job. Let’s go do it.”

Founded in 1878, the E.W. Scripps Company has navigated a century and a half of media evolutions. Starting from a single paper in Cleveland, it would become the nation’s first modern newspaper chain. It then established a wire service in 1907 that competed with the Associated Press. It branched into radio and, after World War II, opened its first local TV news stations. By 2011, the company owned about 20, reaching 13 percent of US households.

In 2015, with online news outlets growing and poaching advertisers, Scripps spun off more than a dozen local newspapers—those ended up with Gannett, which has gutted them—to focus on TV news. Today, Scripps has a presence in 40-plus markets with more than 60 local television stations. Its local programming is supplemented by correspondents stationed around the country.

When Adam Symson took over as CEO in 2017, he had an idea. What if the company drew upon the content its national reporters were already producing for local channels to create a national news division with its own anchors? What if the product was free? What if it delivered information unfiltered by hosts and opinion panels that have come to dominate the cable networks? The model would rival traditional broadcast news channels and attract viewers who didn’t want a cable package but could access this content via antennas or streaming platforms.

“That’s where TikTok competitors don’t matter and social media doesn’t matter, because they’re not always going to be there. We can get there.”

In 2023, Donlon, who had worked for many leading television news companies over a multidecade career and had most recently been an executive producer at Scripps News, took charge of fine-tuning all the live programming. Slowly, the division ramped up its offerings from intermittent live shows on weekdays to a 24/7 operation with an emphasis on breaking news.

“If it’s happening, we’re going no matter what. We are taking the viewer there. We’re going to book the best guests around it, and we’re going to try to get reporters there, because that’s where we can make a difference,” Donlon reminisces about the strategy a few days before election night. “That’s where the TikTok competitors don’t matter and the social media doesn’t matter, because they’re not always going to be there. We can get there.”

Donlon wanted Scripps News to educate viewers without persuading them—even if it came at the expense of attracting a more diehard audience. “I’ve worked at Fox. I’ve worked at MSNBC. And I can’t always say that I left those buildings thinking we served the viewer best,” he tells me. “I can honestly say that I’ve never left here thinking we didn’t do the right thing.”

The commitment to impartial reporting helped reporters connect with viewers across the political spectrum. Sometimes when political correspondent Haley Bull was in the field, people asked her, “Well, which way does your outlet lean?” She tells me she took pride in answering: “I am able to say that we approach our coverage in an objective, fair, unbiased, and balanced manner.”

Of course, sometimes the appearance of balance comes at the price of avoiding the obvious. When a comedian at a Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” Scripps News initially said “many have called [the comment] racist,” instead of just calling it racist. And last summer, a three-minute segment recapping the June debate that led to Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race made little mention of how poorly he performed or how decrepit he appeared.

Nevertheless, viewers were responding to Scripps’ understated approach. Streaming viewership increased more than 40 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to Scripps News Vice President Christina Hartman. Viewership of Morning Rush, a Today Show alternative, jumped 73 percent from December 2023 to September 2024. America Tonight had its best month ever this past September, with a 61 percent increase in viewers compared with the show’s debut in May. As its audience grew, Scripps News earned recognition. Two days before Symson announced the division would face major layoffs, Scripps News won an Emmy for its reporting on the residents of Flint, Michigan, who still don’t have lead-free water. Later, Scripps took home two prestigious Edward R. Murrow awards, which honor excellence in broadcasting.

“That’s the hardest part about this whole process,” says America Tonight host Maritsa Georgiou, who was part of the layoffs. “We got to a place where we were hitting these marks. Our viewership was growing every month. Show ratings are doing great.”

But the ratings didn’t translate to a balanced budget, which came as a surprise to Symson. A former reporter himself, he had seen major corporations, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, pledge to double down on supporting the pillars of our democracy, including the media. Seeing an opening, he embarked on a “personal quest to leverage their words to spawn conversations about how they could step up now,” he says. “I had conversations directly with the CEOs and CMOs of some of America’s largest companies, trying to draw the line between the important role that journalism plays and what we were doing at Scripps News and how they were spending their ad dollars­—and I failed.”

Companies can buy ads anywhere. Faced with the choice of marketing their products next to coverage of war, famine, and political strife or during sitcoms or football games, guess which one they’ll pick. The fewer viewers an outlet gets, the less likely a company is to risk being highlighted next to news that generally bums people out. “When push came to shove,” Symson notes, ad buyers were “uncomfortable putting their dollars to work around the news.”

While E.W. Scripps’ local news stations and entertainment assets were profitable, Scripps News was posting huge losses that contributed to a precipitous decline in the company’s share price; it slid from $20 three years ago to a low of $1.74 this past September.

“We were losing millions upon millions upon millions at a time when E.W. Scripps became increasingly unable to support that kind of loss,” says Hartman, who says she was responsible for decreasing the team’s expenses and increasing the product’s revenue. “When I look at our weekly broadcast revenue, we’re more than doubling what last year was. We could have tripled it, and it still wouldn’t have closed that gap.”

In retrospect, Georgiou says there were signs the budget was growing tighter. Then, on the morning of September 27, a blog post warning that Scripps News was headed for layoffs began circulating in employee group chats. Quickly thereafter, Symson convened a town hall and delivered the bad news.

With about 200 positions eliminated, approximately 60 people will remain at Scripps News. They will continue to report and package political, investigative, and national news segments that appear on and complement E.W. Scripps’ local stations. Sans anchors, the standalone news packages will be available on streaming platforms. Matt Simon, the vice president of news leading the leaner unit, says that by focusing on streaming, Scripps will be able to glean better metrics on the types of reporting that attracts viewers.

“Going straight to streaming as our primary and, in many cases, sole distribution is going to enable us to make sure we’re delivering to consumers and viewers the news that they need and want,” he says.

Donlon, who departed in mid-­November with most of his team, isn’t sold on the viability of the new strategy. “Frankly, I have not been involved with the development of that product at all,” he says. “I wish they would have involved me. I probably would have made some different suggestions, at least on personnel, but I wasn’t consulted.”

CEO Symson is also unsure whether streaming news segments will translate to profit. But his qualms have nothing to do with the quality of reporting. “I know for a fact that our journalism will continue to serve the industry and serve the country,” he says. “I think what I worry about is whether the American people are willing consumers.”

A few hours after the last production meeting, election results begin to trickle in to Scripps’ darkened control room. A writer drafts teleprompter scripts for the anchors, producers keep the live banners fresh, and a director seamlessly toggles among 14 journalists in the field.

Twenty different conversations are happening at once. The person making sense of them all is Donlon. Sometime around 8:15 p.m., he tells the team to pivot from focusing on the anchor desk to covering a press conference where law enforcement officials were discussing bomb threats made to more than two dozen Georgia voting sites. In a studio down the hall, host Georgiou asks a guest to “very quickly” answer an unrelated election question before cutting over. “No, no, no,” Donlon mutters in the control room, wanting his team to cut away. “There’s no such thing as very quickly.”

Within seconds, a control room producer starts to phase in instrumental music to cut off Georgiou and her guest. It is a master class in controlled chaos, and it takes only three words to make it happen. Nobody breaks a sweat.

When brief lulls allow, Donlon compliments his team’s hard work and ­repeatedly asks whether they would like more pasta. If he could, he tells me that night, he would have offered them stable jobs instead. Departing anchor Georgiou describes the depressing circumstances as “working through a funeral—our own.”

“The professionalism shining through has been heartwarming,” says Simon, “but also incredibly heart-wrenching—knowing that when the election starts to get resolved, people will stop having a place to work.”

Although the results of the presidential race were clear by early Wednesday morning, Scripps News had prepared for a repeat of the chaotic 2020 race, when the winner wasn’t determined for nearly a week. Because of the impending layoffs, the newsroom had already wound down some of its programming and wasn’t scheduled to broadcast live over the weekend. The previous week, Donlon had asked his team if anyone would be willing, on their own time, to staff an emergency show if necessary. He needed 12 people; more than 30 volunteered.

Kate O’Brian, president of news, who was to depart Scripps at the end of 2024, wasn’t surprised. “There will be emotions that are connected to what’s happening to them and their jobs,” she says, “but I bet they are way pushed down while we do the work.”

“You don’t have time to cry now,” she adds. “You cry later.”

In about two weeks, nearly everyone in this Atlanta conference room will be out of a job. But tonight, on November 5, the Scripps News team has an election to cover.

“Nothing goes on the air unless it gets vetted through the control room, okay?” says Brian Donlon, a New Yorker who tempers his gruff side with wisecracks. As the outlet’s senior director of live programming, he cautions two dozen anchors, writers, producers, and editors a couple of hours before showtime at the organization’s HQ, “It’s not the Wild West.”

Like other newsrooms across the country, Scripps News was bracing for the worst—potential violence, claims of rigged voting, a deluge of disinformation. But it was also wrestling with its own reckoning: the unraveling of its national broadcast news operation and the imminent unemployment of roughly 200 colleagues.

Scripps News is a division of the E.W. Scripps Company, one of the nation’s largest local TV broadcasters and the owner of brands Court TV and Ion Television. Acquired by E.W. Scripps in 2014 under the moniker Newsy, and then rebranded two years ago as Scripps News, it was pitched as a neutral voice in a hyperpolarized media ecosystem, a just-the-facts national alternative for viewers tired of punditry and hyperbole. Available free via digital antennas and on streaming services, the 24/7 news operation racked up awards and accolades for its evenhanded coverage from industry players like the Radio Television Digital News Association and gained a growing audience.

But financially, Scripps News could not outrun the trends decimating the media landscape—dwindling ad dollars and increasing competition from social media, podcasts, Substacks, and partisan outlets. It’s a downward spiral that began with print. Since 2005, a third of newspapers have disappeared while others have been gutted after being swallowed up by venture capital firms; over the past three decades, the number of newspaper reporters in the US has dropped by nearly two-thirds.

National TV news platforms now are facing a similar reckoning. Ad buyers want large audiences, but ratings are falling. Even primetime viewership on election night, broadcast media’s Super Bowl, was down 25 percent across all networks, compared with 2020. CBS and NBC have slashed jobs, while CNN has instituted a new paywall and is reportedly poised for more rounds of layoffs. Many mainstream outlets are also leaning into opinion and divisiveness, none more so than Fox News, which consistently scores the highest ratings. In 2020, Fox pulled out all the stops to help Donald Trump propagate his stolen election claims, and as a result, it was eventually forced to pay Dominion Voting Systems one of the largest-ever media settlements of $787.5 million for amplifying the actually fake news that its technology was used to commit widespread election fraud. Despite the debacle, Fox continues to thrive: In October, Nielsen said the network had marked 91 consecutive quarters as the most-watched cable news channel during primetime hours.

More traditional outlets are “increasingly struggling to reach people on the right, and there are other news outlets that have really sought to cater to them,” says Benjamin Toff, co-author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism. “So you have this polarization of news audiences as well, and I think that puts a lot of conventional news organizations that perceive themselves as trying to be politically balanced in an awkward position.” This trend dovetails with social media platforms growing “less and less interested in actually delivering news content,” Toff adds.

In addition to unforgiving market forces, Trump and his allies have relentlessly attacked and attempted to discredit news outlets. Lately, Trump backer Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in undermining mainstream journalism, has joined the action. While frequently blasting out conspiracy theories and misinformation on X, the platform he owns, he has simultaneously worked to sow distrust in the press. Since November 5, he has repeatedly told his more than 205 million followers they are a practical replacement for trained journalists: “You are the media now.”

Scripps News is just one of the latest victims in an industry under siege. By the time you read this, it will have laid off the majority of its staff and dramatically scaled back its mission, no longer operating as a round-the-clock broadcast news source, and transitioning to a local news and streaming-only model. Usually, we learn about the fall of media organizations retrospectively, in postmortems. I wanted to see one in its liminal moment between bustling existence and relative extinction. So I spent Election Day in the Scripps News offices.

As Donlon reaches the end of his talk to a division he’s led since October 2023, in a conference room packed with pensive staff and trays of pasta, he tries to maintain his business-as-usual approach—but nearly falters. “Thirteen months and now we’re here,” Donlon says, his voice cracking. “When we educate one viewer and tell them something they didn’t know the day before, we did our jobs. That’s the job. Let’s go do it.”

Founded in 1878, the E.W. Scripps Company has navigated a century and a half of media evolutions. Starting from a single paper in Cleveland, it would become the nation’s first modern newspaper chain. It then established a wire service in 1907 that competed with the Associated Press. It branched into radio and, after World War II, opened its first local TV news stations. By 2011, the company owned about 20, reaching 13 percent of US households.

In 2015, with online news outlets growing and poaching advertisers, Scripps spun off more than a dozen local newspapers—those ended up with Gannett, which has gutted them—to focus on TV news. Today, Scripps has a presence in 40-plus markets with more than 60 local television stations. Its local programming is supplemented by correspondents stationed around the country.

When Adam Symson took over as CEO in 2017, he had an idea. What if the company drew upon the content its national reporters were already producing for local channels to create a national news division with its own anchors? What if the product was free? What if it delivered information unfiltered by hosts and opinion panels that have come to dominate the cable networks? The model would rival traditional broadcast news channels and attract viewers who didn’t want a cable package but could access this content via antennas or streaming platforms.

“That’s where TikTok competitors don’t matter and social media doesn’t matter, because they’re not always going to be there. We can get there.”

In 2023, Donlon, who had worked for many leading television news companies over a multidecade career and had most recently been an executive producer at Scripps News, took charge of fine-tuning all the live programming. Slowly, the division ramped up its offerings from intermittent live shows on weekdays to a 24/7 operation with an emphasis on breaking news.

“If it’s happening, we’re going no matter what. We are taking the viewer there. We’re going to book the best guests around it, and we’re going to try to get reporters there, because that’s where we can make a difference,” Donlon reminisces about the strategy a few days before election night. “That’s where the TikTok competitors don’t matter and the social media doesn’t matter, because they’re not always going to be there. We can get there.”

Donlon wanted Scripps News to educate viewers without persuading them—even if it came at the expense of attracting a more diehard audience. “I’ve worked at Fox. I’ve worked at MSNBC. And I can’t always say that I left those buildings thinking we served the viewer best,” he tells me. “I can honestly say that I’ve never left here thinking we didn’t do the right thing.”

The commitment to impartial reporting helped reporters connect with viewers across the political spectrum. Sometimes when political correspondent Haley Bull was in the field, people asked her, “Well, which way does your outlet lean?” She tells me she took pride in answering: “I am able to say that we approach our coverage in an objective, fair, unbiased, and balanced manner.”

Of course, sometimes the appearance of balance comes at the price of avoiding the obvious. When a comedian at a Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” Scripps News initially said “many have called [the comment] racist,” instead of just calling it racist. And last summer, a three-minute segment recapping the June debate that led to Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race made little mention of how poorly he performed or how decrepit he appeared.

Nevertheless, viewers were responding to Scripps’ understated approach. Streaming viewership increased more than 40 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to Scripps News Vice President Christina Hartman. Viewership of Morning Rush, a Today Show alternative, jumped 73 percent from December 2023 to September 2024. America Tonight had its best month ever this past September, with a 61 percent increase in viewers compared with the show’s debut in May. As its audience grew, Scripps News earned recognition. Two days before Symson announced the division would face major layoffs, Scripps News won an Emmy for its reporting on the residents of Flint, Michigan, who still don’t have lead-free water. Later, Scripps took home two prestigious Edward R. Murrow awards, which honor excellence in broadcasting.

“That’s the hardest part about this whole process,” says America Tonight host Maritsa Georgiou, who was part of the layoffs. “We got to a place where we were hitting these marks. Our viewership was growing every month. Show ratings are doing great.”

But the ratings didn’t translate to a balanced budget, which came as a surprise to Symson. A former reporter himself, he had seen major corporations, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, pledge to double down on supporting the pillars of our democracy, including the media. Seeing an opening, he embarked on a “personal quest to leverage their words to spawn conversations about how they could step up now,” he says. “I had conversations directly with the CEOs and CMOs of some of America’s largest companies, trying to draw the line between the important role that journalism plays and what we were doing at Scripps News and how they were spending their ad dollars­—and I failed.”

Companies can buy ads anywhere. Faced with the choice of marketing their products next to coverage of war, famine, and political strife or during sitcoms or football games, guess which one they’ll pick. The fewer viewers an outlet gets, the less likely a company is to risk being highlighted next to news that generally bums people out. “When push came to shove,” Symson notes, ad buyers were “uncomfortable putting their dollars to work around the news.”

While E.W. Scripps’ local news stations and entertainment assets were profitable, Scripps News was posting huge losses that contributed to a precipitous decline in the company’s share price; it slid from $20 three years ago to a low of $1.74 this past September.

“We were losing millions upon millions upon millions at a time when E.W. Scripps became increasingly unable to support that kind of loss,” says Hartman, who says she was responsible for decreasing the team’s expenses and increasing the product’s revenue. “When I look at our weekly broadcast revenue, we’re more than doubling what last year was. We could have tripled it, and it still wouldn’t have closed that gap.”

In retrospect, Georgiou says there were signs the budget was growing tighter. Then, on the morning of September 27, a blog post warning that Scripps News was headed for layoffs began circulating in employee group chats. Quickly thereafter, Symson convened a town hall and delivered the bad news.

With about 200 positions eliminated, approximately 60 people will remain at Scripps News. They will continue to report and package political, investigative, and national news segments that appear on and complement E.W. Scripps’ local stations. Sans anchors, the standalone news packages will be available on streaming platforms. Matt Simon, the vice president of news leading the leaner unit, says that by focusing on streaming, Scripps will be able to glean better metrics on the types of reporting that attracts viewers.

“Going straight to streaming as our primary and, in many cases, sole distribution is going to enable us to make sure we’re delivering to consumers and viewers the news that they need and want,” he says.

Donlon, who departed in mid-­November with most of his team, isn’t sold on the viability of the new strategy. “Frankly, I have not been involved with the development of that product at all,” he says. “I wish they would have involved me. I probably would have made some different suggestions, at least on personnel, but I wasn’t consulted.”

CEO Symson is also unsure whether streaming news segments will translate to profit. But his qualms have nothing to do with the quality of reporting. “I know for a fact that our journalism will continue to serve the industry and serve the country,” he says. “I think what I worry about is whether the American people are willing consumers.”

A few hours after the last production meeting, election results begin to trickle in to Scripps’ darkened control room. A writer drafts teleprompter scripts for the anchors, producers keep the live banners fresh, and a director seamlessly toggles among 14 journalists in the field.

Twenty different conversations are happening at once. The person making sense of them all is Donlon. Sometime around 8:15 p.m., he tells the team to pivot from focusing on the anchor desk to covering a press conference where law enforcement officials were discussing bomb threats made to more than two dozen Georgia voting sites. In a studio down the hall, host Georgiou asks a guest to “very quickly” answer an unrelated election question before cutting over. “No, no, no,” Donlon mutters in the control room, wanting his team to cut away. “There’s no such thing as very quickly.”

Within seconds, a control room producer starts to phase in instrumental music to cut off Georgiou and her guest. It is a master class in controlled chaos, and it takes only three words to make it happen. Nobody breaks a sweat.

When brief lulls allow, Donlon compliments his team’s hard work and ­repeatedly asks whether they would like more pasta. If he could, he tells me that night, he would have offered them stable jobs instead. Departing anchor Georgiou describes the depressing circumstances as “working through a funeral—our own.”

“The professionalism shining through has been heartwarming,” says Simon, “but also incredibly heart-wrenching—knowing that when the election starts to get resolved, people will stop having a place to work.”

Although the results of the presidential race were clear by early Wednesday morning, Scripps News had prepared for a repeat of the chaotic 2020 race, when the winner wasn’t determined for nearly a week. Because of the impending layoffs, the newsroom had already wound down some of its programming and wasn’t scheduled to broadcast live over the weekend. The previous week, Donlon had asked his team if anyone would be willing, on their own time, to staff an emergency show if necessary. He needed 12 people; more than 30 volunteered.

Kate O’Brian, president of news, who was to depart Scripps at the end of 2024, wasn’t surprised. “There will be emotions that are connected to what’s happening to them and their jobs,” she says, “but I bet they are way pushed down while we do the work.”

“You don’t have time to cry now,” she adds. “You cry later.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown—and with him, any sense that Ohio was still a swing state.

Brown, who served three terms, maintained an edge for most of his US Senate reelection bid against Moreno, a former luxury car dealership owner from Colombia. But in the end, a windfall of cash from national Republican groups boosted Moreno over the top. Just before midnight, Moreno lead Brown by 5 points.

It’s not surprising that a Republican would win a Senate seat in Ohio, but the fact that this particular Republican beat a well-liked incumbent suggests how much Ohio has changed in less than a decade.

As a Rust Belt state devastated by deindustrialization, automation, and in recent years, an epidemic of drug addiction, Ohio tends to gravitate toward candidates who are dutiful in their support for middle-class and working-class voters. But Moreno doesn’t have a pro-worker reputation: As we previously reported, he was found liable for withholding wages from employees and was sanctioned by a judge for disposing of documents relevant to that case. He additionally faced lawsuits from former employees who accused him of racial, gender, and age discrimination. More recently, he’s blocked voters from recording his events by using audio jammers.

Moreno also struggled to refine his message on reproductive rights, a topic 57 percent of Ohio voters said they supported in 2023 when they approved a ballot measure enshrining abortion access. “You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said in a leaked video from a recent town hall. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else,'” Moreno mocked. “OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, but—especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.'”

But Moreno did have something Brown could never dream of—nor desire: an endorsement from Donald Trump. That endorsement was likely pivotal for Moreno, says Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. It gave him the edge against state Sen. Matt Dolan, a more traditional Republican who was Moreno’s biggest competition in the primary race. With no political experience and, until recently, not much name recognition, “he doesn’t really have a strong track record” otherwise, Beck says.

While Brown is a political progressive—supporting LGBTQ rights and reproductive freedoms—he has maintained a healthy distance from the rest of his party in recent months. He didn’t campaign with Harris. He stayed home this summer while fellow Democrats threw their celebratory, celebrity-filled nominating convention in Chicago. Brown also garnered the endorsement of the only Republican who ever defeated him in an election: former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who bested Brown as he sought reelection as Ohio’s secretary of state in 1990.

Known for sporting union-made suits and driving union-made cars, Brown’s 2024 campaign also attracted long-standing appreciation from prominent labor union leaders. The senator often wears a canary pin on his lapel to symbolize 20th-century coal miners who were subjected to dangerous working conditions before collective bargaining advanced job safety.

His populist persona and these contradictions are the same ones that helped Brown win the Senate seat three times in 2006, 2012, and 2018. It’s not that Brown has changed. It’s that Ohio has.

Ohio used to be a political microcosm of the country. Without fail, between 1964 and 2016, Ohio’s presidential pick was also the nation’s choice of president. The consistency inspired the phrase, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”

In the early 2000s, the state’s population growth began lagging behind the rest of the country. Over time, Ohio became less educated, older, whiter—and, accordingly, redder. When Trump ran in 2016, his brash, America First persona appealed to Ohioans who felt they had been forgotten by elite politicians prioritizing globalism over their kitchen-table issues. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump won the state by more than 8 points. That trend has continued this cycle: As of 11:30 pm ET, Trump was nearly 12 points ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Ohio.

In the end, Brown’s legislative history and broad coalition of blue-collar devotees couldn’t propel him to a fourth term. In today’s Ohio, only Trump’s support mattered.

Back in June, during the CNN debate, former president Donald Trump said something very important: He promised to accept the results of the 2024 race in November if it is a “fair and legal and good election.”

How does Trump define those terms? In 2020, he felt the election was not legitimate because he did not win. This year, he seems to have a similar calculus, saying he wants his victory to be “too big to rig.” But unlike the last presidential cycle, in which Trump’s camp filed 60-plus lawsuits asserting widespread fraud in hopes of overturning the results after the election was over, the strategy in 2024 is not haphazard and reactive. Spearheaded by the Republican National Committee, it has involved dozens of pre-election lawsuits that seem largely designed to generate voter distrust.

“It’s a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall—kind of like everything everywhere, all at once. Plaintiffs can file lots of similarly dubious claims in the courts and then “see if they can get anyone, any judge, to validate them after the fact.”

“At the end of the day, these lawsuits are PR campaigns in legal wrapping paper. They don’t reflect real legal concerns. They’re designed to create chaos,” says Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the pro-democracy group States United. “After the fact, when the results come in—if they don’t like the results—they have an easier time undermining them.”

As I reported in the September-October issue of Mother Jones, the RNC has laid the groundwork this year to say the election was not properly conducted by filing a deluge of lawsuits alleging illegal voting and illicit election schemes. Experts fear the RNC and far-right groups will point to their pre-election lawsuits as proof they warned the election was rigged before it even started—opening the door for even more lawsuits challenging the results that could eventually make their way to a sympathetic court.

“It’s a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall—kind of like everything everywhere, all at once,” says Lydgate, who formerly served as the chief deputy attorney general of Massachusetts. Plaintiffs can file lots of similarly dubious claims in the courts and then, Lydgate says, “see if they can get anyone, any judge, to validate them after the fact.”

While both political parties have filed pre- and post-election lawsuits on procedural matters over the years, many of the new claims conservatives are filing “really feel like they’re of a different ilk,” says Nora Benavidez, a civil rights and free speech attorney. Citing court cases that aim to challenge voter statuses, Benavidez says this crop of lawsuits is an attempt to “narrow opportunities for people to vote” while also insinuating that the process “needs to be shored up to fight corruption.”

Lawsuits challenging voter eligibility have repeatedly been dismissed by state and federal judges. Some of the cases about voter rolls were even launched after the statutory 90-day window before an election closes, at which point states can’t alter voter rolls. Some of the suits aren’t even seeking immediate relief, begging the question of why the lawsuits were filed at all.

Danielle Lang, senior voting rights director at Campaign Legal Center, says the agenda is obvious: “I have no doubt that those who are trying to sabotage or undermine an election might use any number of talking points to do so, including pointing it to frivolous lawsuits that they filed way too late.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), isn’t hiding the ball here. In an October interview with the New York Times, Vance bragged that the RNC has “filed almost 100 lawsuits at the RNC” to ensure votes are counted correctly. They define “correctly” differently than experts do.

Republicans in multiple states have tried to challenge procedures for handling ballots from military members and other voters who live abroad. In Pennsylvania, a lawsuit from six GOP members of Congress sought to impose additional checks on the eligibility and identity of overseas military members and expat citizens. (Since 2016, overseas citizens make up a bigger share of the combined cohort than overseas military members and their families; this may lead Republicans to think the overseas population favors Democrats.) A federal judge threw out the lawsuit Tuesday and criticized the congressional members for filing the suit so close to Election Day. The plaintiffs “provide no good excuse for waiting until barely a month before the election to bring this lawsuit,” the judge wrote. Other judges dismissed comparable lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina about overseas voters within the last month.

In both Nevada and Michigan, the RNC has claimed that voting rolls are glutted with ineligible voters, who may cast ballots on Election Day that dilute the opinions of genuine voters. Those cases were dismissed in October, but a similar case challenging voter rolls was filed in Arizona by the 1789 Foundation, a right-wing group run by a lawyer known for lawsuits opposing vaccine mandates. On October 30, well after the 90-day window to remove voters passed, the group alleged Arizona is allowing up to 1.2 million ineligible voters to remain on its rolls illegally. That case is ongoing.

While unlikely to work on a broad scale, this legal onslaught can still have an impact. By filing lawsuits alleging improper voter roll maintenance or unlawful election procedures, the plaintiffs are necessitating that already-overburdened election officials spend time proving that the lawsuits are meritless.

The lawsuits also give the conspiracy of systemic election fraud a false sense of credibility. People not incredibly familiar with the legal system may be inclined to believe a legal complaint has merit just because it was filed in court, and not understand that people can claim almost anything in lawsuits.

It’s also not implausible that the plaintiffs could find a court that accepts their theories, no matter how legally flawed or politically motivated.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court suggested it is open to questionable arguments, when it overturned decisions from two lower courts and allowed Virginia’s Republican leaders to proceed (at least temporarily) with efforts to purge 1,600 people from its voter rolls. This is seemingly at odds with the 90-day window before elections in which federal law bars states from changing these lists.

The Supreme Court did not provide justification for its decision, from which the court’s three liberal justices dissented.

It’s unlikely the presidential campaigns will be fully settled when the polls close Tuesday. If the legal blitz is anything like 2020—and there’s ample evidence to suggest it may be worse—courts will get an opportunity to vote on election matters, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Scott, a West Point graduate with an MBA and a background in finance, ran for Broward County elections supervisor in 2020. At the time, he thought his previous stints as an account manager for a technology company and a facilities administrator at a health care firm would make him a “good fit” for a job that would ostensibly preoccupy him with a mélange of humdrum desk-work.

He was surprised, however, to find how much his military experience in Iraq would come in handy.

With an unhurried demeanor, a lanyard, and a warm smile, Scott comes across more like a beloved social studies teacher moonlighting as a football coach than a soldier. But in the late-2000s, he was an Army captain embedded with the Iraqi military during some of the country’s earliest democratically run elections. In an effort to prepare for hotspots of unrest, the Iraqi leadership of Scott’s battalion pitched going door to door to ask locals how they planned to vote; Scott had to explain to the officer that having uniformed and armed Iraqi military members interrogate locals about their voting plans was “not a good look.”

“It was a different world,” he says of the Middle Eastern country’s shaky, fledgling democracy. “Although,” he adds, “America is kind of moving that way.”

The day after Scott was sworn in as Broward’s elections supervisor, in January 2021, election deniers—incited by Trump’s lies about a stolen election—stormed the US Capitol. He called his wife to ask if she was watching the news. “The Handmaid’s Tale is going down right now,” he recalls telling her. “This is real, right?”

He realized then that in the fleeting moments between the end of his campaign and first week of his new role, the job of “being an election official really changed.”

In the months and years since Trump turbocharged election angst, Scott has had to deal with politically motivated actors spreading misleading information about voting procedures and conspiracy-slinging citizens, some of whom have made physical threats against him and his staff. His experience is not the exception but the norm among the people who have taken up this line of work.

Nearly 40 percent of local election workers have experienced harassment or abuse, according to a recent survey conducted by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Dozens of threats have been so serious as to warrant full FBI investigations, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which noted these threats were concentrated in the states Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. Multiple election officials have even been victims of “swatting,” a dangerous hoax in which a caller reports a fake crime with the intention of triggering a substantial law enforcement response at the home or workplace of their unsuspecting target. These tactics don’t only put election workers at risk, they also intimidate voters. A year after the January 6 attack, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism asked Americans whether they felt safe at voting locations. Fewer than half said yes.

But if elections are becoming increasingly unhinged, election officials are also making significant efforts to improve their institutions and the public’s trust in them. Clerks and supervisors are fortifying their physical structures with bulletproof glass and GPS-tracked ballot bags and dedicated power supplies and motion detectors. They’re collaborating with law enforcement, and with one another, about how to prepare for and respond to threats in the first presidential race since Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters tried to overturn the 2020 election’s results. This time around, officials like Scott are hoping for a more tranquil transition period. But they’ve also prepared for the worst.

Scott recently showed me around his new election headquarters, which serves as a processing center for vote-by-mail ballots, the recount site for elections that are within half a percentage point, and the place where paper ballots are scanned into Broward’s auditing system. With security guards, a gated parking lot, badge-entry doors classified by clearance level, and windows for inquisitive (or incredulous) civilians to watch over ballot processing, the $103 million building was hardened to withstand both Category 5 hurricanes—and the growing ranks of election conspiracists. Scott notes the building’s design was an exercise in balancing the public’s desire for election transparency with everyone’s need for physical safety. He had managed similar dynamics before.

“Part of my tour in Iraq was preparing for and making sure that those elections went off without any major security things happening,” Scott tells Mother Jones about his service, which earned him a Bronze Star Medal and a Combat Action Badge. “We wanted to make sure people felt safe going to the polling places.”

Nearly 20 years later, that’s exactly what he and fellow US election workers are doing domestically.

Last month, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package intercepted by a postal center. Its contents included an unknown powder; its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.” The FBI is investigating its origins.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package with an unknown powder—its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.”

She said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she received since last September. pic.twitter.com/i7C84mQdEd

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 28, 2024

Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she has received since last September. One extremist made a threat to her life while she was in the hospital having a C-section; other threats have been sexual in nature. But rather than panic about potential election-related violence, Griswold has channeled her efforts into preventing it.

“We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters.”

The 40-year-old has worked to reform Colorado’s election landscape, including championing the passage of state election laws, among them one that made it a felony to compromise voting equipment. That was something former Colorado election worker Tina Peters did in 2021 when she allowed an unauthorized person to access data from election machines, images from which were eventually posted on conspiracy-riddled websites. (Peters was recently sentenced to nine years in prison.) Other new regulations Griswold has backed have made it illegal to retaliate against election workers and to have guns near election sites.

Since 2020, Griswold has made available at least $5 million in grant money for more physical security at election sites, which has allowed counties to take measures such as installing bulletproof glass or having Narcan on hand in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon. “We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters,” she tells me. “There is no reason we should have to be planning for these domestic conspiracies and the effect it has on our elections, but we have to.”

Election officials elsewhere have been similarly proactive. In St. Charles County, Missouri, the only thing that separated in-person absentee voters from elections staff in 2020 was a row of desks. Kurt Bahr, the county’s Republican director of elections, recently installed a full wall with a locking door and customer service windows to provide a barrier so his employees “feel more secure in case any voter is overly agitated.”

Sante Fe, New Mexico’s clerk has installed GPS tracking devices on all traveling ballot bags. In case someone alleges fake ballots were introduced into the closed system, clerk Katharine Clark can say, “Au contraire. I have this dashboard, and that shows me exactly where my ballot bags are.”

Clark, a Democrat, has also added an accelerometer that measures vibration inside her county’s ballot tabulator to decipher if anyone improperly touched it overnight. Further, her county is issuing personal alert devices for all presiding judges and has hired additional security that will “have eyes and ears on all the public sites.”

One of the remaining challenges election officials face is deciding when a disturbance reaches a threshold that requires the help of law enforcement. “It’s kind of like the definition of pornography,” says Bahr of Missouri. “You know it when you see it.”

Tina Barton has made it her mission to foster coordination between law enforcement and election officials. She learned the importance of this when she became the target of conspiracy-crazed election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, she walked into her fluorescent-light filled office at Rochester Hills, Michigan City Hall, where she had served as the city’s election clerk for eight years. She saw a blinking light on her desk line. It was a voicemail from an unknown caller.

“Ten million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it, and your little infantile Deep State security agency has no time to protect you…We’ll fucking kill you,” said the voice, which also threatened bringing a knife to Barton’s throat. “You will fucking pay for your fucking lying-ass remarks…We will fucking take you out. Fuck your family, fuck your life.”

The culprit was eventually identified as Carmel, Indiana’s Andrew Nickels, who has since been sentenced to 14 months in prison; but the victim of the call was effectively hand-selected by the Republican National Committee. After Michigan was called for Biden, then–RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed that fraud had abounded in the state, and case in point were the “2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats but were Republican ballots,” said McDaniels at a press conference on November 6. “And this took place in Rochester Hills.”

There was a minor issue in Rochester Hills, but it was discovered and corrected well before Nickels left the voicemail. Around 1 a.m. the day after the election, Barton—who had at that point worked more than 18 hours straight—noticed that the county’s website showed a handful of absentee precincts from her county were not showing up. She informed the county, whose officials said they had not received one of Barton’s files. She ran a report and discovered the file was not missing, but saved under the wrong name.

The county advised Barton that the solution was to purge the old file and rerun the absentee precincts, then save that information under the correct file name. But within 24 hours of that step on Wednesday, it was discovered that both files had somehow been added to the county’s total. Immediately, before noon on Thursday, the incorrect file was removed from the system.

Even if the issue was not corrected—it was—Biden won the state by more than 150,000 votes: roughly double the number of people who live in Rochester Hills. An audit led by Republican state legislators would later confirm, in June 2021, that Michigan’s elections were lawfully run, and that temporary mishaps didn’t affect final outcomes. All the while, Barton was perpetually on edge. At the grocery store, she’d think, “Did that person walk too close to me? Why are they everywhere that I’m going?” she tells me. “You become hyper-vigilant about every single thing, and start to view every single thing in person as a possible threat. And that can be really overwhelming.”

While investigators were still working to identify her aggressor, a group called the Center for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE) was forming in response to threats against election officials like Barton. It was founded in 2022 by a cross-partisan group of current and former national, state, and local election officials, members of law enforcement, as well as nonprofits across the political spectrum. Barton, a Republican who has since left her election clerk role, is now a vice chair.

Over the last two years, she’s convened nearly 150 CSSE training sessions across more than 35 states, bringing together thousands of election workers, members of law enforcement, facilities managers, hazmat teams, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and more to help the various stakeholders preemptively form lines of communication among themselves in preparation for what used to be extraordinary complications: Reports of mysterious substances, menacing phone calls, open-carry demonstrations outside polling sites, accusations of non-citizens voting, bomb threats, and more.

Barton and her co-instructor, former Sheriff for Larimer County, Colorado, Justin Smith, travel to various jurisdictions, pose hypotheticals emergencies such as these, and break the attendees into randomized groups to strategize best practices. “Then we’ll take that opportunity after we’ve heard what they’ve said to see if we have some more things to either challenge them on, or to push their thinking on,” Barton says. CSSE has also made instructional videos and guides for groups and officials who can’t facilitate in-person training.

Election workers, many of whom have already been threatened, are usually eager to accept CSSE’s guidance. But in the beginning, it was sometimes a harder sell to law enforcement personnel, who generally feared engaging in anything political and didn’t realize how rampant election-related intimidation had become. Smith would help convince them by comparing the need for police engagement in election settings with the need for police in school settings.

There were school shootings before Columbine, but the 1999 tragedy was an “awakening period” during which both law enforcement educators realized they needed to work together to prevent future catastrophes. Similarly, Smith says, “2020 was not the first time we were having problems in elections,” but the scale of chaos from that cycle was a turning point requiring groups like CSSE to help bridge the divides between the various relevant parties.

Barton and Smith’s work is just one part of a growing movement in which individuals are collaborating across professions and party lines to prevent chaos-mongers from affecting people’s constitutional right to vote in 2024. Another nonpartisan organization, the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions PLEJ was founded in 2022 to facilitate engagement between election officials who share challenges and, with PLEJ’s help, solutions.

Joe Scott of Broward County is a member of PLEJ, as are 89 more of the largest local election jurisdictions across 33 states. Collectively, the group’s members administer elections for 40 percent of the US electorate. At a September PLEJ panel hosted in Washington, DC, Republican and Democratic election officials from eight states came together to talk about their security plans and structures. Carolina Lopez, the executive director of PLEJ and a member of CSSE, says that the officials often invite each other to their sites to trade tips. “Instead of every little fiefdom building something, we’re putting all of our resources together,” says Lopez.

The fraternization may never have happened so quickly—or at all—if Trump hadn’t repeatedly claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, provoking people like Andrew Nickels to assail local bureaucrats like Tina Barton. CSSE and PLEJ didn’t exist then, and they do now.

Unfortunately, so do new threats. “I’m actually really hopeful as we go into the 2024 general election,” says Barton. “I’m also cautious.”

Two years after the US Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, tens of millions of Americans will go to the polls this November hoping to protect access to the procedure—whether their lawmakers like it or not. Ten states— some already with robust protections, others with near-total bans—have measures on their ballots to enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions. The expected outpouring of voters, including in key swing states, could help determine control of the White House, Congress, state legislatures, and state supreme courts.

Reproductive freedom has proved to be one of the strongest currents shaping the outcome of American elections since 2022. So far, voters in seven states have reacted to the end of Roe v. Wade by passing ballot measures aimed at restoring, and even expanding, Roe’s protections. In a few of those states, the voter-initiative process empowered the public to bypass GOP-dominated legislatures and supersede decades-old restrictions. Reproductive rights organizers are hoping to continue that winning streak on November 5. 

But faced with the broad appeal of abortion initiatives in GOP-led states such as Ohio, Republican officials have gone to sometimes extreme lengths to undermine the latest measures. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged a multifront war on Amendment 4, threatening television stations that air ads favoring the measure and issuing a 348-page report accusing the Floridians Protecting Freedom campaign of “widespread petition fraud.” 

While most of this year’s measures have a common objective—protecting reproductive access—they take very different approaches to reaching that goal. Here is a rundown of what’s on the November ballot, which we will update as election results become available. 

Arizona

In anticipation of the end of Roe, Arizona Republicans passed a 15-week abortion ban in early 2022. But they also left in place an 1864 statute that outlawed nearly all abortions and threatened providers with jail time—a “zombie” law that was moot as long as Roe was in effect. This past April, the Arizona Supreme Court revived that Civil-War era ban by a 4–2 vote. The GOP-controlled legislature quickly repealed the old law, but many Arizonans were outraged at what the court had done, and the campaign to put Proposition 139 on the November ballot exploded. Prop 139 would enshrine a fundamental right to abortion in the Arizona Constitution and prohibit the state from restricting or banning abortion until the point of fetal viability—about 24 weeks. Abortions would be allowed later in pregnancy to save the mother’s life or to protect her physical or mental health. The amendment would also protect anyone who helps another person obtain an abortion.

A coalition of reproductive rights groups certified more than 575,000 signatures this past summer—the most ever validated for a citizens initiative in the state’s history, supporters said. In a New York Times/Siena College poll in late September, Prop 139 was ahead among likely voters by a resounding 58 percent. If it passes, Prop 139 could be used to challenge almost 40 abortion laws on Arizona’s books, including the existing 15-week ban, a prohibition on telehealth abortions, and a parental consent requirement for teenagers.

Colorado

Long before the Dobbs decision, Colorado legislators passed numerous laws safeguarding access to abortion. But after Dobbs, reproductive health advocates in the state concluded that even the strongest statutes weren’t strong enough—Colorado needed to enshrine those protections in its constitution. The measure they put on the November ballot, Amendment 79, wouldn’t just establish a right to abortion; it would repeal a 40-year-old constitutional provision that prohibited the use of state dollars to fund abortion. Sponsored by a coalition called Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom, the measure needs 55 percent of votes to pass. 

Surrounded by states with bans or heavily restrictive laws, Colorado is a crucial abortion access point for the West. With no gestational limits, the state is also a haven for anyone seeking an abortion later in pregnancy, as it is home to one of four clinics in the US that offer third-trimester procedures. Repealing the ban on state funding would allow Colorado to use its state Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions, making the procedure more accessible for low-income patients.

Florida

Florida’s Amendment 4 would enshrine in the state’s constitution the freedom to seek an abortion before fetal viability, and after viability if a medical provider determines that the procedure is necessary to preserve a patient’s health.

Gov. DeSantis and his GOP administration have done everything they can to sabotage the amendment—including sending “election police” to the homes of people who signed the petitions.

If the measure passes, it would dramatically improve access to reproductive care in Florida, which since May has banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Before that, the state permitted abortions up to 15 weeks, and before Dobbs, until 24 weeks. The impact of the Florida vote will be felt throughout the Southeast: Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have near-total abortion bans; Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans, and North Carolina’s 12-week ban is made more burdensome by a 72-hour waiting period. 

The stakes for passage are high, and so are the barriers. Over the last several election cycles, Florida has turned out more conservative voters than liberal ones. While reproductive rights are popular across the political spectrum, the state has a 60 percent threshold to approve constitutional amendments; the other red states that have passed abortion-protective measures since Dobbs—Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio—only required simple majorities. Meanwhile, Gov. DeSantis and his GOP administration have done everything they can to sabotage the amendment—including sending “election police” to the homes of people who signed the petitions, ostensibly to root out fraud. If the measure passes, DeSantis and his allies are widely expected to fight just as hard to overturn the results.

Maryland

Maryland’s Question 1, which was placed on the November ballot by the state legislature, does not mention “abortion”—much to the chagrin of supporters and opponents alike. Instead, the amendment broadly establishes the constitutional right to “reproductive freedom,” including the freedom to decide whether to continue or end a pregnancy. It needs a simple majority to pass.

Maryland already has some of the least restrictive abortion laws in the country: There is no gestational limit, state Medicaid covers the procedure, and a shield law protects patients who travel from states with abortion bans. This has made the state a critical access point for abortion seekers further along in pregnancy, as well as people traveling from the South. Abortion protections are widely popular in the state; in a recent poll by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 69 percent of respondents said they plan to vote for Question 1.

Missouri

Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effect mere minutes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—making it the first state in the nation to broadly prohibit abortion. Abortion-rights advocates soon set about crafting a ballot initiative to end the ban, inspired by wins in other states. Now, with Amendment 3, voters will decide whether they want the right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion, and healthcare during pregnancy. If approved by a simple majority, the amendment would set up a legal battle to overturn the current ban and challenge the many other Missouri laws that regulated abortion providers nearly out of existence even when Roe was still in effect.

Amendment 3’s proponents, a coalition known as Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, have traveled a rocky road just to get the measure before voters. They’ve overcome blatant obstruction by top state GOP officials, multiple legal challenges, and deep internal divisions over whether the initiative should allow the state to ban abortions after fetal viability. The final text protects abortion rights until viability, and permits later abortions if needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

Montana

Constitutional Initiative 128 establishes the right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including abortion. If passed, it would allow the state to regulate abortion after fetal viability, so long as those restrictions don’t prevent abortions that health care providers deem medically necessary. The amendment, which requires more than 50 percent of the vote, would also prevent the government from criminalizing patients and anyone who helps a person exercise her abortion rights.

If top Republican state officials had it their way, the measure would not even be on the ballot. State courts intervened at multiple points; the Montana Supreme Court overruled Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s initial rejection of the proposed amendment, nixed Knudsen’s drafted ballot language saying the amendment “may increase the number of taxpayer-funded abortions,” and threatened Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen with a contempt charge because she refused to hand over the sample ballot petition to the campaign behind the amendment, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights. After abortion rights supporters submitted nearly double the required 60,000 signatures, Jacobsen even tried changing the rules to throw out the signatures of inactive registered voters, until a district court ordered her to stop.

Thanks to the state supreme court, abortion is currently legal in Montana until fetal viability, despite the best efforts of Republican state legislators to restrict access. Montanans have already brushed off one GOP attempt to stigmatize abortion; in November 2022, 52 percent of voters rejected a legislature-initiated statute that would have made it a felony for doctors to not provide care to infants born alive after induced labor, a cesarean section or an “attempted abortion.” (The law wasn’t necessary since Montana, like every other state, already makes infanticide a crime.)

Nebraska

Nebraska voters will see dueling abortion amendments on their November ballots. Initiative 434 restricts abortion rights, banning the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy with limited exceptions. That’s essentially the same law already on the state’s books—but the measure would enshrine it as a constitutional amendment, making it much harder to repeal. And because the amendment doesn’t protect abortion before the 12-week mark, state politicians could always go further and pass a complete ban, as Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has pledged to do.

By contrast, Initiative 439 expands abortion rights, creating a “fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient.” In practice, the amendment would roughly double the length of time for pregnant people in Nebraska to get an abortion. Crucially, it would block lawmakers from passing a total ban.

If the double initiatives sound confusing, well, that’s the point. Anti-abortion activists have repeatedly tried to muddy the waters about which ballot initiative is which, as Rachel Cohen at Vox has reported. They’ve also tried to get the pro-abortion initiative thrown off the ballot on a technicality, but the Nebraska Supreme Court shot them down.

Given the confusion, it is possible that both measures could pass. In that case, the one with the most votes wins.

Nevada

Nevada, one of the swingiest states in the 2024 election, has its own version of the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by voters in 2022. But it didn’t explicitly mention protections for abortion. Question 6 constitutionally enshrines the right to abortion until fetal viability or for the health or life of the mother, as determined on a case-by-case basis by health care providers. Any pre-viability restrictions must be directly related to promoting the health of the pregnant person and “consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice.” This year’s vote is just the first step in a multiyear process; assuming a simple majority of voters approve it, the measure must be passed again in 2026 to become part of the constitution.

Thanks to a law passed in 1973, abortion has been legal in Nevada until 24 weeks. Because voters passed a referendum on that law in 1990, it can only be changed by a direct ballot measure. Protections for abortion are very popular in Nevada; a University of Maryland poll conducted over the summer found that about 70 percent of state voters oppose criminalizing abortion at any stage of pregnancy. The campaign behind the amendment, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, has raised nearly $10 million since January, according to campaign finance reports; the Coalition for Parents and Children PAC, which successfully sued to block an initial version of the amendment that covered reproductive healthcare more broadly, hasn’t raised or spent any money.

New York

New York’s Proposal 1 may not include the word “abortion,” but it would create first-in-the-nation protections for the rights of pregnant people.

The proposal is a broad version of the Equal Rights Amendment, the long-running feminist effort to guarantee women’s rights in state and federal constitutions. Right now, New York’s constitution only forbids government discrimination on the basis of race and religion. Prop 1 adds more protected categories to that list: disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Those types of discrimination are already banned under state law, but by enshrining protections in the constitution, Prop 1 would make them harder for legislators to attack in the future—for example, if New York politics keep trending rightward.

Here’s where abortion comes in: The amendment also bans discrimination based on “pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.” Not only does that definition go farther than any other state, it leaves little room for judges to interpret in ways that might limit abortion access, according to Katharine Bodde, of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Yet while New York Democrats initially viewed Prop 1 as a surefire way to boost voter turnout, their right-wing opponents have seized on transphobic messaging to great effect—making this blue-state fight unexpectedly close.

South Dakota

South Dakota’s current abortion ban is one of the most extreme in the country, with all abortions banned except when needed to save a pregnant person’s life. Amendment G, backed by a group called Dakotans for Health, would replace that law with a trimester-based system allowing increasing restrictions on abortion as a pregnancy progresses.  

In the first trimester, the state would be banned from interfering with “a woman’s abortion decision and its effectuation.” In the second trimester, the state could restrict abortion in ways “reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.” Third-trimester abortions could be banned, except when necessary to preserve a pregnant person’s life or health. The amendment needs a simple majority to pass.

Planned Parenthood and other abortion-rights groups aren’t supporting Amendment G, which they’ve said doesn’t go far enough. But the conservative Republicans who dominate state politics are still so terrified of the measure that they passed an emergency law to let voters revoke their petition signatures—then opponents of the measure led a phone banking effort to dupe signers into pulling their support. Why are state Republicans spooked? “If you can do it in South Dakota, it will strike fear into the hearts of every red-state legislature in the country,” Dakotans for Health co-founder Adam Weiland told the American Prospect.

Madison Pauly, Abby Vesoulis, Julianne McShane, and Nina Martin contributed reporting. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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Top image photo credits: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty; RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty; William Campbell/Getty; Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Getty; Getty(3)

When the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion in its 2022 Dobbs decision, one argument the justices made was that it was not banning abortion across the country, but rather granting states, and their voters, the opportunity to regulate the procedure. Since then, seven states have voted on their local abortion laws through ballot measures. From the liberal paradises of Vermont and California to redder states like Ohio and Kansas, all seven voted to protect abortion. In November, 10 more states are using ballot measures to address the topic, too.

Among them is Florida. Until 2022, the state allowed abortions until the third trimester. But since Dobbs, the state first enacted a ban on abortions after 15- weeks gestation, and subsequently a ban on abortions after six weeks, which took effect in May.

Floridians Protecting Freedom (FPF) is trying to change that with Amendment 4, which the reproductive rights group added to Florida’s November ballots by collecting more than 900,000 signatures. If enough Floridians vote “yes” on the ballot measure (official summary shown below), the referendum will theoretically enshrine in the Florida Constitution the right to abortion access up until fetal viability—which is generally around 23 to 24 weeks. As the referendum states:

No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.

More than half of Florida voters support expanding abortion rights, according to polling by both Florida Atlantic University and the Hill/Emerson College. But whether this support ultimately alters the abortion landscape in the state is a different question.

That’s because Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is using the power of his administration to threaten the initiative. He’s appointed people to the Financial Impact Estimating Conference—a panel responsible for gauging potential costs of ballot measures—that required the amendment be accompanied by language stating, without evidence, that access to abortion may cost taxpayer dollars. State law enforcement has also been sent to question Floridians who signed the petition for Amendment 4 to appear on the ballot. He’s enlisted a state agency to create a misleading website about abortions in Florida. Local television channels playing an advertisement supporting Amendment 4 have also been threatened with prosecution over the alleged violation of Florida’s sanitary nuisance law, which is generally used to combat health risks like the improper disposal of human waste or dead animals.

On Friday, DeSantis further escalated his intimidation campaign when his state department released a 348-page preliminary report alleging FPF may have committed “widespread petition fraud” to reach the 891,000 signature Florida statute requires to advance ballot measures. In a statement, FPF says its campaign has been “run above board and followed state law at every turn.” Further, the state deadline to challenge amendment signatures has already passed.

Anna Hochkammer, the executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, says the administration is “using the resources of the state to suppress the purest form of democracy, which in this case is necessary because an entrenched unrepresentative cabal of elected officials refuses to legislate in accordance with the overwhelming preferences of the citizens…Despite all of that, we are unbowed and unbroken.”

“An entrenched unrepresentative cabal of elected officials refuses to legislate in accordance with the overwhelming preferences of the citizens…Despite all of that, we are unbowed and unbroken.”

But the report could provide basis for a new, albeit insincere, legal argument against the ballot measure—and it seems it already has. On Wednesday, anti-abortion advocates filed a lawsuit citing the state missive, alleging that, “When all fictitious, forged, illegally obtained, or otherwise invalid signatures are removed from consideration, Amendment 4 failed to reach the constitutionally required number of signatures for ballot placement.” Accordingly, the lawsuit against FPF says, “The invalid petitions must be stricken and Amendment 4 removed from the 2024 General Election.”

DeSantis didn’t personally wage the lawsuit, but he did tee it up for the petitioners who did. Such tactics should not be surprising. Other GOP leaders, such as Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state lawmakers in Missouri, respectively tried to thwart similar initiatives through politically motivated lawsuits, exaggerated cost estimates, disinformation, and more.

As my colleague Ari Berman points out in his recent magazine story, this is particularly concerning because ballot measures are the only method in which majority rule by a plurality of a state’s citizens can supersede the minority rule of increasingly and disproportionately powerful GOP state lawmakers who have re-drawn districts to benefit them staying in power.

In hyper-gerrymandered states like Ohio, the only way to ensure that the will of the majority is followed is to override representative democracy and go directly to the people. This strategy has taken on renewed urgency in response to recent US Supreme Court decisions taking away fundamental rights, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These initiatives can garner support across party lines in a way that is otherwise impossible in a highly polarized partisan political climate.

The Supreme Court explicitly noted that the solution to abortion access is not—in the majority’s opinion—protected by the US Constitution. Instead, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion, the 2022 Dobbs decision “properly returns the Court to a position of neutrality and restores the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government.”

In other words, the court said, abortion is an issue that should be regulated through voting: either for political candidates whose reproductive rights views align with those of the voters or, even more directly, for ballot measures.

This is also—in theory—the party line of the GOP. In his presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump has emphasized this point. “It’s all about the states, it’s about state rights. States’ rights,” Trump told Time magazine in April. “States are going to make their own determinations.”

Even without DeSantis putting his thumb on the scale, Florida already had a high bar for passing referenda: As of 2006, 60 percent of voters are required to amend the state’s constitution. Among conservative-leaning states—Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio—that have voted on abortion ballot measures, none have had to hit that high a mark. (Kansas was closest, at 59 percent).

Organizers of Amendment 4 say they believe Florida could be the first state to do so, but it’s a harder task when the DeSantis administration is engaging in what Hochkammer calls “asshole politics,” which values “power and posturing over good policy.”

For example, both the proponents and opponents of Amendment 4 have television advertisements in Florida. A pro-Amendment 4 ad depicts a woman describing how a pre-ban abortion saved her life when she found out she had a brain tumor while also pregnant with her second child. “The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby. I would lose my life. And my daughter would lose her mom,” the mom says in the 30-second clip. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine.”

Florida’s Department of Health alleged the advertisement was false in cease-and-desist letters, citing Florida’s “exception” to save the life of a mother. But many physicians, who risk fines and prison time, argue that life-or-death scenarios are extremely complicated and often do not conform to the vague language of abortion-ban exceptions.

In the case of the woman who had a brain tumor, her diagnosis was terminal. According to a lawsuit filed in federal court by Floridians Protecting Freedom on Wednesday, the woman would not have met the requirements for an exception because an abortion only would have “extend[ed]” her life, not saved it. There are post-ban examples, too.

In another case, a 15-week pregnant woman was leaking amniotic fluid for an hour in a Broward County, Florida, hospital waiting room. Her ultrasound showed she had no amniotic fluid around her fetus, a condition that can quickly lead to serious infection and death. She was discharged and miscarried in a public restroom later that day, at which point was rushed to another hospital and put on a ventilator. She stayed in the hospital for six days.

“When you don’t want to talk about the fact that your state has an abortion ban that’s forced rape survivors to go out of state for care, that’s led to women almost losing their lives,” FPF campaign director Lauren Brenzel recently told Mother Jones, “you create distractions because you don’t want to talk about the harmful policy that you’ve implemented.” She added, “It’s not shocking. It’s the national playbook.”

When the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion in its 2022 Dobbs decision, one argument the justices made was that it was not banning abortion across the country, but rather granting states, and their voters, the opportunity to regulate the procedure. Since then, seven states have voted on their local abortion laws through ballot measures. From the liberal paradises of Vermont and California to redder states like Ohio and Kansas, all seven voted to protect abortion. In November, 10 more states are using ballot measures to address the topic, too.

Among them is Florida. Until 2022, the state allowed abortions until the third trimester. But since Dobbs, the state first enacted a ban on abortions after 15- weeks gestation, and subsequently a ban on abortions after six weeks, which took effect in May.

Floridians Protecting Freedom (FPF) is trying to change that with Amendment 4, which the reproductive rights group added to Florida’s November ballots by collecting more than 900,000 signatures. If enough Floridians vote “yes” on the ballot measure (official summary shown below), the referendum will theoretically enshrine in the Florida Constitution the right to abortion access up until fetal viability—which is generally around 23 to 24 weeks. As the referendum states:

No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.

More than half of Florida voters support expanding abortion rights, according to polling by both Florida Atlantic University and the Hill/Emerson College. But whether this support ultimately alters the abortion landscape in the state is a different question.

That’s because Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is using the power of his administration to threaten the initiative. He’s appointed people to the Financial Impact Estimating Conference—a panel responsible for gauging potential costs of ballot measures—that required the amendment be accompanied by language stating, without evidence, that access to abortion may cost taxpayer dollars. State law enforcement has also been sent to question Floridians who signed the petition for Amendment 4 to appear on the ballot. He’s enlisted a state agency to create a misleading website about abortions in Florida. Local television channels playing an advertisement supporting Amendment 4 have also been threatened with prosecution over the alleged violation of Florida’s sanitary nuisance law, which is generally used to combat health risks like the improper disposal of human waste or dead animals.

On Friday, DeSantis further escalated his intimidation campaign when his state department released a 348-page preliminary report alleging FPF may have committed “widespread petition fraud” to reach the 891,000 signature Florida statute requires to advance ballot measures. In a statement, FPF says its campaign has been “run above board and followed state law at every turn.” Further, the state deadline to challenge amendment signatures has already passed.

Anna Hochkammer, the executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, says the administration is “using the resources of the state to suppress the purest form of democracy, which in this case is necessary because an entrenched unrepresentative cabal of elected officials refuses to legislate in accordance with the overwhelming preferences of the citizens…Despite all of that, we are unbowed and unbroken.”

“An entrenched unrepresentative cabal of elected officials refuses to legislate in accordance with the overwhelming preferences of the citizens…Despite all of that, we are unbowed and unbroken.”

But the report could provide basis for a new, albeit insincere, legal argument against the ballot measure—and it seems it already has. On Wednesday, anti-abortion advocates filed a lawsuit citing the state missive, alleging that, “When all fictitious, forged, illegally obtained, or otherwise invalid signatures are removed from consideration, Amendment 4 failed to reach the constitutionally required number of signatures for ballot placement.” Accordingly, the lawsuit against FPF says, “The invalid petitions must be stricken and Amendment 4 removed from the 2024 General Election.”

DeSantis didn’t personally wage the lawsuit, but he did tee it up for the petitioners who did. Such tactics should not be surprising. Other GOP leaders, such as Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state lawmakers in Missouri, respectively tried to thwart similar initiatives through politically motivated lawsuits, exaggerated cost estimates, disinformation, and more.

As my colleague Ari Berman points out in his recent magazine story, this is particularly concerning because ballot measures are the only method in which majority rule by a plurality of a state’s citizens can supersede the minority rule of increasingly and disproportionately powerful GOP state lawmakers who have re-drawn districts to benefit them staying in power.

In hyper-gerrymandered states like Ohio, the only way to ensure that the will of the majority is followed is to override representative democracy and go directly to the people. This strategy has taken on renewed urgency in response to recent US Supreme Court decisions taking away fundamental rights, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These initiatives can garner support across party lines in a way that is otherwise impossible in a highly polarized partisan political climate.

The Supreme Court explicitly noted that the solution to abortion access is not—in the majority’s opinion—protected by the US Constitution. Instead, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion, the 2022 Dobbs decision “properly returns the Court to a position of neutrality and restores the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government.”

In other words, the court said, abortion is an issue that should be regulated through voting: either for political candidates whose reproductive rights views align with those of the voters or, even more directly, for ballot measures.

This is also—in theory—the party line of the GOP. In his presidential campaign, former President Donald Trump has emphasized this point. “It’s all about the states, it’s about state rights. States’ rights,” Trump told Time magazine in April. “States are going to make their own determinations.”

Even without DeSantis putting his thumb on the scale, Florida already had a high bar for passing referenda: As of 2006, 60 percent of voters are required to amend the state’s constitution. Among conservative-leaning states—Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio—that have voted on abortion ballot measures, none have had to hit that high a mark. (Kansas was closest, at 59 percent).

Organizers of Amendment 4 say they believe Florida could be the first state to do so, but it’s a harder task when the DeSantis administration is engaging in what Hochkammer calls “asshole politics,” which values “power and posturing over good policy.”

For example, both the proponents and opponents of Amendment 4 have television advertisements in Florida. A pro-Amendment 4 ad depicts a woman describing how a pre-ban abortion saved her life when she found out she had a brain tumor while also pregnant with her second child. “The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby. I would lose my life. And my daughter would lose her mom,” the mom says in the 30-second clip. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine.”

Florida’s Department of Health alleged the advertisement was false in cease-and-desist letters, citing Florida’s “exception” to save the life of a mother. But many physicians, who risk fines and prison time, argue that life-or-death scenarios are extremely complicated and often do not conform to the vague language of abortion-ban exceptions.

In the case of the woman who had a brain tumor, her diagnosis was terminal. According to a lawsuit filed in federal court by Floridians Protecting Freedom on Wednesday, the woman would not have met the requirements for an exception because an abortion only would have “extend[ed]” her life, not saved it. There are post-ban examples, too.

In another case, a 15-week pregnant woman was leaking amniotic fluid for an hour in a Broward County, Florida, hospital waiting room. Her ultrasound showed she had no amniotic fluid around her fetus, a condition that can quickly lead to serious infection and death. She was discharged and miscarried in a public restroom later that day, at which point was rushed to another hospital and put on a ventilator. She stayed in the hospital for six days.

“When you don’t want to talk about the fact that your state has an abortion ban that’s forced rape survivors to go out of state for care, that’s led to women almost losing their lives,” FPF campaign director Lauren Brenzel recently told Mother Jones, “you create distractions because you don’t want to talk about the harmful policy that you’ve implemented.” She added, “It’s not shocking. It’s the national playbook.”

Vice President Kamala Harris had an appendectomy when she was three. She is up-to-date on preventative care screenings, like colonoscopies and mammograms. She has managed seasonal allergies and sporadic skin reactions with a nasal spray and Claritin, and she treats mild nearsightedness with contact lenses. At her most recent physical in April, Harris had a normal blood pressure reading of 128/74 mmHg; her heart rate was a healthy 78 beats per minute.

These findings are “unremarkable,” as her physician, Dr. Joshua Simmons put it in a memo the White House released Saturday. In another words: normal. As is the practice of a presidential candidate allowing their personal health information be made available to the public.

Trump said he would “very gladly” share his recent medical information publicly, but has not yet done so.

Donald Trump, who at 78 is nearly 20 years older than Harris, hasn’t been nearly as forthcoming. In August, he told CBS News he would “very gladly” share his recent medical information publicly, but has not yet done so. The last time he released substantive details about his health was nearly seven years ago, at which point a memo from his physician said he had high cholesterol, a benign skin condition called rosacea, and was “overweight,” as measured by the standardized Body Mass Index (BMI) scale. The next year, the President released more limited health vitals that tipped the scale into the BMI category of “obese,” which correlates with a higher risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes.

When Trump’s ear was injured in an assassination attempt over the summer, his campaign did not release medical records or provide a briefing. The most recent documentation of any sorts is from late 2023, at which point Trump shared a three-paragraph letter from his physician on Truth Social, stating his physical exams were “well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional.”

This isn’t the first time he’s obfuscated his physical health. In 2020, when Trump was hospitalized with Covid, his administration insisted he was on an “upswing.” The New York Times later reported that he was much sicker than his inner circle had let on: His blood oxygen levels had dropped to dangerous levels, the Times said, and officials worried he might have needed to be put on a ventilator.

Trump’s late physician, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, said in 2015 that Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Today, that part is unlikely—especially without medical proof to back it up. But since Joe Biden dropped out of the race, former president Trump now claims a different superlative: oldest-ever presidential nominee.

There’s a quickly growing religious movement whose followers believe Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. The New Apostolic Reformation, as it’s known, seeks an explicitly Christian command of the highest levels of the government, including the presidency and the Supreme Court—but its leaders are working on the hyper-local level, too.

In the latest episode of Reveal, my colleagues traveled to a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see how these Christian nationalists have inserted their ideology into the very fabric of local civic life rather than merely be the “head-in-the-sand, Jesus-loves-you kind of Christians.”

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

To Pastor Don Lamb, this is not a Christian takeover. Yet his congregation is influenced by the elusive, hard-to-pin-down New Apostolic Reformation movement whose followers believe that Christians are called to control the government and that former President Donald Trump was chosen by God.

There are prophets and apostles, and a spiritual war is underway, not just in Pennsylvania. “Estimates of Christians influenced by NAR vary widely, from 3 million to 33 million,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler in her feature story on the movement in our latest magazine issue. As Butler noted, “Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR ‘the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.'”

This week, Reveal’s Najib Aminy and Butler explain what the New Apostolic Reformation is and what happens when it seeps into small-town churches like Lamb’s.

On a recent Sunday, a couple hundred politically engaged Floridians are sipping sparkling water and nibbling on Biscoff-crusted cheesecake bites at a posh golf club located along the state’s southeast coast. Not Mar-a-Lago. This event is 27 miles away, at the similarly lavish Boca Grove Golf and Tennis Club ($200,000 initiation fee, $45,000 annual dues).

At this point, Hurricane Milton has not formed. Hurricane Helene is still four days from making landfall, and Florida Democratic chair Nikki Fried and Democratic Senate nominee Debbie Mucarsel-Powell are making the case to the Brooks Brothers–loving crowd that more auspicious winds—political ones—are sweeping the state.

Fried invites the large room of club members and guests to envision their living rooms as election results start to trickle in on November 5: “We’re all watching MSNBC, and we’ve got Steve Kornacki on the board…He stops for a second. He puts his finger to his ear and he says, ‘I have a prediction,’” Fried intones in the style of a yoga instructor setting the mood for Savasana. In her fantasy, Kornacki forecasts Florida going blue, “deliver[ing] the presidency to Kamala Harris.”

“I don’t think it’s a secret anymore,” says Mucarsel-Powell, who represented the Miami area in Congress between 2019 and 2021. “Florida is in play.”

Not long ago, these predictions would have been laughable. In the Spring, Donald Trump was polling ahead of then-opponent President Joe Biden by 11 points in the Sunshine State. Republican incumbent Sen. Rick Scott’s advantage over his Democratic challenger was also near the double digits. With GOP supermajorities in both state legislative chambers, and the state led by an autocrat-curious governor known for shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and requiring public schools to teach that slaves benefited from their servitude, Florida seemed about as red as the sunburn that some tourists (but not me!) get on their first day there.

“The surge was like Helene. Fast and huge.”

Up until late Summer, Democrats seemed to think Florida was a lost cause. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) had only invested about $1.2 million in the state party; that’s well under the average price of a single-family home in the Coral Gables region, not the cost of procuring a massive political triumph. But Florida has gotten more interesting lately. Last month, three polls showed Mucarsel-Powell within a single percentile of Scott. A few large surveys also showed Harris within the margin of error for Florida’s 30 electoral votes. After Harris became the presumptive nominee in July, more than 45,000 Floridians signed up to volunteer their efforts toward electing Democratic candidates like Harris and Mucarsel-Powell.

“The surge was like Helene,” Hillsborough County Democratic Party chair Ione Townsend says of the numbers. “Fast and huge.”

At least part of the momentum is thanks to two April decisions made by the conservative state Supreme Court. First, the conservative judges ruled that a six-week abortion ban could take effect in May, putting the consequences of the Trump-induced overturning of Roe v. Wade in plain sight. Second, Floridians would get to weigh in on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitution in November, motivating infrequent voters to participate in the election. Biden’s July withdrawal from the presidential race and endorsement of Vice President Harris to succeed him was another tree-shaking upheaval that boosted Democratic momentum nationwide.

In the last couple of weeks, Mucarsel-Powell has also seen an unwitting assist from three-term incumbent Sen. Jon Tester, whose slippage in the polls against a rich Republican challenger in Montana has the party petrified. Democrats were counting on Tester to keep control of the upper chamber; now they need alternatives. Texas and Florida are the only two states where Democrats stand a chance of unseating incumbent GOP senators, according to ratings by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Scott has begun taking note: On Thursday, NBC News reported Scott was planning a $10 million advertisement buy in Florida’s metropolitan areas. That’s roughly as much as Mucarsel-Powell spent on her whole campaign through the end of July, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is lending a hand. The group announced in late September a “multi-million dollar investment in television advertising” focused on Texas and Florida. The DSCC is still trying to boost Tester, too. It stated a couple weeks earlier that it was spending $25 million on direct voter contact programs across 10 states, including Montana, Texas, and Florida. The DSCC did not specify exactly how much money it was allotting to each state.

Additionally, the independent reproductive rights campaign “Yes on 4” is spending millions on canvassing and advertising to turn out voters in support of reproductive rights, a cause Democratic candidates and most of their supporters emphatically endorse. But it’s a bit of an awkward dance: Florida’s new abortion restrictions have inspired a broad range of voters, including Republicans and independents. Leaders of the ballot measure want to engage them too, and therefore are trying to keep Democratic candidates at an arm’s length from their own organizing. But Democratic candidates, roused by the ballot measure’s widespread support, long to capitalize on the popular effort. The Harris campaign notes that the uptick in new volunteers in Florida predominantly consists of women, for example.

“You can’t go and want to support Amendment Four and still vote for these Republicans who took away this right, and would continue to take away this right,” argued Fried on a recent press call.

It would be mathematically impossible for three-fifths of voters to support Issue 4 through registered Democratic voters alone.

Democratic candidates in Florida tend to bring up reproductive rights within a few minutes of speaking to crowds. But you won’t see Floridians Protecting Freedom, the umbrella coalition working to pass the abortion ballot measure, brag about any ideological overlap with Democrats.

That’s out of necessity. Amending Florida’s constitution requires a 60 percent voter threshold. While several conservative-majority states—Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas—have voted to protect abortion access in recent election cycles, none have achieved that high of a percentage. (Kansas was closest, at 59 percent). There are 1 million more registered Republicans in Florida than there are Democrats, and non-affiliated voters make up a quarter of the pie, too. It would be mathematically impossible for three-fifths of voters to support Issue 4 through registered Democratic voters alone.

Florida has routinely passed ballot measures, including on controversial topics, with bipartisan support: In 2018, Floridians far exceeded the 60 percent threshold on a ballot measure to restore voting rights to felons, and in 2020, the state narrowly passed an initiative gradually increasing the minimum wage to $15. That’s what Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition executive director Anna Hochkammer is trying to replicate.

Fortunately for her strategy, and much to Mucarsel-Powell’s dismay, “Florida has a history of passing what could be considered progressive policy referenda,” Hochkammer says, “while simultaneously electing very conservative people at the top of the ticket.”

Like Hochkammer, Mucarsel-Powell is also vying for the support of independents and Republicans. “There’s a huge group of independent voters in our state that will determine this election,” she tells me in Boca. “When they hear about me and what I want to do for the state, they come to me pretty quickly.”

Republicans have concerns about the border, for example. So does she.

“We have these communist dictatorships. They’re narco regimes. There’s a criminal organized crime network. This is true. It sounds like I’m talking about a movie, but it’s not. It’s real, and it’s happening with Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador,” she says.

If Republicans really wanted to solve the “crisis at the border,” Mucarsel-Powell argues they would have gone through with the bipartisan Senate bill.

It’s personal for her. She migrated from Ecuador with her mom and three older sisters when she was 14. She still has family there. Her dad, who stayed behind, was killed by gun violence when she was 24. “If you’re a mom and you’re trying to escape violence and murder in your country, you’re going to do everything you can to bring your children to this country for safety,” she says. “I mean, it’s one of the reasons why my mom brought us here.”

If Republicans really wanted to solve the “crisis at the border”—her choice of words—Mucarsel-Powell argues they would have gone through with the Senate bipartisan border control funding bill steered by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). Instead, after Trump said that only a “Radical Left Democrat” would vote for it, Republicans pulled their support in February. (If it passed, it would have been the largest and most aggressive border bill in decades).

“It’s very dangerous to allow the trafficking of drugs into the country. You had an opportunity to do something about it, and you refused to for your own gain,” she says, referring to Republicans.

Her upbringing in Ecuador also influences her perspective on reproductive rights—a major focus of her Barbie-pink branded campaign. Had she never left, she imagines she would have “probably married a little too young” and “maybe had more kids than I have now.”

She compares what is happening in her state to the high rates of sexual violence, bodily harm, and maternal mortality that occur in Latin America. “That’s the reality that we’re now facing in Florida,” she says. (Ironically, some countries in Latin America are expanding reproductive rights as US states reduce access.)

Mucarsel-Powell pins the blame on her opponent, reminding voters that Scott said he would have signed the six-week abortion ban into law if he was still governor; that Scott once co-sponsored a national abortion ban that would have imprisoned clinicians who provide abortion care; and that Scott has twice, including last month, voted against a Senate bill to protect IVF access.

After my Sunday with the underdog Senate candidate in South Florida, I head north, planning to interview leaders from Floridians Protecting Freedom and shadow volunteers canvassing for abortion rights on Wednesday. Hurricane Helene, nearing the state’s Gulf Coast, had different plans. So I instead interview the campaign’s director, Lauren Brenzel, from a rented Kia Forte in the parking lot of a combination casino-rest-stop off of 1-75.

Brenzel doesn’t want to talk about Democratic races: “It’s just not related to us. None of the federal solutions for abortion access have immediately impacted Florida, so we just aren’t involved in candidate races, because the solution for Florida’s abortion ban is based on constitutional protections for abortion which are only available through direct democracy.”

I try again, asking about the possibility that a GOP-controlled Congress or Trump-controlled White House tries to enact national restrictions, or use the Comstock Act to ban mailing medications used for abortions and miscarriage management. Those things would impact Floridians even if their ballot measure was successful. “We just aren’t focused on the national landscape at all for this,” she says, matter-of-factly.

She is instead laser-focused on Florida’s peninsular shape. During our interview, Brenzel kindly but vigorously suggests I get out of Florida as fast as I can to avoid getting caught up in the catastrophic flooding and flight stoppages that would result from Helene, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm in late September and has so far claimed more than 225 lives. “Abby, I’m warning you. Go now,” she says. “The geography of our state is so unfriendly.”

Surrounded by water on three of four sides, it can be time-intensive and expensive to get to other states from Florida. That is true for escaping both hurricanes and strict abortion bans, Brenzel points out. “You can’t go east, south or west,” she said. “You’re surrounded by ban states.” The closest alternatives, where abortion is legal beyond six weeks, are seeing greater patient volume than clinics can accommodate. Often, Floridians in need of care end up flying to Washington, DC, or New York, “because they can’t get appointments in North Carolina or Virginia.”

For those who want or need abortions in a clinic, traveling is often the only option. Gestational ages are not based on the actual date of conception but from the first day of a patient’s last menstrual cycle. By the time someone misses their period, they have two weeks to discover their pregnancy, get into a clinic to confirm it, and then schedule an abortion before the six-week window closes. Doctors attest these restrictions are not just logistically and financially challenging; for some patients, they prevent lifesaving medical care. While the six-week ban allows clinicians to end pregnancies if their patient faces a “serious” risk of substantial, irreversible injury or impairment, the law is hazy on what constitutes “serious.”

A September report from the national nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights shared a recent, real-life example of the uncertainties caused by this law from a Florida OB-GYN whose patient previously suffered a spontaneous coronary artery dissection after her last pregnancy. This woman was pregnant again and her medical team believed she had about a 10 percent chance of experiencing another spontaneous dissection, which would almost certainly kill her the second time around.

“I had to sit before five or six or seven hospital administrators and make an argument for this woman,” the OB-GYN told researchers. “I had to hear these people say, ‘Well, is 10 percent a lot? Is that enough?’” Hospital administrators ultimately agreed the patient’s risk was serious, but it took two-plus weeks to get approval to end her life-threatening pregnancy.

After a long drive through the everglades Tuesday, I stop by the Harris-Walz field office in Tampa. There were some other abortion ballot measure events I considered attending in Orlando and Jacksonville, but those would have involved hundreds more miles of driving.

This isn’t merely my personal gripe. It’s also a challenge for Mucarsel-Powell and Harris. Florida has several major metropolitan areas spread throughout the state. They aren’t just far apart, making campaign stops difficult. They are also exorbitantly expensive places to buy advertisements.

Texas, where the race between incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Colin Allred was just updated by Cook Political Report from “likely” in Cruz’s favor to the more-competitive “leans” in his direction, presents similar geographical challenges. “Texas-sized” is a phrase for a reason, and the state also has high-priced media markets. A large, mid-September Morning Consult poll of nearly 3,000 likely voters showed Allred ahead of Cruz by one point, but a downside to Democrats making major national investments in Texas over Florida is that support for Harris is lower in Texas. Very few, if any analysts, are putting a question mark by Texas’ 40 Electoral College votes.

Florida Democrats would argue there are other signs Florida deserves more national attention. Harris’ husband and ultimate wife-guy, Doug Emhoff, made a campaign stop at the sprawling Villages retirement community in September, calling Harris a “badass” and warning how a second Trump presidency would imperil the state’s high population of seniors; Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison has made the trek south several times; and in a media call late last month, Fried announced the DNC was immediately infusing $400,000 into Florida in support of Democrats. “I think we have the enthusiasm that the Republicans don’t have,” says Townsend, the party chair from Hillsborough.

As of the last FEC filing period, Scott’s $20 million in spending across the campaign was double that of Mucarsel-Powell.

Case in point is Florida Democrats volunteer Susan Quinn. A now-retired sales representative and New Jersey native, Quinn says she “would have obviously voted for Joe Biden,” but wasn’t as excited for him. Now, Quinn is phone-banking for Harris and contributing cash down the Democratic ballot. “This is probably the most I’ve ever given financially to campaigns,” she tells me at the campaign outpost, “because I’m feeling there’s a chance to actually affect this.”

It would take a lot of Susans to flip Florida, including at the Senate level. The biggest barrier to that is still money. “We’re not a battleground state, so we’re not seeing the kind of infusion that the seven battleground states are,” Townsend laments.

Mucarsel-Powell is working on that. By the time I fly out of Florida on Tuesday night to dodge Helene, the candidate is in New York for a fundraiser. She has a lot of ground to make up: As of the last FEC filing period, Scott’s $20 million in spending across the campaign was double that of Mucarsel-Powell.

As the candidate puts it, electing Mucarsel-Powell wouldn’t just be one of the limited ways the party can protect their control of the US Senate—it could also protect Floridians’ control over their bodies. “It will mean nothing if they vote to pass this ballot amendment and enshrine in the state’s constitution a woman’s right to her reproductive health care,” she told me back in April, “if then they elect Rick Scott, send him back to the Senate, and then he pushes for a national abortion ban.”

Before Bernie Moreno was the 2024 Ohio Republican candidate for Senate, he was the owner of numerous luxury car dealerships, hawking rarified brands like Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz.

To sell pretty cars, it helps to have pretty dealerships. So in December 2007, Moreno hired the firm Welty Building Company (WBC) “for the design and construction of a Porsche dealership and a Mercedes-Benz dealership” in the Cleveland area, according to a 2014 court document.

Details of the initial contract, such as exact work orders and total costs, are not public record. But legal documents obtained from Cuyahoga County’s clerk of courts show Moreno’s company M1 Motors failed to promptly pay Welty hundreds of thousands of dollars upon completion of the work. After an arbitrator declared in July 2014 that Moreno’s company owed WBC $313,058, Moreno still didn’t pay, forcing the construction firm to file a legal claim in September 2014 seeking a court to confirm the arbitrator’s decision. As a result, the court scheduled a conference meeting to discuss. Even after that meeting was scheduled, WBC had to file a “Motion to Enforce” before Moreno finally fulfilled his financial obligations to WBC in full, including post-judgment interest, sometime after early January 2015.

Delays aren’t necessarily standard-operating procedure after arbitration rulings. But many people, either out of inability to pay or frustration with the ruling, sometimes drag their feet. Jeremy Fogel, the executive director at the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former US District Court and state court judge, said he saw similar situations play out all the time when he held the gavel. “It’s a kind of litigation behavior that, unfortunately, is not unheard of,” he says. 

This saga, not previously reported, is just the latest example of past legal disputes involving Moreno. A litany of cases from Moreno’s pre-politics days of building a car dealership empire—lawsuits claiming racial, gender, and age discrimination, as well as wage withholding—have clouded Moreno’s attempt to portray himself as a self-made entrepreneur who knows what’s best for Ohio workers because he’s employed thousands of them at his dealerships. This is at least the second example from Moreno’s past in which he did not promptly comply with official legal renderings: Amid proceedings over a case in which he was ultimately found liable for withholding overtime wages from his employees in Massachusetts, Moreno shredded company documents that he and his lawyers “were required to preserve” and “knew or should have known [were] relevant.”

Welty CEO Donzell S. Taylor told Mother Jones that there’s no bad blood between his construction company and Moreno. “Issues like these are not uncommon in the construction business and this one was resolved through the proper channels,” he said in a statement. “We are proud of the work we did for Mr. Moreno and look forward to working with his team again in the future.” But evidently, Moreno was not the CEO’s first pick for the Senate seat: Federal Election Commission records show Taylor donated the election-cycle maximum of $6,600 to one of Moreno’s opponents in the GOP primary, Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose.

A Moreno campaign spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

For the average Ohioan whose debt is more likely tied to a modest mortgage or credit cards, Moreno’s history of delaying or withholding payment to workers and contractors may impact how they view the candidate whose campaign hinges on his image as a wealthy businessman.

Initially, Moreno’s 2014 legal dispute with WBC took place outside of court. As is increasingly common, WBC and M1 Motors entered arbitration, an alternative legal process that is typically less expensive and tends to be friendlier to large corporations.

The independent arbitrator’s decision explains WBC pursued legal action to seek its remaining balance of $271,371 (which M1 “admittedly owed”), plus prejudgment interest of $39,688. For its part, M1 claimed WBC erred in its design and construction processes to the tune of $1.13 million.

“There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”

Moreno’s company alleged construction errors from WBC required M1 to replace portions of the roof and relocate poorly designed drains for more than $100,000, re-do $70,000 worth of decorative concrete and pavers, rebuild a $265,000 car wash, fix exposed metal trusses costing $15,000, and replace a $416,000 Porsche metal wall panel. The arbitrator concluded M1 owed WBC $313,058, minus $30,000 WBC owed M1 for minor construction flaws. The $30,000 credit made the sum M1 owed WBC on July 28 come out to $283,058.

“The testimony of M1’s principal was that he did not believe that WBC’s designer did anything wrong. M1’s expert did not offer any opinion contrary to that testimony,” the arbitrator’s ruling concluded. “There was, for all practical purposes, no evidence that WBC’s design was deficient in any respect.”

According to a motion filed by WBC, Moreno didn’t comply with the decision for more than two months. In Ohio, the deadline to appeal an arbitration decision is 30 days from the date the judgment is rendered in an arbitrator’s report. There’s no evidence Moreno’s company appealed. “Despite the arbitration award itself and numerous requests from Welty’s counsel seeking payment, Ml refused to pay Welty,” a November 7 motion said.

To discuss M1’s non-payment, the court in mid-September scheduled a conference call hearing. Two days prior to that court conference slated for October 15, M1 Motors finally paid WBC its principal debt and pre-judgment interest of $283,058, a full 77 days after the arbitration concluded in July. However, M1 did not pay interest on the principal that accrued between the date of the July arbitration ruling and the date of the belated October 13 payment, which led WBC to file its “Motion to Enforce.”

Finally, a judge settled the matter on January 2, 2015. Citing previous case law, Judge Nancy Fuerst ruled M1 had to pay WBC “post judgment statutory interest.”

“No just cause for delay,” the judge wrote to M1. “So Ordered.”

In 2015, as Sen. Ted Cruz mounted a competitive presidential campaign and courted the religious right ahead of the Iowa caucuses, the Texas Republican touted the support of a controversial anti-abortion crusader.

“I am grateful to receive the endorsement of Troy Newman,” Cruz said. “He has served as a voice for the unborn for over 25 years, and works tirelessly every day for the pro-life cause. We need leaders like Troy Newman in this country who will stand up for those who do not have a voice.”

Newman wasn’t just any anti-abortion activist: He was, and is, the leader of Operation Rescue—a group that in 1991 held weeks-long protests at the abortion clinic of George Tiller, who was later assassinated by an anti-abortion extremist. Moreover, Newman has claimed that extreme weather was God’s punishment for America’s tolerance for abortion and gay rights; he also co-wrote a book that endorsed the execution of abortion providers.

“The United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists.”

Nearly a decade after the failed presidential bid, Cruz is locked in a tough reelection fight with Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL player. The rollback of abortion rights has become a major issue in the Texas contest, as it has nationally, and the two-term senator has been notably quiet on the subject of late. It is a marked contrast from the 2016 presidential election, when Cruz sought to distinguish himself in the presidential contest as an uncompromising defender of the “pro-life” movement.

While other GOP candidates shared similar beliefs in 2016, Cruz argued he was better at proving his devotion to the cause. Ahead of the Iowa caucuses that year, he announced a “Pro-Lifers for Cruz” coalition of 17,000-plus members. “The question we ought to ask is, don’t tell me that you’re pro-life. Show me. When have you stood up and fought to defend the right to life?” Cruz said before the critical first-in-the-nation nominating contest.

It was at that point, in January 2016, that Cruz named Newman as one of 10 co-chairs leading the anti-abortion coalition. The Cruz campaign press release announcing Newman’s appointment mentioned Newman’s book, Their Blood Cries Out, in his bio. Now out of print, the anti-abortion manifesto, first published in 2000, contains eye-popping passages, including one section arguing that the US government should execute “abortionists”:

In addition to our personal guilt in abortion, the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes in order to expunge bloodguilt from the land and people. Instead, the act of abortion has been elevated to a ‘God-given right’ and the abortionists canonized as saints. Consequently, the entire nation has the blood-red stain of the lives of the innocent upon its head.

Newman co-authored the book with Cheryl Sullenger, who was earlier convicted and imprisoned for her involvement in an attempt to bomb an abortion clinic in California in 1987.

In addition to suggesting the US government kill abortion providers, Newman and Sullenger wrote that the tendency to blame abortion providers and liberal lawmakers for abortions—rather than the women who obtain them—is a mistake:

Those responsible for innocent bloodshed should not be excused or comforted in their sin, yet, as a society, women who have abortions are treated as victims and those who support them in the decision to kill are considered heroes who were willing to stand by their friends or family members during a time of crisis. In reality, the woman is the same as a contract killer, hiring out the murder of her defenseless child, and the supporter is a co-conspirator, aiding and abetting the crime.

The full extent of Newman’s relationship to Cruz is unclear; neither Newman nor Cruz’s congressional office responded to inquiries from Mother Jones. But in addition to Cruz’s presidential campaign materials that mention Newman, there are pictures of Newman posing with Cruz, and with Cruz’s then-chief-of-staff, Paul Teller, on Newman’s Facebook profile alongside a caption: “Ted Cruz may have come in number two in the [presidential] primary, but he is number one to me!”

While the inflammatory contents of Their Blood Cries Out have previously been cited, including by Mother Jones eight years ago, the passages and Cruz’s connection to their author take on new relevance as abortion has become a defining issue of the national election and Cruz’s Texas reelection.

A Democrat hasn’t won a statewide election in Texas in three decades, but Cruz’s apparent lead against Allred is now squarely within the margin of error. Texas voters have reported abortion as one of their top issues this cycle. In recent weeks, Cruz has hesitated to address his views on the topic, as they may prove to alienate critical swing voters in November.

On August 1, people who had given money to the Democratic presidential ticket began getting ominous messages suggesting their identities may have been stolen. Some received texts from an unknown sender asking them to confirm recent donations. Others told Mother Jones that they received emails warning that their donations had been “flagged” and asking them to click a box to “verify” that they had really contributed the money—or to click “no” if they did not recall doing so.

One donor described the email he received as “mysterious, vague, and somewhat threatening.” That email, similar to the one pictured below, requested that he respond within “the next 24 hours.”

The recipients of these messages have something in common: they’re listed in federal campaign filings as having donated to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris using ActBlue, a ubiquitous online platform that makes it simple to contribute to a vast array of Democratic candidates and liberal causes. ActBlue, a non-profit, has become central to Democrats’ grassroots fundraising efforts. For years, Republicans struggled to emulate its success.

The mysterious emails were sent by the equally mysterious “Fair Election Fund”—a newly formed dark money group that says it is working to uncover supposed electoral malfeasance. When the organization released an initial advertisement in May, it touted a $5 million fund that it said would be used to pay whistleblowers who “expose cheating in our elections.” More recently, it launched a media blitz full of baseless and implausible claims that Kamala Harris’ eye-popping fundraising numbers might somehow be the result of a massive identity theft and money-laundering scheme carried out by ActBlue.

The goal of the Fair Election Fund’s messages to ActBlue users became clear on August 13, when the Washington Examiner reported the conservative group had “identified 60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July [FEC] report but did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.” The Examiner said the organization had spent $250,000 to compile these initial findings.

“If the Democrats’ fundraising numbers sound outrageous, unbelievable, it’s because they might be,” the Fair Election Fund charged in a recent video, which displayed a headline about the $310 million Harris raised in July. “The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has been accused of stealing our identities to conceal donations from bad actors.” The group says it spent $50,000 to run this ad online.

This line of criticism piggybacks on long-running GOP attacks on ActBlue. Last year, James O’Keefe, a conservative activist previously ousted from the far-right video sting outfit Project Veritas, accused ActBlue of assigning large numbers of donations to the names and addresses of people who did not remember donating so often. Though O’Keefe’s claims of a “potential massive money laundering” scheme went unconfirmed, various GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), have faulted ActBlue for accepting some donations without requiring card verification values—the 3- or 4-digit codes on credit cards used to confirm their validity.

Contrary to the right-wing allegations, there is no public evidence that ActBlue has stolen anyone’s identity or has been involved in money laundering. ActBlue denies engaging in any wrongdoing. “We are aware of recent attempts to spread misinformation about our platform,” an ActBlue spokesperson told Mother Jones, while citing “robust and effective protocols in place to ensure our platform is secure.” The platform says that it now requires all new donors to provide CVV codes, though many longtime users can still make donations without them.

The Fair Election Fund’s recent claims about ActBlue coincided with Harris receiving an outpouring of support from first-time and small-dollar donors in the wake of Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race. In just the first week of her campaign, she raked in more than $200 million dollars, two-thirds of which came from people who hadn’t donated yet this cycle, the campaign announced.

After learning of the messages the Fair Election Fund was sending to contributors, ActBlue published an August 2 tweet warning they appeared to be part of “a dangerous disinformation campaign” targeting “Democratic donors.” ActBlue advised users to avoid replying to the messages and to instead report them as spam.

Donor safety and security are our top priority. We will continue to monitor bad-faith attempts to undermine grassroots power. These attacks pale in comparison to the historic enthusiasm small-dollar donors are bringing to the 2024 elections. pic.twitter.com/hIVISJRDzb

— ActBlue (@actblue) August 2, 2024

The August 13 Examiner story didn’t make clear how the Fair Election Fund conducted its research or how it arrived at the 60,000 figure, and the group didn’t answer questions from Mother Jones about its methodology. But it appears that the Fair Election Fund used FEC reports to identify small donors and then purchased commercially available data that allowed the group to contact them. Recipients told Mother Jones they received messages at phone numbers and email addresses that they had not provided to ActBlue or to the Biden or Harris campaigns.

Such a method could easily generate inaccurate results. Clicking a box telling an unsolicited emailer you don’t recall making a donation is not a sworn statement that you got scammed. It’s unclear how the Fair Election Fund ensured that the donor contact information it obtained was correct, or whether it accounted for the possibility that some donors may have simply forgotten signing up to make recurring contributions.

One ActBlue user who contacted Mother Jones, and who asked not to be identified, said she had replied “no” to a text message asking if she recalled donating to Biden in June. That drew a quick follow-up call from a woman who said she worked for the Fair Election Fund and asked for confirmation the user did not recall giving the money. The donor told the caller she did not recall the donation, but later realized she may have been mistaken. She told Mother Jones in an email that she suspected she had inadvertently signed up for recurring monthly contributions when she made an earlier donation.

More significantly, the Fair Election Fund and other ActBlue critics have offered zero evidence of the broader conspiracy they’re insinuating, in which fraudsters are supposedly stealing thousands of identities and using them to make hundreds of millions of dollars worth of illegal donations to Democratic candidates in small increments.

Anyone who wants to secretly bankroll a campaign, after all, has much better options. Super-PACs can accept unlimited amounts of money to spend on a candidate’s behalf with far less transparency. And other dark money groups spending big on the 2024 election, including the Fair Election Fund itself, likewise face significantly less public scrutiny.

Ironically, ActBlue—like its GOP counterpart, WinRed—is actually more transparent than even traditional forms of small-dollar fundraising. Under federal election law, if a person makes a donation of less than $200 directly to a campaign, their identity is never disclosed publicly. But all donations made through conduits like ActBlue must be publicly reported, which creates a detailed paper trail that otherwise would not exist.

Nonetheless, the Fair Election Fund’s claims have had impact. The Examiner story noted that the group had shared its findings with the offices of five Republican state attorneys general, two of whom quickly said in statements they would look into the allegations. “We are grateful to Fair Election Fund for sharing these concerning findings with us, as we explore whether any of our constituents have been defrauded by ActBlue,” Alabama AG Steve Marshall said.

Two of the attorneys general, Ken Paxton of Texas and Jason Miyares of Virginia, have said they were already investigating ActBlue, as has House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican. “Certain features of campaign finance law may incentivize bad actors to use platforms like ActBlue to covertly move money to political campaigns to evade legal requirements,” Paxton said in an August 8 statement.

The Fair Election Fund is working on other initiatives, as well. The group in May announced it would give people who claimed to have evidence of election fraud “payment from our $5 million dollar fund.” It has not explained what criteria it will use to determine payouts. But the effort, four years after Donald Trump used lies and debunked stories of ballot-stuffing to try to steal the 2020 election, appears squarely aimed at generating new election fraud claims that could turn out to be just as unreliable.

The Fair Election Fund used what it said was a “six-figure” ad buy in swing states during the Olympics to tell people who report voter fraud that they “could be eligible for compensation.” The Raleigh News & Observer reported the group also spent $375,000 on ads and billboards attacking North Carolina’s Democratic-controlled Board of Elections for denying ballot access to third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. The group similarly said it spent “six figures” faulting efforts to keep West off the ballot in Michigan. It also recently touted an online ad that claims that efforts to keep West off Pennsylvania ballots would disenfranchise Black voters and represent “the real Jim Crow 2.0.”

Where all the money for these campaigns comes from is not clear. A spokesperson for the Fair Election Fund declined to comment on the group’s funding or to answer specific questions, including where the group is incorporated. Former Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), who has been identified in press reports as a co-founder as a well as senior adviser to the group, did not respond to repeated inquiries by Mother Jones. He appears to be the only individual publicly declaring an affiliation with the group.

The group claims on its website to be a nonprofit but provides no information about its incorporation or tax status, as most nonprofits do. It also does not appear in a national database of tax-exempt organizations that have registered with the IRS. The group’s spokesperson did not respond to questions about its nonprofit status. In reports it was required to file to the Federal Communications Commission, the group listed the address of a small building in Pittsburgh.

Google’s online Transparency Center for ads indicates that some of the digital ads the Fair Election Fund has run were paid for by another organization, a corporation registered last year in Delaware called “For Which it Stands Fund, Inc.” That group has no evident online presence.

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer, said Fair Election Fund looks to be following a playbook favored by dark money recipients in recent election cycles. They can start operating without applying to the IRS for nonprofit status, as long as they plan to apply within the year. This delays the need to disclose any information publicly, including the filing of a so-called 990 tax form, until after the election. Some avoid even that belated disclosure by terminating their state registration before having to file a 990, Kappel said.

“Fair Election Fund appears to be a dark money group with very little known about how it’s funded or how it operates,” said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal-leaning watchdog group. “It seems to be trying to build out a conspiracy theory to use against Democratic candidates in the 2024 election. When groups like this pop up, it’s not out of the ordinary for them to hit quick and then disband before anything can be found out about them—or done about them.”

Campaign finance researchers contacted by Mother Jones said it was notable that the Fair Election Fund claimed to have $5 million when it launched but does not appear to be raising money online. That suggests the likelihood of a large preexisting source of money.

FCC filings list a woman named Tori Sachs as an official with the group. That is the name of a political consultant in Michigan who has helped spearhead several dark money efforts in support of Republican candidates in that state. Sachs has worked for multiple organizations funded by the billionaire DeVos family, including by Betsy DeVos, who was Trump’s Education secretary and previously chaired the Michigan GOP.

Sachs did not respond to inquires. A spokesperson for the DeVos family did not respond when asked if the family is providing funding for the Fair Election Fund.

Meanwhile, the Fair Election Fund is charging ahead, dangling cash for election fraud claims. And according to the Examiner, the group plans to “continue vetting Biden-Harris donors in the coming weeks.”

Additional reporting by Julia Lurie.

At a somber memorial event held Wednesday at Engine Company 4/Ladder Company 15 fire station in lower Manhattan, former president Donald Trump appeared to bring a special guest: 9/11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

The appearance of Loomer, a far-right social media shit-poster with a long record of bigotry, follows her travel with Trump to Tuesday’s presidential debate between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris.

But her attendance at a 9/11 remembrance event proved especially shocking. Last year, Loomer shared a video to Twitter that claimed the infamous terrorist attack was an “inside job.” Alongside the video, Loomer shared her false belief that the plane hijackings and resulting terrors were merely a ploy to allow the US government to surveil Americans moving forward.

“These actions destabilized the Middle East and allowed for the alphabet agencies to begin their campaign of WEAPONIZED GOVERNMENT AND MASS SURVEILLANCE against the American people,” Loomer wrote in June 2023.

Nearly 3,000 people died as a direct result of the attacks in 2001, including more than 2,500 civilians and firefighters at the World Trade Center in New York City; 184 people at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; and 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93, which crashed in an empty field in western Pennsylvania. Thousands more have contracted illnesses believed to be linked to their time near the wreckage of the attacks, according to a government program that compiles data on survivors.

Further, more than 240,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan war-zone areas since the War on Terror began. Of those, more than 70,000 were civilians.

Beyond spreading lies about 9/11, Loomer has previously described herself as a “proud Islamophobe.” She has also called Islam a “cancer on humanity.” Though the purpose of her recent travel with Trump is unclear, Loomer appears to be angling for what one may call an “inside job” in a second Trump Administration, after coming close to a job in his 2024 campaign.

Taiwanna Anderson’s life changed forever in December 2021, when she found her 10-year-old daughter Nylah unconscious, hanging from a purse strap in a bedroom closet.

Barely an adolescent, Nylah wasn’t suicidal. She had merely come across the “Blackout Challenge” in a feed of videos curated her for her by TikTok’s algorithm. The challenge circulating on the video-sharing app encouraged users to choke themselves with household items until they blacked out. When they regained consciousness, they were supposed to then upload their video results for others to replicate. After several days in a hospital’s intensive care unit, Nylah succumbed to her strangulation injuries. Anderson sued TikTok over product liability and negligence that she alleges led to Nylah’s death.

For years, when claimants tried to sue various internet platforms for harms experienced online, the platforms benefited from what amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 statute that offers apps and websites broad immunity from liability for content posted to their sites by third-party users. In 2022, a federal district judge accepted TikTok’s Section 230 defense to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Anderson based on the assessment that TikTok didn’t create the blackout challenge video Nylah saw—a third-party user of TikTok did.

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl.”

But on Tuesday, the federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals released an opinion reviving the mother’s lawsuit, allowing her case against TikTok to proceed to trial. TikTok may not have filmed the video that encouraged Nylah to hang herself, but the platform “makes choices about the content recommended and promoted to specific users,” Judge Patty Shwartz wrote in the appellate court’s opinion, “and by doing so, is engaged in its own first-party speech.”

“TikTok reads 230 of the Communications Decency Act to permit casual indifference to the death of a ten-year-old girl,” wrote Judge Paul Matey in a partially concurring opinion that sought to go even further than the other two judges on the panel.

Legal experts on tech liability say the panel’s overall decision could have immense ramifications for all kinds of online platforms that rely on algorithms similar to TikTok’s.

“My best guess is that every platform that uses a recommendation algorithm that could plausibly count as expressive activity or expressive speech woke up in their general counsel’s office and said, ‘Holy Moly,'” says Leah Plunkett, faculty at Harvard Law School and author of Sharenthood, a book about protecting kids online. “If folks did not wake up [Wednesday] thinking that, they should be.”

Advocates of Section 230 have long held the broad liability shield is necessary for the internet to exist and evolve as a societal tool; if websites were responsible for monitoring the heaps of content that hundreds of millions of independent users create, they contend, lawsuits would devastate platforms’ coffers and overwhelm the judicial system.

“If you have fewer instances in which 230 applies, then platforms will be exposed to more liability, and that ultimately harms the Internet user,” says Sophia Cope, senior attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free speech and innovation non-profit. A narrower interpretation of Section 230 immunity would make platforms “not want to host third party content, or severely limit what users can post,” Cope says, adding that the shift would amount to platforms engaging in “preemptive censorship” to protect their bottom lines.

But critics of Section 23o’s current scope say the statute has been interpreted far too leniently and that companies should at least sometimes be responsible for dangerous content their online platforms disseminate. In its monumental ruling this week, the appeals court said that when platforms curate harmful content, they—not their third-party users—may be engaging in a form of “expressive activity” for which they can be sued.

“TikTok made the conscious decision to not rein in the challenge, but instead to serve it up to more and more kids, many of whom were likely under the influence of TikTok’s addictive algorithms,” says Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who has been involved in several product liability suits against tech companies.

Tuesday’s decision is a departure from previous federal court rulings about the liability (or lack thereof) of online platforms. That’s because the appeals court had new case law to consider. In July, the Supreme Court released a favorable ruling to tech platforms at the behest of the trade group NetChoice, buttressing the ability of platforms to engage in expressive activity such as curating content or de-platforming politicians if they so chose. To interfere with that ability would implicate the First Amendment rights of platforms, the Supreme Court said in a narrow ruling of that case, NetChoice v. Moody.

Some experts believe the NetChoice decision has little to do with Section 230, which was originally passed by Congress with the intent of protecting fledgling tech platforms from being sued for moderating some content, but not doing a good enough job of it. “There is NO CONFLICT between moderation and ranking being (1) the platform’s speech and also (2) immunized by 230,” Daphne Keller of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center wrote on Twitter. “The whole point of 230 was to encourage and immunize moderation.”

But for proponents of re-litigating 230, the fact that NetChoice’s earlier Supreme Court argument was used by Third Circuit to reconsider how expansive Section 230 protections should be is “deliciously ironic,” says Goldberg, because “NetChoice is the most pro-230 lobbyist organization out there.”

Tuesday’s appellate court decision does not guarantee that TikTok will be held liable for showing Nylah the video that culminated in her death; however, it means cases in the Third Circuit’s jurisdiction shouldn’t be thrown out on Section 230 grounds before trial courts can consider their facts.

The ruling “should send a message” to platforms that use content curation algorithms “that the gravy train is over,” Goldberg tells Mother Jones. “These tech behemoths have been minting money for too long, comfortable with the notion that dead kids are the price of outrageous growth.”