In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden was buoyed by victories in the “blue wall” states of the Upper Midwest, and a few narrow wins in the South and Southwest. But it was easy to forget that he also picked up another electoral vote in a state where Democrats had been shut out since 2008—Nebraska, a reliably red state that has apportioned its electors by congressional district since 1992. The second district, which includes much of Omaha, is an electoral-college curiosity that was offset by Trump’s victory in the second congressional district of Maine—a reliably blue state that also splits its electoral votes.

This year is different. Thanks to reapportionment following the 2020 census, winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would only get Kamala Harris to 269 electoral votes—an Electoral College tie—and not 270. And because an Electoral College deadlock would be broken by a House of Representative roll-call in which each state delegation gets one vote, an Electoral College tie is effectively an Electoral College loss for Democrats. A win in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, or North Carolina would still put Harris over the top, but the easiest path to 270 is simply to hold onto what Nebraskans refer to as “the blue dot.” Which is why this time, Republicans aren’t satisfied with Nebraska and Maine canceling each other out; they are currently trying to change the rules at the last minute to take Omaha’s vote for themselves.

Trump supporters, and his campaign itself, have been talking about changing Nebraska’s rules for a while. Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk held a rally in the second district earlier this year to try to pressure the legislature to make a change, and Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita said at the Republican National Convention that he believed the state might still take action. Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has signaled his openness to calling a special session if Republicans in the unicameral legislature can prove they have the votes. But this largely theoretical exercise took on a more concrete tone this week, after NBC News reported South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham had traveled to Nebraska on behalf of the Trump campaign to lobby Republican lawmakers on the matter. And according to the Washington Post, Trump himself spoke with a Republican state senator by phone during the meeting to make his case directly.

This might seem a little late in the game to make such a major change to the Electoral College, but that’s the point: This is only happening because it’s so late in the game that Maine, because of its own state laws, can no longer change its own rules in response. It’s hard to come up with any justification for the Electoral College in the year 2024, but the Nebraska gambit makes a mockery of an already broken and deeply undemocratic system.

It’s hardly a done deal. Pillen has said he won’t call a special session unless legislators demonstrate they have a filibuster-proof majority, and as Nebraska Democrats have pointed out, they don’t have the votes right now. According to the Nebraska Examiner, there’s at least one key holdout with a conflicting professional interest—Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who is reportedly considering running for mayor of Omaha next year. He might want to avoid being known in Omaha as the guy who made Omaha irrelevant. In one of the world’s least reassuring statements, a spokesperson told the Examiner Thursday that McDonnell was opposed to any change “as of today.”

Whether Nebraska changes the rules or not, though, Graham’s gambit, and the pressure from the Trump campaign, offers an ominous glimpse of a future that looks a lot like the recent past. One of the dominant storylines following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was the pressure campaign he and his allies mounted on individual Republican officeholders all the way up until January 6. Trump, for instance, invited Michigan Republican lawmakers to the White House and called Republicans in Wayne County to try to pressure them to oppose the certification of Detroit’s election results. He asked Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in a phone call to “find” a few thousand votes that would put him over the top. Graham, as it happens, also talked to Raffensperger after the election, in a conversation that the election official considered part of a pressure campaign. (Graham denied any ill intention and was investigated but not charged by the Fulton County District Attorney’s office as part of its probe of 2020 election interference.) I don’t think I need to get into how Trump pressured Mike Pence. 

This is what November and December will look like if Trump loses at the ballot box: a drumbeat of urgent phone calls with Republicans lawmakers and officeholders in which the Republican candidate tries to cajole them into enabling his desired outcome, whether through legal or extra-legal means. If he doesn’t have the votes on Election Day, he will simply try to “find” them—in legislatures, on boards of supervisors, and in judges’ chambers. 

Then again, if Trump does get his way in Lincoln, it just might mean he never has to do any of that.

Arizona’s fourth legislative district, located in the suburban heart of Maricopa County, might be the ultimate bellwether in the ultimate bellwether state. And this fall, the stakes are impossibly high, not just at the presidential level—where polls show Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in a dead heat—but all the way down the ballot. Republicans control both chambers of the legislature by just one vote. In Arizona, where each legislative district elects two representatives, control of the state house could come down to Democrats’ efforts to flip one seat and hold another in this district that includes parts of Phoenix and Scottsdale.

In their quest to hold onto the legislature, Republicans have turned to a member of a famous Arizona family—Pamela Carter, older sister of the original Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter. On the campaign trail, the candidate Carter has talked up her work as a successful entrepreneur and a record of academic accomplishment, and boasts of having “my family’s full support” for her state house run. But a review of her record and past statements tells a much different story: In contrast to the fourth district’s moderate profile, Carter is a fervently anti-abortion minister who has been “blessed with end-time revelation” and who has made confusing claims about her past. And one notable member of her family is not on board—her famous sister, an advocate for reproductive rights.

“On her website, Pam claims to have her ‘family’s full support,'” Lynda Carter said in a statement to Mother Jones. “I have known Pam my entire life, which is why I sadly cannot endorse her for this or any public office.” 

Pamela Carter has offered an inconsistent accounting of her educational background. Her page at Ballotpedia states that she “earned a master’s degree in Communications and Biblical studies and attended Arizona State University,” which a spokesperson for the elections site confirmed was based on an informational survey that was “verified by the candidate.” “I was raised in Scottsdale, went right here to Arcadia High, ASU, and I just love our city,” she said on a podcast in 2022. This is technically true. Carter did attend ASU, and she does also have a master’s degree. But the reality of her resume is a bit more complicated.

According to an ASU spokesperson, Carter was at one point enrolled at the university, but did not graduate. Instead, according to her LinkedIn page and other interviews, she attended an unspecified bible college in Kansas City, Missouri, and later received a master’s degree in “communications and media studies” from the Primus University of Theology, a Phoenix-based institution that affirms in its mission statement that “life begins at conception.” (One of the prerequisites for admission is that you order a copy of the founder’s book.) Primus, which aims to prepare its students “for their Ministry calling,” is not accredited by any agency recognized by the Department of Education. Instead, it cites the approval of the University Accreditation Association, which evaluates institutions on their adherence to “biblical truths.” Its degree programs are “designed for the specific and singular purpose of qualifying individuals for Christian Ministry.”

But Carter has also described that degree differently in different contexts. Her campaign website during her unsuccessful 2022 campaign for Scottsdale city council said she held a “Master’s Degree in Business and Communications,” a claim she also repeated that year in an interview on a local podcast. In another video that year, she boasted of having a “master’s degree in theology, as well as in mass communications.” A current campaign biography states that “I received my master’s degree in Communications and Biblical studies.”

“On her website, Pam claims to have her ‘family’s full support,'” Lynda Carter said . “I have known Pam my entire life, which is why I sadly cannot endorse her for this or any public office.” 

Carter, who did not respond to requests for comment, has leaned into her biography during her run for office, arguing that her business experiences give her an advantage in the political realm. Foremost among those ventures was Jon Cole Systems, a gym she once owned with her ex-husband, the powerlifter Jon Cole. Newspaper ads for the fitness center sometimes featured Lynda Carter, touting the benefits of Cole’s “TOTAL WOMAN” workout program. 

“It was the largest [gym] in the nation at the time,” Pamela Carter boasted in a 2022 interview, in which she suggested that working people struggling to find housing in Scottsdale needed to hustle as hard as she had when she owned two homes and was helping to run the business in the 1970s.

For a few years, the gym was a major success, with clients such as the Green Bay Packers and members of the Phoenix Suns. But it soon went downhill. The company pursued Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1982, and was sold for $60,000 the next year, according to an Arizona Republic report in 1983. The couple divorced around the same time.

After the gym business fell through, Carter went on to a long career as a Christian wellness influencer, pitching the gospel alongside weight-loss and nutrition tips. She moved to California and hosted a fitness show called “Get in Shape with Pamela Carter” (on the Trinity Broadcasting Network) and another program on CBN called “Fit for Life.”

“I was one of the first and only, that I know, to actually use weights and aerobics to Christian gospel music,” she said in 2022. 

Eventually, after moving to Kansas City in the 1990s to attend Bible college, Carter started a ministry of her own, mixing divine revelation with health and wellness. Ravished Heart Communications Ministries International, which she launched with her second husband, Bruce, after a 50-day prophetic encounter in 2002 in which “the Lord revealed Himself to Pamela as her Messianic Bridegroom,” sold $12 self-help tapes that promised to help followers “lose weight” and defeat “food addiction.” “[Y]ou will learn how to increase your metabolism through Biblical eating habits and get the most out of your workouts. Pamela will also teach you how to overcome and break strongholds emotionally and spiritually that keep you compulsively addicted to overeating,” one two-part series promised. Another tape included a “one-hour prayer session” in which Carter “prays for you to be set free from [food] addiction.”

The ministry aimed to make an impact not just in the Christian dieting space, but in mass media. Carter asked her followers for donations so she could work in Hollywood as an “intercessor”—essentially an activist prayer warrior—and she produced her own content, including a lengthy interview with a woman who claimed that her daughter had been resurrected from the dead; and a feature film about the life of Karla Faye Tucker, the Texas woman who was executed by then-Gov. George W. Bush after converting to Christianity on death row. (Carter played the judge in the movie.)

But she ran into more financial difficulties around this time. Carter and her husband fell into debt during the 2008 Recession, and a chapter-7 bankruptcy filing in 2009 stated that Carter was back in the nutrition business. According to court documents, she was doing “nutritional sales” for Mannatech, a multi-level marketing company. “Pamela’s income comes from pyramid sales and fluctuates every month,” the filing stated, although it never amounted to more than a few hundred dollars. At the time, Mannatech, which had deep links to the Christian Right, was mired in controversy. In 2007, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sued the company, alleging “unlawful, misleading sales practices,” including testimonials that suggested that the supplements had cured autism and cancer, and brought a woman out of a coma. (The company settled with the state in 2009, and ultimately paid $4 million in restitution to customers and $2 million to the state, with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing.)

By 2011, Carter had rebounded: “We are praying for a new skin care line,” the Ravished Heart website announced that year.

Carter was not just pitching products, though. She was selling a very particular kind of theology, rooted in a desire to see the United States “united for Jesus,” and a belief that modern-day prophets—like herself—were transmitting revelations from God. A biography at the ministry stated that Carter “is very passionate about her love for the Lord and has been blessed with end-time revelation of His desire for His bride.” (The full revelation was available for purchase for $25.) She talked frequently about building influence on the “Media mountain” and said in 2011 that she was part of “God’s media army…to be raised up for such a time as this, to take possession of the arts, the entertainment media, the internet.”

The term is often used by proponents of a Christian nationalist movement sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation and a belief its adherents subscribe to known as Seven Mountains Dominionism, which aims to take gain influence over the seven spheres (or “mountains”) of government, education, media, family, entertainment, religion, and business.

In response to a candidate questionnaire from the city of Scottsdale two years ago, Carter said she had “been involved…as a volunteer” with three churches or organizations, all of which had ties to the NAR. They included Intercessors for America, a national prayer organization that warns that “there is an Enemy of our souls and our nation who orchestrates a coordinated battle plan that is discernible and beatable with spiritual weapons.” 

Another group she touted her work with was the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer, whose founding pastor, Mike Bickle, was dismissed last year amid allegations of sexual abuse. The church, where worship services have run 24/7 since 1999, has “been criticized by some pastors for what they describe as unorthodox theology and a cultish atmosphere, charges that Mr. Bickle rejects,” the New York Times reported in 2011. (In response to a Kansas City Star investigation into Bickle earlier this year, the organization emphasized that his alleged abuse predated the church’s creation, while Bickle has admitted to “inappropriate behavior” but not “the more intense sexual activities that some are suggesting.”) Long before he was forced out, Bickle had courted controversy with his assertions from the pulpit that Oprah was a forerunner of the Antichrist and that God sent Hitler to kill Jewish people because they wouldn’t accept Christianity.

Carter has described her foray into politics in ways that mirror her earlier work in “God’s media army.”

“What I’m learning in this whole government mountain thing,” she said in a 2020 conversation with Patricia King, a Phoenix-based minister, is that “the warfare just increases.”

“I think we need to do a lot of battle in the spirit—either certain individuals will repent and get in alignment with God’s will, or they’ll be cut off and replaced,” Carter said in the same video, after King discussed efforts to take back the US House of Representatives that year. “There are many scriptures about that. You know, He allows evil to prosper for a season, that it may be destroyed forever. I believe that’s where we are right now in the United States, and around the world, really.”

In that interview, Carter, who served that year as an advisor to the Trump campaign in the state, said she had acted as a prayer “intercessor” while working as a paid poll worker in Arizona. “I was dancing around, I had so much joy in just praying over every person that came in, you know, it was so fun,” she said. “But there’s also a lot of corruption I saw—not at the poll where I was working but at the election facility—and we just have to really watch and pray, watch and pray, and then you can cut that off in the spirit and then report it.”

In addition to her experience owning the fitness center and her advanced degree, Carter has often championed her involvement with two nonprofits, Help 4 Kidz—which provides food and clothing to needy kids—and the National Latina/Latino Commission. The former, she boasted during her city council campaign, had received the “Martin Luther King Award” for its work, which the nonprofit says it received from President Barack Obama. While the group’s founder was separately honored by the White House for her charitable endeavors, the MLK “Drum Major Award” was in fact a mail-order prize in which the White House would send a ceremonial pin and letter to anyone who had been nominated by a neighbor. The commission, which sounds like an official agency, is in fact a Christian organization designed “to mentor on the seven spheres of influence,” and notes on an archived version of its website (which has been down since June) that it was “seeking [sponsors] to Build Bomb Shelters near schools” in Israel. The group, which listed Carter as a board member, has a small footprint; the group has not reported more than $50,000 in revenue at any point in the last 12 years.

The overtly Christian language that has defined her life’s work has been less prominent in Carter’s campaigns, first in the 2022 race for city council and now for state representative. She has preferred to discuss her opposition to higher-density construction projects, and fears that migrants to the state are causing crime to spike. 

In her statement opposing Pamela Carter’s candidacy, Lynda Carter praised the late Republican Sen. John McCain for his “decency, justice, and freedom,” while explicitly endorsing both of the Democrats running against her sister:

“As a native Arizonan, I am proud to endorse Kelli Butler and Karen Gresham to represent LD4 in Arizona’s State House. Kelli and Karen are both strong, experienced candidates, born and raised in Arizona,” she said. “They are working mothers fighting for the rights that matter most to Arizonans, especially every child’s right to a quality education.”

Democrats have made inroads in places like LD4 in recent election cycles with an emphasis on protecting public education and reproductive rights from overreach by Republicans at the state capital. Pamela Carter, for her part, has defended the state’s controversial voucher program and vowed to hold the line on one of the biggest issues facing social conservatives in Arizona right now: abortion.

The district offers a glimpse of how reproductive rights is playing at the ballot box in a highly competitive area. Christine Marsh, the district’s Democratic state senator, won her election in 2022 by a little more than 1,000 votes by relentlessly linking a Republican incumbent to the state legislature’s 15-week abortion ban. The current Republican state representative, Matt Gress, was one of three members of his party to break ranks and vote to repeal Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban, which offered no exceptions even for cases of rape. A recent Fox News survey found that supporters of an abortion-rights ballot initiative in Arizona outnumber opponents by roughly three-to-one—and 50-percent of Republicans said they approved. Carter, though, has sung a different tune. 

“Hopefully we will stand and not allow any abortion,” she said in 2022, when asked how the legislature should respond to the repeal of Roe v. Wade. “If I were in that position, I would say no on any abortion.”

At least a few times a week, when no elections are underway, the Maricopa County recorder’s office hosts tours of the Tabulation and Election Center, or MCTEC, a gray, one-story concrete fortress on the edge of downtown Phoenix where as many as 2.4 million ballots will be sorted and counted this fall. Ever since the 2020 election, when President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the county helped Democrats flip the state, the site has been the subject of suspicion, threats, and conspiracies.

In response to the chaotic scenes of 2020, when Alex Jones showed up with a megaphone and declared that it was “1776,” the county installed a 10-foot-high security fence with an intercom system around the entrance. People in four states have been arrested for threatening the recorder, ­Stephen Richer, whose office is responsible for maintaining voter rolls and mailing out ballots. In March, the vice chair of the county GOP joked about lynching him; in July, she led the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention. Richer, a 39-year-old Republican lawyer with thinning red hair, has, in turn, tried to demystify his team’s processes with aggressive transparency.

On a 105-degree Tuesday in June, I joined a small group from a local chamber of commerce for a peek under the hood. Some participants had questions about their own experiences: Why had a relative’s ballot not been counted? What really happened when Sharpie ink bled through a ballot? As we wound through corridors, past rows of printers and stacks of empty USPS bins, Sarah Frechette, deputy registrar outreach coordinator in the recorder’s office, pointed out one safeguard after another. You need a key card to pass through any door, and each card only grants access to certain areas. No one from the recorder’s office can enter the tabulation room—a different agency counts the votes. Just three people have access to the server, which is encased in a small glass room within the tabulation room. No one can enter that room unless another person is present. If ballots are kept overnight, they are stored in secure rooms behind floor-to-ceiling chain-link cages. The only thing missing is a moat.

When we arrived at a beige room with rows of tables where trained workers attempt to verify signatures on mail-in ballots flagged for review, Frechette drew our attention to the ceiling. “Camera…camera…camera…camera,” she said, pointing up. They are everywhere, and they are always on. You can go online and watch the livestreams yourself.

MCTEC is a citadel of lawfulness, where Democrats and Republicans check each other’s work and protect the democratic process in America’s fourth-largest county. Richer refers to the tabulation room as “the holiest of holy rooms.” But outside the metal gates, it’s a different story.

To much of Richer’s party, MCTEC is a crime scene. Almost four years after Joe Biden’s victory, the myth of stolen elections shapes races up and down the ballot and across the state. It has consumed the energy of the legislature and thrown a wrench into the gears of governance through an endless parade of lawsuits and investigations. America’s most volatile swing state is trapped in a time loop: Arizona is where the 2018 election was suspect, the 2020 election never ended, and the 2022 election is literally still being contested.

This obsession with fraud and betrayal has cost Arizona Republicans dearly. What was once a locus of conservative power has shifted slowly but tangibly toward the Democratic column. Republicans have lost a succession of statewide races, alienated independents, and driven officials from their ranks—and sometimes their homes—with threats of violence and retribution. Those defeats have not muted the power of the stolen election narrative; they have reinforced it. In a paranoid party, the biggest winners are the losers. With every setback the Big Lie grows more righteous, more lucrative, and more vital.

The process has at times veered into the comic, but the results are deadly serious. Arizona shows what happens when a conspiracy takes over a party, and election denial becomes not just a tactic but its animating purpose. Processes, such as vote-by-mail, that have for decades made Arizona one of the easiest places in America to vote are now on the chopping block. Officials and low-level workers who have served the public for years are fighting for their jobs—or giving up on them. The very idea that voters should decide elections is viewed with suspicion in some corners of the legislature.

This fall, with Arizona once again poised to play a major role in the presidential election and the fight to control both houses of Congress, and the state legislature up for grabs, election deniers are everywhere. Republicans are no more prepared to accept a Democratic victory now than they were four years ago. And with President Donald Trump leading or within striking distance in most recent polls of the state, the figures who have spent the last four years undercutting the basic workings of democracy might finally reap their rewards.

To see what the recorder’s office is up against, I didn’t have to go far. That same morning, a few blocks north of MCTEC, a small crowd spilled out the doors of a cramped hearing room in the bowels of the Maricopa County Superior Court for the final three arraignments in State of Arizona v. Kelli Ward, et al. The case—in which 11 ­Arizona Republicans and seven other Trump allies were charged with conspiring to submit false Electoral College certificates in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election—is both a commentary and a meta-commentary on the whole state of affairs.

Kris Mayes, the Democratic attorney general who brought the case, won her election in 2022 by 280 votes; Abe Hamadeh, her Republican opponent, was still contesting the result. Hamadeh had recently filed a fourth appeal, arguing that Mayes should be removed from office and a do-over should be held. He’d been challenging the result for so long that he was now also running for Congress; Anthony Kern, an indicted fake elector since elected to the state Senate, was running against him.

The fake electors were symbols of the state party’s evolution. Prior to 2016, Arizona’s official Republican organizations seesawed between hardcore activists and more mainstream leaders. The Maricopa GOP censured the late Sen. John McCain, champion of the latter faction, three times for purported liberal heresies. In turn, McCain’s allies periodically purged the state and local party of gadflies to restore a veneer of normality. The Trump years, and McCain’s death, effectively settled the debate; even as the electorate in Maricopa County moved to the center, the Republican Party went full MAGA.

Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor who is stepping down at the end of his term after years of threats and abuse, told me that the first signs of an unraveling came in 2018, when Democrats narrowly won three statewide races, including a bid for US Senate. Gates, a 53-year-old lawyer with short graying-brown hair who had previously helmed the state party’s “election integrity” efforts, recalled how Republicans had expressed shock and suspicion at the results, which weren’t called until nearly a week after the election.

Conservatives focused their ire on Richer’s Democratic predecessor, Adrian Fontes, who at the time was responsible for both in-person and mail-in voting. Fontes had run for office on a promise to expand voting access, but presided over a chaotic primary and general election plagued by hourslong waits at some polling stations. The Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors then reached a deal with Fontes in which the board took back control of in-person voting.

“Some of the vitriol in 2019 when I was the chair and I was negotiating that new relationship, I saw it—it was palpable,” Gates said. “Did I see what ended up coming? No, but these pressures were here. They were under the surface and had broken through.”

Afterward, the state GOP enlisted Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer, to conduct an audit of the 2018 election. The 228-page report he produced is striking, both for what it does and doesn’t say. Richer concluded that it was “plausible” Fontes had acted with partisan interest by opening multiple “emergency voting” centers the weekend before Election Day and by continuing to attempt to “cure” mail-in ballots days after polls closed.

Richer’s report also contained traces of past and future conspiracies. His requests for correspondence between Fontes’ office and George Soros, he noted, went unfulfilled. But he also determined Fontes had done nothing illegal, and his report’s allegations of inappropriate behavior were fairly benign and, by Richer’s admission, unsubstantiated. This was a conventional political document, with a conventional political solution. A few months later, Richer declared his candidacy against Fontes. His slogan: “Make the Recorder’s Office Boring Again.”

Behind the scenes, though, the state party was in the midst of a transformation. In 2018, the millennial political activist Charlie Kirk relocated to Arizona from Illinois and began building out a power base around his nonprofit, Turning Point USA, and his PAC, Turning Point Action. Kirk’s Christian nationalist agenda is centered on the Dream City Church in Phoenix, which claimed during the pandemic to have developed a proprietary air-purification system that kills “99.9 percent of Covid within 10 minutes.” (It does not.) He hosts a “Freedom Night in ­America” rally there once a month; Trump has twice campaigned at Dream City.

These MAGA Republicans blamed their setbacks not on Trump, of course, but on electoral malfeasance and the fecklessness of the McCain wing of the party. At the state GOP’s annual meeting in 2019, a handful of Kirk allies, including Turning Point Action’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, and Turning Point USA’s former spokesperson, Jake Hoffman, helped elect Kelli Ward—a right-wing doctor who had once proposed holding a state Senate hearing on chemtrails and waged an ugly primary challenge against McCain—as party chair. (The Arizona Republic reported that Bowyer was working on his own time, not Turning Point’s.) In a harbinger of things to come, the Republic reported, delegates insisted on choosing their new leader via voice vote. They didn’t trust the machines.

“In a paranoid party, the biggest winners are the losers. With every setback the Big Lie grows more righteous, more lucrative, and more vital.”

Trump lost Arizona the next year, at a time when many Arizonans were primed to reject such a loss, and reacted accordingly. Although Richer defeated Fontes, his fellow Republicans almost immediately alleged that something sinister was going down at MCTEC—and soon Richer himself would become the subject of conspiracies. A lawsuit filed by Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Alex Kolodin, on behalf of Bowyer, Hoffman, Ward, and eight other Arizonans who would have served as electors had Trump won, included an affidavit alleging that former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had helped develop the technology used in Arizona voting machines; a claim that Biden’s lead could have been manufactured “with blank ballots filled out by election workers, Dominion or other third parties”; and a reference to a “former US Military Intelligence” expert who was identified only as “Spider.” Ward pressured the Board of Supervisors to stop the certification. When that failed, according to Mayes’ indictment, the 11 Republicans gathered around a conference table at state party headquarters on December 14 to sign their own set of papers declaring that they were Arizona’s rightful electors.

In their arraignment six months later, Trump lawyers Boris Epshteyn and Jenna Ellis, and fake elector Steve Lamon, pleaded not guilty. (Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Ellis, in exchange for her cooperation in the case.) But Trump diehards still view the underlying event with pride. A video of the signing that the state party posted on X is still up. So is a group photo Ward posted, with the message: “Oh yes we did!” This past spring, four days after the indictments dropped, Hoffman, now a state senator, was elected to the Republican National Committee.

The Arizona efforts to “stop the steal” were merely the prelude to an even stranger quest to expose how the election was supposedly stolen. It is hard to summarize what happened next without starting to feel a little insane yourself. In the months that followed, Republican legislators pursued theories that ballots were shredded, that they were imported from South Korea, that drop boxes were illegally stuffed with ballots, that the tabulators were hacked, and that evidence of voter fraud had been incinerated at a farm where 166,000 chickens died in a fire. (The chicken fire did happen, but no ballots were harmed.) The entire party had become Gene Hackman at the end of The Conversation—delirious, destroyed, surrounded by the shattered floorboards of its paranoia.

In Chandler, Arizona, a QAnon-­promoting realtor named Liz Harris tried proving the existence of massive fraud by linking mail-in ballots to vacant lots. But some of her claims could be debunked using Google Maps. Harris was elected to the Statehouse and subsequently expelled for inviting a witness to testify who accused various elected officials of committing crimes on behalf of the Mormon Church and the Sinaloa cartel. In April, she joined Hoffman on the RNC.

The search for clues culminated in 2021, in a monthslong “audit” commissioned by Republican members of the Arizona Senate, paid for by e-commerce kingpin Patrick Byrne, and carried out under the direction of an IT firm called the Cyber Ninjas at a former basketball arena in central Phoenix nicknamed the Madhouse. The Ninja volunteers, one of whom—fake elector Kern—had been on the US Capitol grounds on January 6, were inspired by an inventor named Jovan Pulitzer (not his given name), who claimed to have developed a proprietary system that could detect ballot tampering. They inspected the ballots for evidence of bamboo fibers (to prove they had actually come from China) and shined UV light under them to search for ­watermarks. (Some QAnon followers believed Trump had secretly marked legitimate ballots.) Pulitzer had previously led a search for the Ark of the Covenant. Evidence of fraud proved similarly elusive.

There was plenty of drama on Election Day, as might be expected in a county the size of Maricopa. Take the Sharpies. Voters who showed up at some polling locations were told to fill out their ballots with markers because the ink dries faster. In some cases, the markers bled through to the other side of the ballot, causing panic among voters. Sharpies formed the basis for one of Trump’s post-election lawsuits, but the case was thrown out because there was no evidence the issue prevented votes from being counted. When a voter brought up the subject on the MCTEC tour, a staffer explained why—the ballot’s offset design was crafted specifically to stop bleed-throughs from affecting the tabulation.

But the spectacle was partly the point. During the audit, the Cyber Ninjas’ CEO partnered with a documentary filmmaker (who’d previously argued that aliens had done 9/11) to produce The Deep Rig, a movie that purported to explain how the CIA influenced the 2020 results. The film premiered in 2021 at Dream City—where the state GOP voted to give Ward another term at its annual meeting that year. (The chair election, which this time used paper ballots, mirrored the party’s crackup; one losing candidate alleged that the election was rigged and demanded an audit, which Ward rejected on the grounds that “you certainly don’t allow a challenger who lost an election to demand something that they don’t have the right to.”) The Cyber Ninja audit was a joke, but a useful one. Politicians and activists learned that there were few consequences to indulging the lie. Quite the opposite—refusing to do so might cost you your job, while egging it on could get you a much better one.

No one understood this lesson better than Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor who resigned after questioning the decision to call Arizona for Biden. As the state party attempted to regroup from its recent setbacks, Lake kept election denial front and center during her run for governor in 2022. She won Trump’s endorsement after promising at a Turning Point event to revisit the stolen election as governor, then hosted a rodeo with MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Lake was the sort of candidate the Turning Point crowd had been waiting for: a proto-Trump for a shadow party. She spoke at Dream City, rallied with Kirk and Bowyer, and stumped with the organization’s enterprise director (also a state representative). Lake led a slate of like-minded conservatives who vowed to use their powers to take back what was stolen from them. She filed her first challenge to the vote process before ballots were even mailed out.

A few weeks after the 2022 election, Lake had a dream. As she later recounted in her memoir, Unafraid: Just Getting Started, she found herself drugged, blindfolded, and bound with duct tape in the back of a pickup truck being driven by two men. One, with “a batch of ginger stubble, a color match for his thinning hair,” was named Stephen. The other—“short, with greasy black hair, and a face that seemed incapable of bearing any expression other than smugness”—was called Bill. They had taken her to the desert to kill her but were too incompetent for the job. After Stephen fumbled with his Glock, Bill grabbed the weapon and fired wildly in her direction. When she awoke, Lake wrote, her phone was ringing. It was her attorney, bearing news about her lawsuit challenging the election results.

If the villains of 2020 were shadowy foreign powers, Republicans had clearer targets when Lake lost two years later. They blamed Richer and Gates, whose Board of Supervisors was responsible for Election Day administration and tabulation, as well as certifying the results. The losing US Senate candidate, Blake Masters, conceded while nonetheless demanding that Gates resign. But the rest of the slate began a series of long-shot legal challenges premised on the corruption and incompetence of MCTEC. Touring Arizona in the ensuing months, Lake beamed photos of Gates and Richer onto big screens and falsely accused them of “intentionally” causing delays at voting sites and of “pumping 300,000 invalid ballots” into the final tally.

Lake wasn’t merely complaining. She actively attempted to reverse the outcome via lawsuits that aimed to install her in her rightful place in the governor’s mansion. To represent her, she hired a self-described “adventure travel guide” and lawyer named Bryan Blehm, who had distinguished himself previously as counsel for the Cyber Ninjas audit. Blehm is often described as a “Scottsdale divorce attorney,” which is true but incomplete; he is also an expert on motorcycle law. He was not an experienced election lawyer, and by his own admission—in a letter defending himself against an investigation by the state bar—lacked the resources for the task.

Blehm’s case was not strong, in other words. A judge suspended his law license for two months for making a false statement in a state Supreme Court filing and ordered him to take continuing legal education. Lake’s attorneys in the voting-machines action were docked $122,000 for filing a case without merit. Alex Kolodin, the Arizona lawyer who worked with Sidney Powell on the election challenge that cited “Spider,” was ordered by a court to take five different remedial ethics classes. (The cases were a boon for Kolodin, who is now a state representative and a member of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee; he recently posted a photo of himself doing his coursework at a Dream City Trump rally.)

But Lake had strength in numbers. Mark Finchem, an Oath Keeper and former state representative who lost his 2022 race for secretary of state by 120,000 votes, filed his own lawsuit to contest the results and demand a new election. Hamadeh filed a series of similar challenges on his own behalf, which “the crazies love because they see me fighting,” he privately told a fellow Republican. Conceding a lost race went from the norm to the exception, and lawsuits were filed as a matter of course. The recorder’s office has been dragged to court 43 times since 2020. Eventually, citing psychological harm, physical threats, and damaged career prospects, Richer fought back with a defamation lawsuit against Lake.

Republican elected officials have tried to make it easier to flood the political and legal systems with baseless claims. Fake elector Kern introduced legislation that would protect attorneys who filed election challenges, however frivolous. Kolodin, the oft-sanctioned election lawyer, supported a bill that would strip the bar of the power to sanction lawyers altogether. In May, GOP members of the Arizona House called for impeachment of Mayes, the attorney general, in part because of her efforts to prosecute election-denying officials in rural Cochise County, which had failed to certify the 2022 election before the deadline.

Arizona’s elections themselves seem increasingly superfluous. One state representative backed a bill to give the legislature, not voters, power to award the state’s electoral votes. Another pushed a law that would preemptively award Arizona’s electoral votes to Trump in 2024. It was an effort, one of the bill’s supporters explained, to “ignore the results of another illegally run election.”

Lake, who continues fighting for a redo of the gubernatorial election even as she runs for US Senate, is stuck in the same predicament as much of her party. Election denial might have started as an applause line, but once you exposed the conspiracy it also meant you couldn’t stop—the only way out was to keep telling the lie until you finally won.

At his office across from the courthouse, I asked Gates, who has publicly detailed his struggles with PTSD, if he had seen any ­indications that the fever was breaking. He replied by pointing out a recent change the supervisors had made to the chamber where they hold public meetings. In February, a group of attendees upset about the recent elections had attempted to storm the dais. Now the room has a pony barrier.

“I could post on X that I just had a sandwich, you know, and there’d be several comments that I’m a traitor,” Gates said.

A few days after the MCTEC tour, I stopped by a Republican candidate forum at a rec center next to a pickleball court in Sun City West, a sprawling retirement village 45 minutes from downtown Phoenix. The community is red, white, and very old—at one point, the emcee interrupted proceedings to ask whether anyone was missing a pair of bifocals.

Fears of stolen elections came up in almost every race, even the ones you might not expect. A candidate for Maricopa County sheriff promised that, if elected, he would put deputies in charge of transporting ballots and confiscate suspicious voting equipment. A candidate for the legislature promised to get rid of early voting. A candidate for Maricopa County attorney blamed the Republican incumbent for pursuing sanctions against election deniers. Even one of the candidates for superintendent of schools managed to bring the conversation back to “election integrity.”

The Trump campaign’s local field director, on hand to promote a get-out-the-vote program, said that Hamadeh had “supposedly” lost his 2022 race, moments before Hamadeh himself took the stage to brag about his ongoing lawsuit. Kern, whose campaign sold T-shirts bearing his mugshot, described himself as a “proud member of the 2020 electors club” and announced to the crowd that it was “time for battle.” Multiple candidates used their time to demand Richer’s firing.

When Richer spoke, following a Lake-backed primary challenger who accused him of mailing out extra ballots, he talked up his law enforcement endorsements and efforts to keep voter rolls up to date. “I want to be a resource,” he told the room.

The crowd booed.

The moderator asked him a question that he said had been picked at random: Did Richer believe the 2020 election was stolen?

Richer enunciated his response as clearly as he could.

“I do not believe the 2020 election was stolen,” he said.

The boos started up again.

Republican voters weren’t persuaded by the recorder’s promises of transparency and good faith. In July, Richer lost his primary by a little less than nine points. For the third straight election, the most competitive county in America’s most competitive state will roll the dice with someone new.

The operating word of the Democratic National Convention was “vibes.” They’re good, if you haven’t heard. They’ve shifted. For a group of people often dismissively referred to as “bedwetters,” Democrats are as excited as they’ve ever been at having a roughly 50-50 chance of disaster. There was just a feeling. Everyone from Bill Clinton to Oprah wanted to talk about the “joy” the new nominee brought to the race. Attendees told me it felt like 2008. “Yes she can,” said Barack Obama. People carried around prints of Vice President Kamala Harris that looked like Shepard Fairey had painted them. I thought I even saw Bill Ayers while walking around in his old neighborhood on Sunday.

A few months ago, such a display of Democratic optimism would have felt impossible. For much of the last eight years, the Democratic Party has been defined by a simmering discontent over the administrations of the past and the primary battles that never ended. Biden, elected in an economic crisis and a global pandemic, had promised to serve as a transitional figure before yielding to a new generation of leaders. But as his reelection bid stumbled, he seemed, instead, like a bridge to nowhere.

Chicago offered a glimpse of what a soft-landing looks like, not just for the economy, but for a whole political party. Years of infighting and recriminations yielded to a policy consensus that sounded like an unusually appealing kind of working-class fusionism. Adding dental and vision coverage to Medicare. Stopping corporate price-gouging. Busting monopolies. Passing the PRO Act. Free school lunch and breakfast. On Wednesday, Tim Walz’s small-town biography doubled as a story not just about football defensive schemes, but about the crushing weight of medical debt and the imperative for government to wipe it out.

The sorts of issues that had often festered for years on the party’s left-flank were dressed up in a kind of general-interest dad plaid, and pitched to a willing audience by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The new consensus did not just happen all at once. It happened, in part, because the current president rebuilt trust in what normie Democrats could accomplish. Biden was a bridge after all. Democrats in Chicago finally found out what was on the other side.

The change within the party was not just a matter of positive thinking. It was reflected in the substance of the event. The spectacle in Chicago was the total inverse of what transpired at the RNC. In Milwaukee, Trump and Vance had dangled the possibility of a new conservative workers party, in the service of an increasingly monarchical donor class. To make their case, they even rolled out a prominent labor leader, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who argued that unions should seek friends in the Republican Party in the fight against “economic terrorism.” O’Brien’s gimmick seemed a bit credulous at a coronation for a corrupt plutocrat who had kneecapped organized labor as president; it looks even more foolish now.

While the RNC offered the illusion of transformation, Democrats showed off their capacity to actually change, and to elevate new leaders and ideas in the service, often enough anyway, of a politics for working people. Instead of O’Brien, the DNC gave a primetime platform to Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president, who took off his blazer midway through his speech on Monday to reveal a red union t-shirt that said “Trump is a scab.”

Fain, who took office in 2023, represented a new direction for an old institution. He was the product of a political revolution within the UAW, aimed at driving out stagnant and corrupt leadership, and as president, he pursued a more aggressive strategy, which culminated in a historic strike at the Big Three automakers last year. (Full disclosure, I am a member of the UAW.) His spokesman is a former organizer for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and Fain rails frequently against “the billionaire class.” But his presence on stage spoke not just to a more ambitious and assertive labor movement, but also to the power of real political partnership—and the changes that Biden, of all people, had brought to politics.

The new consensus did not just happen all at once. It happened, in part, because the current president rebuilt trust in what normie Democrats could accomplish. Biden was a bridge after all.

The union’s recent successes, he pointed out every chance he got in Chicago, were powered by members but eased along by the White House. In remarks to reporters this week, Fain credited Biden’s revamped National Labor Relations Board, which Trump had stacked with corporate picks, for clearing the way for clean elections at notoriously difficult shops. When auto workers went on strike last year, Biden, Fain noted, became the first president to ever walk a picket line. And when workers struck in 2019, Harris, as a presidential candidate, was there too.


“Plants were closing under Donald Trump,” Fain said. “I didn’t see Donald Trump save one of them. I didn’t see Donald Trump try to save one of them.”

Fain was a ubiquitous figure throughout the week in running shoes and a rotating array of red and blue UAW shirts. The union had sold thousands of “Trump is a scab” tees since his speech on Monday. Everywhere he went, delegates—many in red union shirts of their own—would gather around him to have a word or take a photo. (He was also multi-tasking—Fain used his speech to deliver a message to Big Three automaker Stellantis, and even took a bus trip during the week to rally outside the company’s plant in Belvidere, Illinois.) On Wednesday morning, after watching Fain quote Ecclesiastes and the “great poet…Marshall Mathers” within the span of a few minutes at a breakfast with the Michigan delegation, I asked him about the party’s trajectory.

“After the Reagan years and Bush 1, you saw a shift somewhat where, because laws changed, deregulation happened, the massive tax cuts for the wealthy, trickle-down economics…and I think the party somewhat shifted to try to appease the business class and the corporate class,” he said, as we walked down an escalator at a Michigan Ave. Hilton. “I think that hurt in the elections, because when people look at both sides, they see the same people serving the same master.”

Things were looking up, though. He believed that Harris and Walz, like Biden, would bring the party closer to its “working-class roots.”

“It’s gonna take time—it’s not gonna happen overnight,” he said. “But we’re on our way.”

The week was a passing of the torch of sorts, not just for Biden and Clinton, but for the man who lost the nomination to both of them, Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator, a more hunched but still fiery 82, is seeking a fourth and perhaps final term this fall, while still mostly talking about the same issues he’s been harping on for four decades—getting money out of politics, universal health care, and tackling “oligarchy.” At a small confab near the United Center hosted by his longtime allies at the Progressive Democrats of America on Monday, Sanders made a forceful case that the man whom Democrats had rallied behind to stop him from winning the nomination had been a real ally once in office.

“He was prepared to really bring about structural changes in this country,” Sanders explained, laying out a wish list from childcare to adding dental and vision coverage into Medicare. “That was Build Back Better, and we failed with the two corporate Democrats in the Senate—but what I want you to understand is he was prepared to do that.”

“You’re not gonna hear a lot about Medicare for All” at the convention, Sanders acknowledged. (Harris, who embraced a variation of the policy in 2019 during her presidential campaign, walked back her support this month.) But Sanders had been a leading voice calling for Biden to stay in the race, in part because of the strength of their working relationship. Although he and Harris are not as close, Sanders sounded positive when we spoke later that night about what a Harris administration might portend.

Harris said the words “we are not going back” six times. The dig at Trump was obvious. But it describes where the party is at too.

“I think the proposals that she has brought forth so far are strong proposals,” he said. “I’m really glad that she is focusing on housing, because I will tell you that it’s an area that has not gotten the attention that it deserves. And she’s right. You got a major housing crisis in Burlington, Vermont, Los Angeles, and every place in between, 650,000 people homeless, millions unable to afford housing, so I’m glad she’s focusing on that. I’m glad she’s continuing the efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs, which is a huge issue. I’m glad she believes in eliminating medical debt, which is just insane that people go bankrupt because they have cancer. So that’s an important issue, and extending the child tax credit that we passed in the rescue plan to lower childhood poverty by 40 percent is also enormous. So I think she’s off to a good start.”

One of the reasons he was feeling optimistic, Sanders said this week, was because of what he called “the rebirth and revitalization of the trade union movement.” In Biden, he had found an ally on the inside, but in Fain—whom he singled out for wearing an “Eat the Rich” shirt during last year’s strike—Sanders saw the vanguard of a workers movement often aligned with the Democratic Party that could continue to drive change outside of it.

The gerontocracy at the top of the party has for a long time created the impression of a stultifying institution. The narrowness of the message Biden was capable of articulating—in contrast to the substance of the policies he was working to deliver—created an oppressive sort of aura. It was all harshly whispered words about “democracy” and the “soul of the nation.” Biden was standing in the way of not just Harris, but of a broader generational transition capable of saying so much more.

It wasn’t just Fain. Ocasio-Cortez, a fellow insurgent once on the fringes on the party, now had roughly the same prominence in the speaker lineup as Hillary Clinton, and attacked the Republican nominee as a “two-bit union-buster.” Everywhere you looked, there was some new star in the coalition, or soon-to-be-star in the coalition, seizing their five to 15 minutes to make their case. Many of these figures weren’t even in politics during the 2016 primaries. Their ideas and careers had been forged in the reactionary crucible in the Trump years.

Perhaps no one embodied this breakthrough better than Harris herself, a politician whose 2020 presidential candidacy floundered in a party still stuck in 2016, and who wallowed as an occasional punchline as vice president for three years.

“[O]ur nation, with this election, has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward, not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans,” she said in her remarks at the United Center. She said the words “we are not going back” six times. The dig at Trump was obvious. But it describes where the party is at too.

Going into the week, the grumbling, among the grumbling set, was that Harris was big on sunshine and light on specifics. But the program is simple enough: Making things easier for working-people, in easily recognizable ways—affordable housing, affordable groceries, affordable drugs, and affordable families too; the Child Tax Credit that Sanders promoted is such a popular idea that the Republicans who killed it are now running on bringing it back.

Democrats were also clear-eyed about what they were up against. Throughout the week, a procession of people—Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (first elected: 2018); Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (first elected: 2018); Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson—stepped up to the lectern with a comically oversized book, like something out of an old Cistercian Abbey, and announced that this was “Project 2025.”

During Thompson’s faux-SNL sketch, regular people took turns describing their life circumstances, and then Thompson would page through his big book and tell them how they were screwed. A woman named Nirvana happily announced that thanks to Biden and Harris, she pays just $35 a month for insulin. That was getting axed, Thompson cheerfully informed her. Another person said she was an employee at the Department of Education. She would be fired, Thompson explained. Someone else was happily married to a spouse of the same sex. Womp, womp.

The Project 2025 attacks were the sort of policy evisceration—at various points mean and fun and deeply moving—that I hadn’t seen in such portions since Obama’s scorched-earth campaign against Bain Capital and Paul Ryan’s budget. It is hard to say anything new about Trump. But the key to the Project 2025 attacks was that they didn’t just define Republicans as weird and creepy (although they did do that, in a mix of gut-wrenching and clever ways). That big oversized think-tank document gave Democrats a chance to talk about the things they consider normal. They were unafraid to talk about abortion. They went out of their way to talk about fertility treatments. They stood for the bedrock principle of doing what the doctor tells you to do. It fell to Walz, another relative unknown until Biden’s exit, to sum up this new middle-ground in his characterstically blunt way: “Mind your own damn business.”

The vibesiest scene at the DNC’s vibes-fest this week may have come at “Hotties for Trump,” an after-party where hundreds of zoomers picked up “Fuck Project 2025” condoms and posed for photos next to a couch that said “Property of JD Vance.” The event was bankrolled, like tens of millions of dollars worth of other Democratic operations, by the LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman.

Like the entire Harris campaign itself, the Democratic coalition’s kumbaya feel is fragile and potentially fleeting. There are already signs of potential crackups in this new unified front. “There are some Democratic donors who don’t like Lina Khan,” Sanders told me. “I happen to think that Lina Khan is the best chair of the FTC that we have seen in a very long time.”

Hoffman begs to differ, and in his criticism of one of the Biden administration’s most effective Big Tech trust-busters, you can see the shape of the battles to come. Those grocery stores where Harris wants to crack down on rising costs, for instance, include chains like Kroger—whose merger with Albertson’s Khan has put on hold. The week’s most glaring stain was the refusal to grant speaking time to a Palestinian-American Georgia state representative and Harris delegate—the sort of cynical and short-sighted move that may haunt a group of people who claim to be the party of moral clarity. And for all their positivity, Democrats are still more or less a coin flip from another catastrophe in November, and a new wave of recriminations and soul-searching.

For Democrats, the future is promising but uncertain. But they have, at least, finally left the past behind.

The immediate reaction to former President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night was that it sounded a lot like the sort of remarks he’d delivered before. He asked the audience at Chicago’s United Center if they were “fired up” and rewrote his 2008 campaign mantra to accommodate the vice president: “Yes she can.” Democrats on the ground here say they’re seeing a level of excitement they haven’t witnessed since Obama’s first campaign; the former commander-in-chief was happy to indulge their newfound hope. 

But there was one item on his agenda that sounded quite different from the Obama of old.

“We can’t just rely on the ideas of the past, we need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today and Kamala understands this,” Obama said, as he rattled off key planks of Harris’ domestic agenda. “She knows for example that if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units—and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country. That is a priority, and she’s put out a bold new plan to do just that.”

Just a few years ago, if you’d asked the leading political scientists & thought leaders whether YIMBY ideas would be advanced by a figure like Obama on a national stage, they’d have laughed you. Clear evidence for the power of (correct) ideas. pic.twitter.com/GwxGFSfUw5

— Jerusalem (@JerusalemDemsas) August 21, 2024

That’s right—the push for zoning reform has gone presidential. Obama’s lengthy convention remarks are a useful barometer for where the party stands. I checked to see if any of his previous DNC speeches had tackled the housing shortage that has squeezed low- and middle-income Americans’ finances, displaced working people, and powered a homelessness crisis in places like Los Angeles and New York City. The issue never came up in 2020 or in 2016. In 2012, in the aftermath of a severe recession triggered by a predatory mortgage lenders, Obama did talk up home construction—but only the idea of making them more environmentally friendly. In 2008, as that housing bubble was bursting, he addressed falling home values—but that’s a much different problem than an affordability crisis driven by limited supply and high demand. The idea that the government should clear the road for a massive home-construction boom was simply not the sort of thing people talked about in primetime.

“I plead guilty,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told me this week, after praising Harris’ proposal. “It just hasn’t been as high up on the agenda as it should have been. It’s an issue that’s staring us right in the face. You know, walk two blocks away from the Capitol you have people sleeping out on the street. I talk to people who pay 50, 60-percent of their income in housing. It’s an issue that we should have dealt with, and we’ve got to be bold.”

The failure to tackle the housing crisis has recently seeped into Republican messaging, albeit in a far different way. A good deal of Trump’s narrative of “American Carnage” in largely Democratic cities is really a story about the downstream effects—things like tent cities and visible drug use. At the Republican National Convention last month, Ohio Sen. JD Vance even offered a radical solution to the crisis.

“The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington,” he said in his convention speech. In his telling, “Wall Street barons crashed the economy and American builders went out of business,” and then “tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built.” Then: “Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete—with people who shouldn’t even be here—for precious housing.”

His plan, and Trump’s, was to free up housing stock by deporting 11 million people.

It doesn’t take a lot of detective work to grasp that the mood within the Democratic Party has improved dramatically since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the presidential ticket. Her campaign raised a staggering $310 million in July. Her poll numbers have shot up, moving key states like Arizona and North Carolina back into play. The turnaround has been so abrupt and so unavoidable that the nation’s largest political media outlets have begun chanting this new wisdom in an odd sort of harmony: It was “The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift,” according to the New Yorker; “The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift,” according to Politico; “The Kamala Harris Vibe Shift,” according to the New York Times.

This “jarring vibe shift” (must credit: NPR) hits you over the head at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where a boisterous crowd packed even the nosebleed seats for the first night of programming, and a surprise appearance from the current vice president elicited a rapturous ovation. But the new enthusiasm isn’t just happening at the top of the ticket. It’s also percolating downballot, where state legislative candidates and party strategists say they’ve seen a surge in energy and fundraising since the ticket switch.

“The environment had sort of felt like a perpetual rematch,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me recently. The reaction to Harris’ ascension had shown that there was a “craving” in the electorate for something different that a lot of people in politics hadn’t fully reckoned with. Now there is “a new sort of level of engagement around what is possible and what could be.”

At a meet-and-greet with Democratic state legislative candidates on Monday, I heard some variation of that message over and over.

“There were quite a few voters who were a little skeptical before about Joe Biden and asking themselves how they were going to vote in November,” says Greta Neubauer, the Democratic minority leader in the Wisconsin assembly. “Having knocked on several hundred doors since this change, I will say that we are seeing amazing enthusiasm amongst Democrats for Harris, not only people who are saying, ‘I will be voting for Kamala Harris,’ but also, ‘How do I sign up? How do I get involved?’”

Wisconsin’s lower chamber is one of the party’s top pickup opportunities in 2024, thanks to a state supreme court ruling that threw out heavily gerrymandered Republican-drawn maps. With districts that finally reflect the state’s 50-50 partisan split, Neubauer says, the party is expecting to easily flip eight Republican-held districts that have changed to become more Democratic, and it’s hoping to win seven more seats in areas where Biden and Trump were separated by two percentage points or less in 2020. It’s an attempt to claw back control in a state where Republicans have gutted public employee unions and voting rights, and attempted to strip the Democratic governor of key executive powers.

“I have felt in conversations that we’re able to talk more about the future,” Neubauer says. “We’re not arguing for one of two former presidents. We are talking about someone who has incredible energy, incredible drive, and is really motivating a lot of new people to get involved who may not have felt that previously.”

The state legislative targets for Democrats closely mirrors that of the presidential race. In North Carolina, the party is hoping to end the Republican supermajorities in both chambers. In Michigan, it’s aiming to hold onto the Democratic trifecta it regained after a special election this spring. The party is looking to make inroads in Pennsylvania (where it narrowly controls the house but not the senate) and take back both chambers in New Hampshire—where it lost out on a majority in the state house by just 11 votes in 2022. Not 11 seats—11 votes.

Another top target: Arizona, where Republicans hold one-seat majorities in both chambers of the legislature. With an amendment officially on the ballot to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution, and new signs of life from the top of the ticket, Democrats there believe they have a chance for a governing trifecta in a state that was—until the Trump era—an emblem of conservative rule. They’re running on four core issues that “remain unsolved in Arizona or that have been created by decades of Republican leadership,” says state Sen. Priya Sundareshan, who co-chairs the Arizona Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. That would be reproductive rights, protecting public education, securing the state’s water supply, and gun control.

“We’re running more candidates so we have more pathways to flip than ever before, we’ve staffed up earlier, we’ve been providing our target district candidates with the field level staff that they will need, and we hired those much earlier in the cycle,” Sundareshan says. For months, the state had embodied Democrats’ diverging fates—Rep. Ruben Gallego led Republican Kari Lake consistently in US Senate polling, while Biden lagged far behind in a state he carried four years ago. Now, legislative candidates knocking doors were reporting “more enthusiasm and excitement,” according to Sundareshan.

To Democratic lawmakers who have spent years in the wilderness, Minnesota offers a tantalizing glimpse of what’s possible. Gov. Tim Walz’s shadow campaign to be Harris’ running mate was powered, in part, by the fruits of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party’s takeover of the state legislature in 2022—a slate of big policy wins on everything from union protections to free school lunches.

“When Minnesotans gave us the power with the trifecta, we knew we couldn’t sleep on that trifecta, and that we needed to get as much as we can done and don’t waste any of our capital,” said state Sen. Erin Murphy, the chamber’s majority leader. She told me that after the party had won full control in 2012, “we weren’t as prepared as we were this time.” They spent their subsequent time in the wilderness developing an ambitious governing agenda, under the auspices of a non-profit called the Minnesota Values Project. The result was “an agenda that we could move if we were given the power.

Minnesota Democrats are aiming to expand their six-vote majority in the house this fall, and they feel buoyed now not just by the elevation of Harris, but also the presence of a Mankato West High School defensive coordinator on the ticket.

“People are showing up in August in Minnesota—the month that we take off,” Murphy says. “They’re showing up and door knocking. We’re seeing it, of course, in the signups and contributions that people are making. But mostly it’s just that sense of possibility that we can do this, and people are putting the hard work necessary behind that feeling to actually accomplish it.”

The changes weren’t confined to swing districts and toss-up states. Elected officials in the party’s base were feeling it too. Washington state Rep. Kristine Reeves, who represents a diverse and reliably Democratic district near Seattle, said the mood on the ground took her back 16 years. “It was a very apocalyptic presidency under former President Trump,” she said. Now she was seeing “a level of hope and humanity”—particularly from young people—that she hadn’t seen since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

“I jokingly tell folks, Kamala Harris did in 18 days what it took Barack Obama 18 months to do.” 

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Bernie Moreno’s network of car dealerships is the building block of the Ohio Republican’s campaign for US Senate. Moreno, who is seeking to unseat three-term Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the year’s tightest races, has acquired and eventually sold off more than two dozen dealerships between 2005 and 2022 and grew enormously rich in the process. He is worth as much as $105.7 million, according to financial disclosures—wealth that helped power him to victory in an ugly primary this spring. That private sector track record is also a part of his pitch on the campaign trail, where he describes himself as a self-made man who “mortgaged everything I own in life” to buy his first Mercedes-Benz dealership in Cleveland and who built a successful company “with no partners.”

The up-by-the-bootstraps campaign trail story belies a more complicated reality. While Moreno describes his immigrant family as “lower middle class” and said they “came here with absolutely nothing,” a New York Times report in May detailed the Morenos’ powerful political and financial connections in Colombia, where one brother runs a major construction firm and another served as president of the Inter-American Development Bank. As he has attempted to position himself as a candidate for the working man, Moreno has been dogged, too, by questions about how he made his money. Earlier this year, my colleague Abby Vesoulis reported that Moreno shelled out more than $400,000 to settle a wage-theft lawsuit in Massachusetts in which “he was forced to admit to shredding overtime-­payment records.” He eventually settled more than a dozen claims of wage theft at his dealerships in the commonwealth, along with a host of other complaints from former employees—outcomes he has blamed on disgruntled workers and “activist” judges.

Moreno was, by all accounts, a highly effective car dealer whose energy and risk-taking helped him thrive in a cutthroat industry. But records from a nearly decade-old legal battle involving a dealership in South Florida tell a more nuanced story about Moreno’s rise, and the breaks he got along the way.

The 2014 complaint in the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings centered on attempts by the Infiniti division of Nissan to expand its footprint in the highly competitive South Florida luxury car market by opening a new Infiniti dealership in downtown Coral Gables. After the company announced that Moreno—who had opened nine dealerships for brands such as Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, BMW, and Saab—would be their guy, two neighboring dealers lodged an official protest with the Florida Department of Highway Safety, claiming that Nissan was infringing on their home turf and granting special favors to Moreno.

The South Florida case offered a glimpse of the breaks that helped Moreno climb to the top of the profession. He drew the ire of rival dealers by collecting millions of dollars in financial assistance from manufacturers to open new storefronts, and he testified that Mercedes-Benz had pulled strings to get him a sweetheart deal on his very first Ohio dealership. Ultimately, he secured his Florida “dream” project only after a top competitor was laid low by a scandal involving a failed drug test.

At the hearing that fall, Moreno was a star witness. He described how he got his start as a deputy to the New England car mogul Herb Chambers, an avid yacht collector who commuted to his Massachusetts headquarters by helicopter. They had a “father/son relationship,” Moreno said, but not long after vacationing together in the Caribbean, Moreno and Chambers had a falling-out, and the understudy went into business by himself, spending about $2 million in 2005 to purchase and overhaul a Mercedes-Benz dealership in North Olmsted, Ohio.

“I took every dollar that I had ever seen in my life and managed to save and bought the dealership,” Moreno testified. He even drained his 401(k)—“which is not a good financial move,” he conceded, “but that was my only choice.”

But Moreno did not just mortgage his property in Key Largo. He also got a bit of help. “[W]hat happened was they wanted a minority operator there,” he explained, in comments that were first reported by Business Insider in March. Mercedes arranged for the owner—billionaire automotive tycoon Roger Penske—“to sell that dealership for a dramatically reduced price in exchange for Mercedes giving Penske an open point in Chandler, Arizona,” Moreno said.

Moreno explained that big car companies were “under a lot of pressure to have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community. And so I’m certain, at that time, when—they may have been getting pressure to have more diversity among their dealership ranks, have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community.” During his Senate campaign, Moreno has railed against “wokeness” and referred to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs as “a new form of racism.”

“Bernie was offered this opportunity because he is a talented businessman, and he was able to turn this location into a successful dealership,” a Moreno campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “As he has said time and time again, Bernie believes that merit should always be the singular factor in these decisions—period. His dealerships performed to the highest standard, and he believes that success should be the only factor for hiring practices, promotions, and business dealings.”

The spokesperson added: “As Bernie has said time and time again, his family did not give him a cent to start his own business. He took a huge financial risk on his own to build a wildly successful car business.”

By the time he got wind of Infiniti’s plans to open a Coral Gables location in 2011, Moreno had become a star in the industry, with operations in Ohio, Kentucky, and Massachusetts. Having grown up in the Miami area, he testified that his “heart started beating” when thought about opening a new dealership nearby. Moreno described driving through Coral Gables one day when he saw a vacancy on the ground floor of the Bacardi Building, which is home to the beverage company’s world headquarters. This time, he leveraged his family connections with a nephew, who worked for the “number three guy” at the private equity giant Fortress Investments, which had recently sold the property. “With a little bit of his assistance,” Moreno said, he secured “really favorable lease terms.”

But the bid for the Infiniti dealership was still a bit of a gamble for both parties. In a 124-page prospectus Moreno’s Collection Auto Group submitted as part of the company’s proposal for the dealership, the company included a “Capitalization Plan” with a detailed description of Moreno’s assets at the time. “Necessary Working Capital will be funded,” Collection Auto wrote, “from profits from existing operations in Northeast Ohio…Moreno Family cash reserves, and/or liquidation of select Northeast Ohio stores as necessary.” The document included a handwritten insertion that Collection Auto was prepared to invest “whatever necessary” in the dealership. A campaign spokesperson said that the “cash reserves” in question referred to Moreno’s own funds, and not the extended Moreno family. 

While Moreno testified that his dealership group brought in about $15 million in profit a year, he had poured most of his own income into real estate and new projects—a bank statement attached to the prospectus showed just $55,000 in a personal savings account at the time, while his corporate books listed about $2 million in available funds. Jeffrey Harris, then the regional vice president for Infiniti’s operations in the eastern United States, testified that his biggest concern with Moreno’s pitch was “capitalization,” comparing the highly leveraged businessman to a “Silicon Valley startup.”

To cover the costs, Moreno got a much-needed handout. A centerpiece of the case was a confidential agreement Moreno signed with Infiniti. The manufacturer offered $4.4 million in financial assistance, about $2.4 million of which came in the form of performance incentives but the rest came in guaranteed payouts to defray the cost of rent and—somewhat presciently—delays due to litigation. According to court records, Nissan also gave Moreno $1.25 million in assistance to open a dealership in Akron, $650,000 to open a location in Cleveland, and $3.75 million to open another dealership by that city’s airport.

“Your honor, they keep giving this guy money,” complained John Forehand, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, South Motors. “They aren’t giving anybody else money.”

That turned out to be an overstatement—Infiniti actually had offered a similar amount to South Motors previously to encourage it to open a new shop, and Moreno, for his part, testified that the $4.4 million in assistance was less than he’d asked for. The arrangement with Moreno was not “typical,” but “I wouldn’t call it uncommon,” said Harris, who argued that the large stipend was necessary to secure competitive locations in areas with high rents and startup costs, and that the accompanying confidentiality agreements were a necessity to prevent dealers from bragging to each other about their financial assistance. A judge at the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings in Tallahassee ultimately ruled in Nissan’s favor, and Moreno’s dealership opened in 2017.

But the case exposed discontent among smaller salesmen. A 2016 report in the trade journal Automotive News, which cited Nissan’s close financial relationship with Moreno, found that the assistance “has put Nissan at odds with some dealers, especially those who have smaller lots and lack the means or stomach to invest millions of dollars. Some have surrendered their franchises; others have faced termination notices from the manufacturer, numerous dealers report.” 

Later that year, in response to the Automotive News story, four Ohio dealers sued Nissan alleging that the manufacturer had given Moreno an illegal competitive advantage by lavishing incentives on him. Nissan denied that it gave any dealer preferential treatment, and the case was eventually settled with no admission of wrongdoing.

The South Florida dispute also offered a glimpse of the attributes that have made Moreno successful in Republican politics, where he is hoping to ride the coattails of the ur-salesman, Donald Trump. Moreno was promising a flashy new facility, with an in-house nail bar to cater to women, and specially imported “high, high end Colombian coffee.” (His great-grandfather, he said, founded the Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia—known to American consumers by its fictional pitchman, Juan Valdez.)

In his own testimony, Harris, the Infiniti executive, stated that Moreno had sold more cars in a month at one Cleveland dealership than his predecessor had sold in six months. “Bernie is now being chased by every manufacturer out there,” he said. “Mercedes is chasing him. Infiniti is chasing him…Bernie is absolutely one of the best.”

Sometimes, he could be both relentless and lucky. During the proceedings, Harris testified that despite Moreno’s best efforts, the company had initially reached an agreement with a different suitor for the Coral Gables location—the Major League Baseball star Alex Rodriguez, a hometown hero whose personal fortune and $27 million-a-year contract with the New York Yankees meant the company wouldn’t have to worry about capital costs.

“When I chose Alex as the number one candidate, I did get a text from Bernie every time he went 0 for 4,” Harris testified. “He’d say, ‘Your dealer just went 0 for 4 last night.’”

Ultimately, A-Rod’s baseball career worked against him. The New York Yankee pulled out of the deal after he was suspended for the entire 2014 season for steroid use, jeopardizing his coveted cash flow. 

“[W]hen Alex fell through, I immediately called Bernie and said, ‘Bernie, can you still do what you proposed?’ And he said, ‘yes,’” Harris said.

Correction, August 20: An earlier version of this story misstated which brand of car Moreno sold at his first dealership.

Bernie Moreno’s network of car dealerships is the building block of the Ohio Republican’s campaign for US Senate. Moreno, who is seeking to unseat three-term Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the year’s tightest races, has acquired and eventually sold off more than two dozen dealerships between 2005 and 2022 and grew enormously rich in the process. He is worth as much as $105.7 million, according to financial disclosures—wealth that helped power him to victory in an ugly primary this spring. That private sector track record is also a part of his pitch on the campaign trail, where he describes himself as a self-made man who “mortgaged everything I own in life” to buy his first Mercedes-Benz dealership in Cleveland and who built a successful company “with no partners.”

The up-by-the-bootstraps campaign trail story belies a more complicated reality. While Moreno describes his immigrant family as “lower middle class” and said they “came here with absolutely nothing,” a New York Times report in May detailed the Morenos’ powerful political and financial connections in Colombia, where one brother runs a major construction firm and another served as president of the Inter-American Development Bank. As he has attempted to position himself as a candidate for the working man, Moreno has been dogged, too, by questions about how he made his money. Earlier this year, my colleague Abby Vesoulis reported that Moreno shelled out more than $400,000 to settle a wage-theft lawsuit in Massachusetts in which “he was forced to admit to shredding overtime-­payment records.” He eventually settled more than a dozen claims of wage theft at his dealerships in the commonwealth, along with a host of other complaints from former employees—outcomes he has blamed on disgruntled workers and “activist” judges.

Moreno was, by all accounts, a highly effective car dealer whose energy and risk-taking helped him thrive in a cutthroat industry. But records from a nearly decade-old legal battle involving a dealership in South Florida tell a more nuanced story about Moreno’s rise, and the breaks he got along the way.

The 2014 complaint in the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings centered on attempts by the Infiniti division of Nissan to expand its footprint in the highly competitive South Florida luxury car market by opening a new Infiniti dealership in downtown Coral Gables. After the company announced that Moreno—who had opened nine dealerships for brands such as Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, BMW, and Saab—would be their guy, two neighboring dealers lodged an official protest with the Florida Department of Highway Safety, claiming that Nissan was infringing on their home turf and granting special favors to Moreno.

The South Florida case offered a glimpse of the breaks that helped Moreno climb to the top of the profession. He drew the ire of rival dealers by collecting millions of dollars in financial assistance from manufacturers to open new storefronts, and he testified that Mercedes-Benz had pulled strings to get him a sweetheart deal on his very first Ohio dealership. Ultimately, he secured his Florida “dream” project only after a top competitor was laid low by a scandal involving a failed drug test.

At the hearing that fall, Moreno was a star witness. He described how he got his start as a deputy to the New England car mogul Herb Chambers, an avid yacht collector who commuted to his Massachusetts headquarters by helicopter. They had a “father/son relationship,” Moreno said, but not long after vacationing together in the Caribbean, Moreno and Chambers had a falling-out, and the understudy went into business by himself, spending about $2 million in 2005 to purchase and overhaul a Mercedes-Benz dealership in North Olmsted, Ohio.

“I took every dollar that I had ever seen in my life and managed to save and bought the dealership,” Moreno testified. He even drained his 401(k)—“which is not a good financial move,” he conceded, “but that was my only choice.”

But Moreno did not just mortgage his property in Key Largo. He also got a bit of help. “[W]hat happened was they wanted a minority operator there,” he explained, in comments that were first reported by Business Insider in March. Mercedes arranged for the owner—billionaire automotive tycoon Roger Penske—“to sell that dealership for a dramatically reduced price in exchange for Mercedes giving Penske an open point in Chandler, Arizona,” Moreno said.

Moreno explained that big car companies were “under a lot of pressure to have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community. And so I’m certain, at that time, when—they may have been getting pressure to have more diversity among their dealership ranks, have the dealer body be diverse, be representative of the community.” During his Senate campaign, Moreno has railed against “wokeness” and referred to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs as “a new form of racism.”

“Bernie was offered this opportunity because he is a talented businessman, and he was able to turn this location into a successful dealership,” a Moreno campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “As he has said time and time again, Bernie believes that merit should always be the singular factor in these decisions—period. His dealerships performed to the highest standard, and he believes that success should be the only factor for hiring practices, promotions, and business dealings.”

The spokesperson added: “As Bernie has said time and time again, his family did not give him a cent to start his own business. He took a huge financial risk on his own to build a wildly successful car business.”

By the time he got wind of Infiniti’s plans to open a Coral Gables location in 2011, Moreno had become a star in the industry, with operations in Ohio, Kentucky, and Massachusetts. Having grown up in the Miami area, he testified that his “heart started beating” when thought about opening a new dealership nearby. Moreno described driving through Coral Gables one day when he saw a vacancy on the ground floor of the Bacardi Building, which is home to the beverage company’s world headquarters. This time, he leveraged his family connections with a nephew, who worked for the “number three guy” at the private equity giant Fortress Investments, which had recently sold the property. “With a little bit of his assistance,” Moreno said, he secured “really favorable lease terms.”

But the bid for the Infiniti dealership was still a bit of a gamble for both parties. In a 124-page prospectus Moreno’s Collection Auto Group submitted as part of the company’s proposal for the dealership, the company included a “Capitalization Plan” with a detailed description of Moreno’s assets at the time. “Necessary Working Capital will be funded,” Collection Auto wrote, “from profits from existing operations in Northeast Ohio…Moreno Family cash reserves, and/or liquidation of select Northeast Ohio stores as necessary.” The document included a handwritten insertion that Collection Auto was prepared to invest “whatever necessary” in the dealership. A campaign spokesperson said that the “cash reserves” in question referred to Moreno’s own funds, and not the extended Moreno family. 

While Moreno testified that his dealership group brought in about $15 million in profit a year, he had poured most of his own income into real estate and new projects—a bank statement attached to the prospectus showed just $55,000 in a personal savings account at the time, while his corporate books listed about $2 million in available funds. Jeffrey Harris, then the regional vice president for Infiniti’s operations in the eastern United States, testified that his biggest concern with Moreno’s pitch was “capitalization,” comparing the highly leveraged businessman to a “Silicon Valley startup.”

To cover the costs, Moreno got a much-needed handout. A centerpiece of the case was a confidential agreement Moreno signed with Infiniti. The manufacturer offered $4.4 million in financial assistance, about $2.4 million of which came in the form of performance incentives but the rest came in guaranteed payouts to defray the cost of rent and—somewhat presciently—delays due to litigation. According to court records, Nissan also gave Moreno $1.25 million in assistance to open a dealership in Akron, $650,000 to open a location in Cleveland, and $3.75 million to open another dealership by that city’s airport.

“Your honor, they keep giving this guy money,” complained John Forehand, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, South Motors. “They aren’t giving anybody else money.”

That turned out to be an overstatement—Infiniti actually had offered a similar amount to South Motors previously to encourage it to open a new shop, and Moreno, for his part, testified that the $4.4 million in assistance was less than he’d asked for. The arrangement with Moreno was not “typical,” but “I wouldn’t call it uncommon,” said Harris, who argued that the large stipend was necessary to secure competitive locations in areas with high rents and startup costs, and that the accompanying confidentiality agreements were a necessity to prevent dealers from bragging to each other about their financial assistance. A judge at the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings in Tallahassee ultimately ruled in Nissan’s favor, and Moreno’s dealership opened in 2017.

But the case exposed discontent among smaller salesmen. A 2016 report in the trade journal Automotive News, which cited Nissan’s close financial relationship with Moreno, found that the assistance “has put Nissan at odds with some dealers, especially those who have smaller lots and lack the means or stomach to invest millions of dollars. Some have surrendered their franchises; others have faced termination notices from the manufacturer, numerous dealers report.” 

Later that year, in response to the Automotive News story, four Ohio dealers sued Nissan alleging that the manufacturer had given Moreno an illegal competitive advantage by lavishing incentives on him. Nissan denied that it gave any dealer preferential treatment, and the case was eventually settled with no admission of wrongdoing.

The South Florida dispute also offered a glimpse of the attributes that have made Moreno successful in Republican politics, where he is hoping to ride the coattails of the ur-salesman, Donald Trump. Moreno was promising a flashy new facility, with an in-house nail bar to cater to women, and specially imported “high, high end Colombian coffee.” (His great-grandfather, he said, founded the Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia—known to American consumers by its fictional pitchman, Juan Valdez.)

In his own testimony, Harris, the Infiniti executive, stated that Moreno had sold more cars in a month at one Cleveland dealership than his predecessor had sold in six months. “Bernie is now being chased by every manufacturer out there,” he said. “Mercedes is chasing him. Infiniti is chasing him…Bernie is absolutely one of the best.”

Sometimes, he could be both relentless and lucky. During the proceedings, Harris testified that despite Moreno’s best efforts, the company had initially reached an agreement with a different suitor for the Coral Gables location—the Major League Baseball star Alex Rodriguez, a hometown hero whose personal fortune and $27 million-a-year contract with the New York Yankees meant the company wouldn’t have to worry about capital costs.

“When I chose Alex as the number one candidate, I did get a text from Bernie every time he went 0 for 4,” Harris testified. “He’d say, ‘Your dealer just went 0 for 4 last night.’”

Ultimately, A-Rod’s baseball career worked against him. The New York Yankee pulled out of the deal after he was suspended for the entire 2014 season for steroid use, jeopardizing his coveted cash flow. 

“[W]hen Alex fell through, I immediately called Bernie and said, ‘Bernie, can you still do what you proposed?’ And he said, ‘yes,’” Harris said.

Correction, August 20: An earlier version of this story misstated which brand of car Moreno sold at his first dealership.

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced her running mate on the Democratic ticket this fall: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. A six-term congressman from a largely rural southern Minnesota district who was elected to the governor’s office in 2018, Walz was not much of a household name for most Democrats outside the Midwest until a few weeks ago, when, in an interview with Morning Joe about Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, he struck a bit of messaging gold.

“We do not like what has happened where we can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary,” Walz said.

“It’s true,” he continued. “These guys are just weird!”

While Harris vetted and interviewed a slate of white male elected officials (and one white male Cabinet secretary), Walz emerged as a favorite of online and tuned-in progressives, and “weird” became a rallying cry of all sorts for pundits and politicos looking to put their finger on the, well, strange obsessions of the Late Trump GOP. Even the reported runner-up for the VP nod, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, tried the term out.

But Walz was not just a 60-year-old guy with a catchphrase. He was respected enough as a member of Congress that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly advocated on his behalf last week. And, while not exactly a leftist himself, Walz had support from members of the House Progressive Caucus and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain said Walz was one of the union’s two favorites for the job.

As governor, Walz has used narrow legislative majorities to secure free school lunches for students; he got paid family and medical leave for workers. And even though he once boasted an A-rating from the National Rifle Association—one of the last elected Democrats to receive such an endorsement—Walz eventually broke with the organization and signed a new background checks law as governor.

Vice presidential candidates generally only affect voters’ choices at the margins, but Walz’s background is at least part of the appeal as Harris attempts to shore up support in the Midwestern states that former President Barack Obama carried twice and Joe Biden once, but which Donald Trump flipped in 2016. A former command sergeant major in the Army National Guard, Walz was raised in Valentine, Nebraska. He graduated from Chadron State College and then taught geography and coached football and girls basketball in the small town of Alliance, Nebraska. Eventually, he coached and taught in Mankato, Minnesota, where he moved with his wife, Gwen. In a 2002 profile for the Chadron Record, after he was one of six teachers in the state to receive an Ethics in Education award, a colleague said that Walz “has the ability to reach kids—the rich kids, the poor kids, the white kids, the minority kids, the not-so-great students.”

Walz told the Omaha World-Herald that he first took a serious interest in politics in 2004, when he took his students to see a campaign rally for President George W. Bush. After the students were denied entry because one of them had a John Kerry sticker on his wallet, Walz told the paper, the Mankato West linebackers coach began volunteering at the local Democratic field office. The next year, with almost nothing in the way of national support until the final weeks of the race, he ran for office against a six-term Republican congressman and won by six points. Over the weekend, Politico’s Meredith Lee posted a radio ad from that race that is worth listening to for anyone wanting to understand how Walz has thrived in politics:

dem who worked on Tim Walz's first congressional campaign for #MN01 shares this 2006 radio ad of his

it's title – Hope

"That spot was very powerful in his win" pic.twitter.com/ojPuOkdEPU

— Meredith Lee Hill (@meredithllee) August 3, 2024

Like every other prospective running mate under consideration, Walz will have his current job filled by a Democrat if his ticket wins in the fall. Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who is a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, would become the first Native American woman to be a governor in American history.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

It was about this time last week when I first saw that ad for Gemini, Google’s new artificial-intelligence chatbot. If you’ve been watching much of the Paris Olympics, you know the one I’m thinking of. The spot, called “Dear Sydney,” features a father whose daughter idolizes the American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. His daughter “wants to show Sydney some love,” and while he describes himself as “pretty good with words,” the dad adds, “This has to be just right.”

“Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is,” he types, “and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.”

I have never seen an ad that made me so thoroughly depressed about the product it was selling, and I watch Trump ads for my job. Why would you get a robot to write a fan letter from your daughter? What other meaningful personal interactions are we supposed to want to swap out with a multimodal large language model?

And apparently I’m not alone. For days I kept seeing people bring up the ad. It “takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it,” New York magazine contributing editor Will Leitch wrote, in one representative take. On Friday, Hollywood Reporter offered some good news: Google was taking the spot off the airwaves. We did it, Joe.

“Dear Sydney” was as honest as it was bleak: This is what the people pushing AI like about AI. These are the people who watched Her but missed the point.

When I watched it, I was struck not by the obvious soullessness, but of the collective arrogance that went into making it. This was the outward expression of an industry that seemingly has no self-awareness of the considerable misgivings people have it, or simply doesn’t care. “Dear Sydney” was as honest as it was bleak: This is what the people pushing AI like about AI. These are the people who watched Her but missed the point.

The use case for this kind of AI, at this particular moment, is to take the work that a human can do with care and replace it with a bot that can neither feel nor think. In a lot of cases, the hope—the hope!—is that jobs people do now will not exist. But in plenty of other cases, it will just make the jobs that people do have a little bit more soul-crushing. It is grim but understandable that tech oligarchs find this desirable. But it portends something far darker about the world, I think, if it turns out that vast numbers of people really are clamoring for “art” without artists, “news” without news outlets, and letters from children without the children.

Just a few months ago, a similar ad from Apple was pulled after producing a similar response. That one featured a hydraulic press crushing various tools of human creativity—paint, musical instruments, sculptures. These AI products, such as they are, are aimed at people who wish they could outsource and rip off the things that actually make us human. All you can do is keep shouting at these weirdos until they retreat.

The news got a bit buried, with so much going on in national politics, but Tuesday was a bad night for Republicans who have stood up to election-deniers in their party.

In Maricopa County, the largest and swingiest county in America’s largest swing state, Republican primary voters ousted Stephen Richer, an incumbent who had made a national name for himself by standing up to Trump allies such as Kari Lake over the last three years. The man who defeated Richer, state Rep. Justin Heap, never outright disputed the legitimacy of previous elections, but his supporters sure have—he was recruited to run by a now-indicted fake elector, touted the endorsement of two congressmen who pushed for the state’s 2020 election results to be rejected, and was backed by Lake, who falsely accused the incumbent of adding “300,000 illegal ballots” to the tally in her 2022 run for governor. Republican voters also ousted a member of the board of supervisors (which is responsible for election day voting and ballot tabulation) who had, like his colleagues, drawn the ire of the Trump orbit for doing his job.

It was not just Richer or Maricopa, though. In Yuma County, on the border with Mexico and California, another Republican election official, Richard Colwell, is on the verge of losing his race to a conservative activist named David Lara who has spread conspiracies about elections. Per Bolts’ Alex Burness:

Lara has often lied about elections in Arizona, saying election fraud has taken place for “many years, wide open.” He has also floated punishing that fraud with the death penalty. His complaints helped inspire parts of the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which is popular on the right for alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the movie drew from a purported investigation that Lara conducted alongside another county resident into election tampering.

Earlier this year, 2,000 Mules was pulled from circulation by the conservative Salem Media Group after the distributor settled a lawsuit from a Georgia man the film had falsely accused of voter fraud. Despite claims of a massive, illegal ballot-harvesting operation, the biggest case to arise from the “scandal” Lara helped blow open was the conviction of a former mayor who had collected four ballots from her neighbors in the town of San Luis, where Lara is from. Lara, who leads Colwell by 77 votes with a few thousand early ballots left to count, told the New York Times that he was planning to monitor his town’s ballot drop box location ahead of the 2022 election but didn’t “want to tip off the enemy” about his plans for doing so. In an interview with my colleagues at Reveal that year, Lara alleged that he had lost previous elections due to massive voter fraud.

The county leans Republican but not overwhelmingly so; 2022 Senate candidate Blake Masters pulled just 51 percent of the vote there. Unlike Maricopa, where Democrats fielded a credible candidate, former JAG lawyer Tim Stringham, for just such a contingency, Yuma Democrats had no candidates on the ballot in the primary. According to Bolts, they are hoping a write-in candidate will win enough votes to qualify for the nomination.

Lara also spoke at last month’s Republican National Convention, where he was featured as an “everyday American” concerned about border security. In a sign of just how under-the-radar this race was, neither the Trump campaign’s biography, nor the speech itself, nor the Arizona Republic’s write-up of his speech made note of the critical election office that he was currently seeking.

It was about this time last week when I first saw that ad for Gemini, Google’s new artificial-intelligence chatbot. If you’ve been watching much of the Paris Olympics, you know the one I’m thinking of. The spot, called “Dear Sydney,” features a father whose daughter idolizes the American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. His daughter “wants to show Sydney some love,” and while he describes himself as “pretty good with words,” the dad adds, “This has to be just right.”

“Gemini, help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is,” he types, “and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.”

I have never seen an ad that made me so thoroughly depressed about the product it was selling, and I watch Trump ads for my job. Why would you get a robot to write a fan letter from your daughter? What other meaningful personal interactions are we supposed to want to swap out with a multimodal large language model?

And apparently I’m not alone. For days I kept seeing people bring up the ad. It “takes a little chunk out of my soul every time I see it,” New York magazine contributing editor Will Leitch wrote, in one representative take. On Friday, Hollywood Reporter offered some good news: Google was taking the spot off the airwaves. We did it, Joe.

“Dear Sydney” was as honest as it was bleak: This is what the people pushing AI like about AI. These are the people who watched Her but missed the point.

When I watched it, I was struck not by the obvious soullessness, but of the collective arrogance that went into making it. This was the outward expression of an industry that seemingly has no self-awareness of the considerable misgivings people have it, or simply doesn’t care. “Dear Sydney” was as honest as it was bleak: This is what the people pushing AI like about AI. These are the people who watched Her but missed the point.

The use case for this kind of AI, at this particular moment, is to take the work that a human can do with care and replace it with a bot that can neither feel nor think. In a lot of cases, the hope—the hope!—is that jobs people do now will not exist. But in plenty of other cases, it will just make the jobs that people do have a little bit more soul-crushing. It is grim but understandable that tech oligarchs find this desirable. But it portends something far darker about the world, I think, if it turns out that vast numbers of people really are clamoring for “art” without artists, “news” without news outlets, and letters from children without the children.

Just a few months ago, a similar ad from Apple was pulled after producing a similar response. That one featured a hydraulic press crushing various tools of human creativity—paint, musical instruments, sculptures. These AI products, such as they are, are aimed at people who wish they could outsource and rip off the things that actually make us human. All you can do is keep shouting at these weirdos until they retreat.

The news got a bit buried, with so much going on in national politics, but Tuesday was a bad night for Republicans who have stood up to election-deniers in their party.

In Maricopa County, the largest and swingiest county in America’s largest swing state, Republican primary voters ousted Stephen Richer, an incumbent who had made a national name for himself by standing up to Trump allies such as Kari Lake over the last three years. The man who defeated Richer, state Rep. Justin Heap, never outright disputed the legitimacy of previous elections, but his supporters sure have—he was recruited to run by a now-indicted fake elector, touted the endorsement of two congressmen who pushed for the state’s 2020 election results to be rejected, and was backed by Lake, who falsely accused the incumbent of adding “300,000 illegal ballots” to the tally in her 2022 run for governor. Republican voters also ousted a member of the board of supervisors (which is responsible for election day voting and ballot tabulation) who had, like his colleagues, drawn the ire of the Trump orbit for doing his job.

It was not just Richer or Maricopa, though. In Yuma County, on the border with Mexico and California, another Republican election official, Richard Colwell, is on the verge of losing his race to a conservative activist named David Lara who has spread conspiracies about elections. Per Bolts’ Alex Burness:

Lara has often lied about elections in Arizona, saying election fraud has taken place for “many years, wide open.” He has also floated punishing that fraud with the death penalty. His complaints helped inspire parts of the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which is popular on the right for alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the movie drew from a purported investigation that Lara conducted alongside another county resident into election tampering.

Earlier this year, 2,000 Mules was pulled from circulation by the conservative Salem Media Group after the distributor settled a lawsuit from a Georgia man the film had falsely accused of voter fraud. Despite claims of a massive, illegal ballot-harvesting operation, the biggest case to arise from the “scandal” Lara helped blow open was the conviction of a former mayor who had collected four ballots from her neighbors in the town of San Luis, where Lara is from. Lara, who leads Colwell by 77 votes with a few thousand early ballots left to count, told the New York Times that he was planning to monitor his town’s ballot drop box location ahead of the 2022 election but didn’t “want to tip off the enemy” about his plans for doing so. In an interview with my colleagues at Reveal that year, Lara alleged that he had lost previous elections due to massive voter fraud.

The county leans Republican but not overwhelmingly so; 2022 Senate candidate Blake Masters pulled just 51 percent of the vote there. Unlike Maricopa, where Democrats fielded a credible candidate, former JAG lawyer Tim Stringham, for just such a contingency, Yuma Democrats had no candidates on the ballot in the primary. According to Bolts, they are hoping a write-in candidate will win enough votes to qualify for the nomination.

Lara also spoke at last month’s Republican National Convention, where he was featured as an “everyday American” concerned about border security. In a sign of just how under-the-radar this race was, neither the Trump campaign’s biography, nor the speech itself, nor the Arizona Republic’s write-up of his speech made note of the critical election office that he was currently seeking.

Earlier this month, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversees mail-in voting, voter registration, and property records in America’s fourth-largest county, reached out to Elon Musk with an invitation.

“Can I please give you a tour of our election facility and mail voting process,” he wrote on Musk’s social-media platform, X, after the red-pilled billionaire declared that “electronic voting machines” and “anything mailed in” were “too risky” to use in elections.

“You can go into all the rooms,” Richer continued. ”You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound.”

For three-and-a-half years, Richer has been asking skeptical Republicans just to hear him out about how elections really work in the most closely contested county in the nation’s most closely contested state. First elected in 2020 amid right-wing fears about George Soros, Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer, emerged as one of the nation’s most outspoken voices against the myth of stolen outcomes. He held the line against election deniers such as Kari Lake (who Richer is currently suing for defamation) while attempting to make the election process as transparent as possible. Richer opened the doors to the county’s Tabulation and Election Center for more than 150 tours, turned the security cameras on 24/7 for people to watch at home, and tirelessly fielded questions on Musk’s platform—all while facing a stream of violent threats and criticism. 

But it turned out that good cheer and transparency could only accomplish so much. Musk, for one, did not take Richer up on the offer. And on Tuesday, Richer finally ran out of time to change his fellow Republicans’ minds: He lost his primary to state Rep. Justin Heap, a member of legislature’s Freedom Caucus, who was backed by many of the state’s most prominent election deniers. The single-digit margin only tells a part of the story; with another Richer critic running a strong third, just 36 percent of Republican voters backed the incumbent. 

Heap managed to never say whether he thought the 2020 or 2022 elections were stolen during his campaign. But he didn’t really have to. To understand what he represented and why he was running, you only had to look at the endorsements he racked up from many of the biggest names in what Richer has called Arizona’s “cottage industry” of election denial.

Chief among those backers was Lake, who ran for governor in 2022 while calling for her Democratic opponent to be imprisoned for the 2020 presidential election to be “decertified,” and is still—still!—attempting to get a court to declare her the winner of a race she lost by 17,000 votes. Lake—who in her memoir described a lengthy dream sequence she had about being kidnapped by Richer, taken to the desert, and nearly murdered—is now the Republican nominee for US Senate.

Another prominent supporter was Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer for Turning Point Action, who was indicted in April for his role in the 2020 fake elector scheme. Heap had the support of Arizona Reps. Paul Gosar (who coordinated with “Stop the Steal” leaders on January 6th), and Andy Biggs (who tried to round up support for the state’s fake electors in the run-up to the Electoral College certification). As the Arizona Mirror reported in April, one of the people who nudged Heap into running was his colleague in the statehouse, state Rep. Jake Hoffman—another fake elector.

The vitriol Richer faced from current party leaders was intense. Earlier this year, Shelby Busch, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican party told an audience that if it was up to her, she “would lynch” Richer. Busch, who later said that she was joking, went on to lead the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention.

Because of the way elections are run in the county, a new recorder can’t just rewrite the rules on his own terms. The Board of Supervisors is responsible for tabulation and election-day voting, for instance, and the state’s vote-by-mail system and use of electronic voting machines are set by statute. But notably, Heap has voted to get rid of both of those things, while also voting to mandate hand-counts. (At the same time, Heap is running to be Recorder on the promise of speeding up the counting of votes, which a hand count is not likely to accomplish.)

With support from independents and hard-earned respect from some Democrats, Richer was in a decent position to win a second term if he managed to survive the primary. One Indivisible activist from Scottsdale, who took an election-facility tour with Richer, told me that Richer was going to be the first Republican she ever voted for. But Heap’s victory is far from guaranteed in a county where Democrats have won a succession of key races by appealing to independents and moderate Republicans. On Tuesday, Democrats nominated Tim Stringham, an Army and Navy veteran who previously served as a JAG attorney. 

When we spoke in June, Stringham told me that he had entered the race reluctantly, after being nudged by the county Democratic party. But he cited Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a pivotal moment in his decision to become more involved in politics.

“And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly. My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?”

“Watching on TV, and being like, holy cow, the President of the United States is really trying to overthrow the republic here,” Stringham said. “And I always tell people that it’s like, you know, if there’s just a riot, there’s just a riot, those things happen. But somebody actually handed fake electoral votes to Mike Pence and said we want you to read these votes. They no-shit tried to overthrow the Constitution. And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly.”

“‘My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?,'” he said, recalling his thought process at the time. “‘I’m clearly not in the right place to actually protect American democracy.'”

Stringham did not believe there was a “huge philosophical difference” between he and Richer on how the recorder’s office was run, but he was adamant about wanting to preserve the availability of ballot drop-boxes and protect vote-by-mail from Republican legislators’ attempts to end it.

The incumbent’s defeat is a setback for election officials who have faced threats and tried to clarify the process amid a deluge of misinformation. Scores of election workers across the country, and particularly in Arizona, are leaving their jobs in part due to the added strain of dealing with sometimes-armed conspiracy theorists and endless lawsuits. In Maricopa, Republican county supervisor Bill Gates, who joined Richer in defending the election process in 2022, chose not to run for re-election this year and has talked publicly about suffering from PTSD. Another Republican supervisor who has been a target of election deniers, Jack Sellers, lost his primary on Tuesday too. It’s tough to see how things might have played out differently in recent years if the people screaming about stopping the steal also had allies in some of the most important election administration positions in the land. But it probably wouldn’t have been great.

Richer’s loss won’t, at least, have much of an effect on how the 2024 election is conducted. The recorder’s term won’t end until January—meaning that the lame-duck Republican will still be around to do one last job this November.

In late June, I was at a candidate forum in Sun City West, a sprawling retirement community northwest of Phoenix, when an Arizona Republican sitting next to me leaned over and offered a suggestion.

“You need to do a story,” she said, “about the ads Masters is running against Hamadeh.”

The primary, which ends on July 30, features both Blake Masters, the party’s 2022 nominee for US Senate, and Abe Hamadeh, the party’s 2022 nominee for attorney general. The candidates were close allies two years ago, touring the state as part of a slate with election-denying gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. This time it’s a different story. The Republican primary to fill Rep. Debbie Lesko’s seat in the eighth congressional district is one of the ugliest I’ve seen in 15 years covering conservative politics.

And, as the voter at Sun City West noted, a large part of that is because of the bigoted campaign Masters and his allies have waged against Hamadeh. One ad in question, which actually was paid for not by Masters himself but by an outside group called the American Principles Project that’s supporting him, asks viewers if they “think America was founded on Islamic principles,” before informing them “that’s what dishonest Abe Hamdeh thinks.” It features a photo of Hamadeh in a white robe standing in Mecca. It goes on to say that Hamadeh rejected “the Judeo-Christian values that made America great.”

“We have enough terrorist sympathizers in Congress,” it continues. “On Election Day, never forget what’s at stake.”

The American people have had enough of Islamic Principles in Congress. Make sure Dishonest Abe goes down in #AZ08 pic.twitter.com/UB7dqWwQ7s

— Joe Proenza (@JoeProenza) June 3, 2024

The source for Hamadeh’s comment is a post at “RonPaulForums.com” from 2009. As the Arizona Republic explained, Hamadeh was responding to an Islamophobic poster by arguing that “our own Constitution of the United States was based off of Abrahamic religions, including Islam.” The photo of Hamadeh was taken during a visit to Saudi Arabia while he was serving in the US Army. His parents are Druze and Muslim, and he currently describes his faith as “non-denominational.”

Another ad, from Masters’ campaign says that Hamadeh was “born to two Syrian parents who were here illegally.” According to the Republic, his father faced deportation for overstaying his visa. The ad goes on to feature the same photo of a young Hamadeh in Mecca, with the same quote about “Islamic principles.” 

Good morning.

Did you know that Abe Hamadeh supported Chuck Schumer’s amnesty and said America was founded on Islamic principles?

Dishonest Abe has not been telling the truth about himself and the patriots of #AZ08 are about to find out.

Our new ad coming to the airwaves. pic.twitter.com/rBtyTmABst

— Blake Masters War Room (@MastersPress) April 3, 2024

Masters didn’t just plaster the airwaves with the Islamophobic attacks. His campaign also put up signs around the district with the photo of Hamadeh in Mecca:

I don’t know how much signs impact votes but this one by @bgmasters could cost @AbrahamHamadeh maybe 5 points? They are all over #Az08 pic.twitter.com/GMxEMUsS02

— barrett marson (@barrettmarson) June 3, 2024

Masters also sought to use the two candidates’ past friendship against his political rival. Earlier this year, the Republic also published text messages Hamadeh exchanged with Masters in which they discussed the fallout from the 2022 election. Hamadeh, who lost to Democrat Kris Mayes by 280 votes and—like Lake—is still challenging his loss in court a year-and-a-half later, acknowledged to Masters that “the crazies love me because they see me fighting.”

For his part, Hamadeh has attempted to take down Masters with his own bit of culture-war politics. In one digital ad, his campaign called Masters a “Leftist,” and charged that “Blake lived in a nudist vegan commune” and “played on the women’s basketball team at Stanford.” They also featured a photo of Masters wearing faux-warpaint. (All of these details were reported, as it happens, by my colleague Noah Lanard in a 2022 Mother Jones profile.) Both candidates are billing themselves as intensely anti-immigrant. Masters’ other campaign signs say “Deport Illegals” in big letters, and “Now! Now! Now!” above that; Hamadeh, nonetheless, accused Masters of being soft on border security, citing an old LiveJournal post.

Masters and Hamadeh are not the only candidates running, although they are the favorites. The field also includes state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was indicted earlier this year for serving as a fake elector following the 2020 election and was on the Capitol grounds during the January 6th insurrection. (Kern’s campaign offers t-shirts with his mug shot on it.) There’s also former Rep. Trent Franks, an extremely anti-abortion conservative Christian who represented the area in Washington for parts of seven terms before resigning in 2017 after admitting to having asked several female staffers to bear his children.

When former president Donald Trump appeared at Dream City church in Phoenix in early June, he was visited on stage by a ghost from his past.

“Do you remember you had your sheriff, Sheriff Joe?” Trump said, looking off toward the crowd. “Is he here? I used to love that guy. Where is Sheriff Joe?”

From somewhere in the auditorium’s lower level, 92-year-old Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, shuffled his way slowly up toward the podium. “I didn’t know he was here—come here, Joe,” Trump said. He extended his arms dramatically as Arpaio approached, hugged him tightly, and kissed him on the cheek. Arpaio said a few words, wished Trump a happy birthday, and walked gingerly back toward his seat.

“Grab that railing, Joe!” Trump said. “Because you don’t want to pull a Biden.”

Arpaio made it down the stairs safely. But he has not exited the stage. Although neither he nor the ex-president mentioned it, Arpaio is running for office this year, after a tumultuous fall from grace and a criminal trial of his own. In 2022, after losing two straight campaigns for sheriff; getting convicted of contempt; receiving a pardon from Trump; losing another campaign for Senate; and burying his wife of 63 years; Arpaio ran for mayor of his hometown of Fountain Hills, a master-planned city of 25,000, nestled in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains about 45 minutes northeast of downtown Phoenix. He lost by 200 votes, claimed fraud, produced no evidence, never conceded, and just kept on running. 

During his 24 years as chief law enforcement officer in America’s fourth-largest county, Arpaio defined what it meant to be an anti-immigrant sheriff—inviting national media and Republican politicians to come and tour his massive outdoor jail, “Tent City,” where inmates donned pink underwear and lived without air conditioning. He ordered a volunteer posse to investigate the provenance of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, arrested a critical newspaper editor, and let Steven Seagal drive a tank into someone’s home. His early endorsement of Trump helped solidify the TV star’s standing as the loudest voice in a party of nativists. Arpaio spent years turning the on-the-ground reality of America’s immigration politics into a media-friendly spectacle of performative cruelty. But he has reached the end of the road. On Tuesday, the man who helped define an age of border insecurity will be on the ballot for what might be the final time, in a three-way open primary against the town’s current Democratic mayor and another Republican challenger. 

When I learned all this, I had what seemed like the only reasonable question: Why can’t this old man stop running?

Arpaio’s private office in Fountain Hills occupies a large suite on the first floor of the Ava Investment Building, which is named for his wife, Ava, who passed away in 2021. The couple ran a travel agency out of the complex for years. For a time in the 1980s—before the Challenger explosion, and before Arpaio came out of retirement to run for sheriff—they were attempting to break into space-tourism market by selling tickets on a 57-foot-long, 20-foot-wide vessel called the Phoenix E. Today, his office, filled with framed photos, plaques, and odds and ends from his decades in federal and local law enforcement, serves as both a living-history museum and a campaign headquarters. There are coasters with a photo of a racehorse someone named for him; yellowing newspaper clippings spanning decades; and a framed copy of Trump’s clemency decree.

It was quiet on the day I visited in late June. An aide stayed mostly out of sight, periodically fetching some printed-out press release the boss called out for, while Arpaio sat behind his desk, in front of a bobblehead of himself. We were interrupted only once, when a man stopped by to donate a bag of freshly picked cherries. It was done in such a matter-of-fact way, no one seemed to question it.

The simple explanation for why Arpaio is running for mayor, he told me, is that Ava had once suggested the idea. The longer explanation is that after being booted from office in 2016, Arpaio has run for everything else and lost. In 2018, he ran for Senate and finished third in the Republican primary. In 2020, he sought his old job as sheriff and lost in the primary to his former chief deputy. In 2022, he ran for mayor, spent an astounding $160,000, and lost again. Candidates typically make their campaigns about the future, but when I tried to ask Arpaio about his current race, he repeatedly returned to the past.

“Fox blackballed me, right after I left office,” he told me. “And the only reason they blackballed me, which you’re not gonna put in there—in fact, you have a boss?” 

Yes, I told him; I have editors. 

“They’re gonna throw this in the garbage,” he said. “Nothing. Because I’m gonna mention something and you’re sure gonna edit it out. Because I mentioned the birth certificate.”

Arpaio insisted that he had assigned his “Cold Case Posse” to investigate the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate in 2011 with the intention not of finding evidence that Obama was ineligible for the office but of clearing him. But the more information they produced, he said, the more unavoidable the reality. Finally, he had sent their work to Rome, where some “experts, great people” had looked it over for him and confirmed that Obama’s document was fraudulent. The birth certificate investigation hadn’t just cost him his prime perch in right-wing media. It was also, he suggested, the reason he ended up in so much legal trouble.

“I may be going against the grain, but I think it wasn’t the illegal immigration they wanted me out [for]—of course, they wanted me out on all that, but I think it was the birth certificate. They knew I had the evidence.”

“I got my own little idea about this,” he said. “I may be going against the grain, but I think it wasn’t the illegal immigration they wanted me out [for]—of course, they wanted me out on all that, but I think it was the birth certificate. They knew I had the evidence. Now, getting rid of me—I won’t be sheriff anymore, I won’t have a gun and badge, I’m going to go fishing, I’m going to forget everything. I think it was the birth certificate, and nobody wants to talk about the birth certificate. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about it.”

The problem with this theory of the case is none of this was true. Not the birth certificate part, of course—Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. But not the rest of it either. The Department of Justice began investigating his department during George W. Bush’s administration, before releasing a report in 2011 finding that Arpaio’s office was serially violating the civil rights of Latino residents. The case that ultimately led to Arpaio’s prosecution started with a 2007 class-action lawsuit filed by Latino residents who alleged they had been racially profiled during traffic stops. He and his subordinates serially ignored a 2013 court order to stop the unconstitutional behavior, and, according to Judge G. Murray Snow, “engaged in multiple acts of misconduct, dishonesty, and bad faith,” which ultimately led to his 2017 conviction on a misdemeanor charge of contempt of court. He was facing a maximum of six months of prison when Trump pardoned him later that year. 

But Arpaio was insistent on rebranding his own legal issues and electoral defeats, not as the comeuppance of a bad cop, but as the product of a great conspiracy. He considered himself a canary, of sorts, for Deep State retribution.

“Everything they did then, they’re doing to Trump—it’s almost like a pattern,” he said.

Besides the legal issues, the thing he was most bitter about was the way people talked about his age. “They say ‘he’s too old,’” Arpaio said. He pointed at his head. “There is nothing wrong with my mind.” He kept trying to get me to tell him that he looked young. “I don’t look my age,” Arpaio said confidently. “There’s no one in the universe who will believe my age.” He took out a letter from his physician and had me read it. He believed that when elected as mayor, his active lifestyle and cogency could serve as an inspiration to other old people. “I want them to think, wait a minute—if he can do it, we can do things instead of looking at the pool and television.”

“Even Trump says he thinks I’m 73,” he said. “I should show him my birth certificate!”

Later, I checked the tape of the Dream City speech. Trump said that Arpaio was 170.

Arpaio does have plans for what he would do as mayor, although they are colored, somewhat, by the fact that the person proposing them is most famous for running an outdoor jail in Phoenix. Arpaio explained that he tries to “de-emphasize public safety” in his campaign literature because he’s worried about being put “in a box” because of his law enforcement background. (Nevertheless, one of his proposals is to create a town police force.) One of his top goals was to breathe new life into a town with an aging Sun Belt population. He thought that it needed “more babies,” although it wasn’t clear how exactly he would bring that about. One suggestion, which was not directly related to the babies idea, was to bring in a nightclub. Reminding me that he had once lived in Boston (“I knew Red Auerbach…I’m a big Celtics guy”), he suggested that the seafood restaurant in Fountain Hills could import lobsters. Another plan was to get a nearby casino, which is run by the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, to give the city more money.

Then there was the fountain itself—the city’s namesake, which sits inside a 100-million-gallon man-made lake on a 29-acre eponymous park. The fountain can reach a height of 560 feet. But it wasn’t what it once was, he said. It was powered by three pumps, but under the city’s current mayor, Ginny Dickey, only two of them usually run, which meant that the water reached a maximum height of just 330 feet. 

“That makes me angry,” he said. “I want that to go all the way up. We were number one. Now Dubai is number one. Now we’re number five.” His plan was to turn the third pump back on, costs be damned.

A few days later, I met up with the incumbent mayor, Ginny Dickey, at her office on the second floor of the city hall. She had come from a breakfast with the local chamber of commerce. The 68-year-old Dickey, a former banker and school board member, had first moved to the area in the early 1980s and served on the city council for eight years before being elected mayor in 2018.

Dickey and Arpaio had gone head to head two years ago, and their relationship was cordial but hardly warm. Living in the same community as America’s most media-hungry sheriff could be a source of annoyance. In 2013, she noted, residents had staged a protest after Arpaio and Seagal—with cameras in tow— conducted a simulated mass shooting at a school in town. She said that Arpaio was always trying to talk to her about how they are both Italian. Dickey did not seem to give his big ideas for the town much credence. When I mentioned that Arpaio was proposing to ask a tribal casino for more money, she sounded like she had just watched a dog attempt to parallel park.

“That’s cute,” she said.

Dickey had suggested we check out the fountain, which runs for 15 minutes at the top of every hour. It was a short walk from city hall down a newly redeveloped boulevard with boutiques and nice restaurants. At 10 a.m. on the dot, the water rose and rose and kept rising. At its peak—according to the town’s official site, where it hosts a 24-hour livestream—it spouts higher than the Washington Monument, Notre Dame, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and Old Faithful. When it’s windy, no one within a few hundred feet is safe from the spray. We were standing by the side of the road clinging to the shade of a small tree, while the mayor was being eaten by ants. I mentioned that Arpaio had suggested turning on the third pump.

It was clear that this was a familiar complaint. Running the pump was expensive. And the city didn’t even have property taxes. Her first opponent, in 2018, had proposed having the pump run all the time.

“I think it adds to the intrigue and the fun to not have it on all the time,” she said. “Maybe someday we’ll put other little [fountains] around it.”

Like her most famous opponent, Dickey believed the community needed to bring in more young people, but it was clear that she had given the matter a good deal more thought. As we sat in her office, she explained that the town’s median age had been rising steeply for decades—it was now 59—and the lack of affordable housing options for families was one of the main reasons why. The city’s housing stock was 96 percent full. She and the council had found the perfect place to begin to change that: An old mall not far from downtown, which is currently anchored by a Target. Retrofitting the complex could provide reasonably-priced housing for 600 people. 

This is the reality of the office Arpaio is running for: It is not a job where you do a lot of stunts. It requires a passion for zoning and spreadsheets and strategic planning—and patience for the people who accuse you of spoiling their paradise. The Target Center, as the plan was known, had inspired furious backlash in some segments of the community.

“Some people are just like, ‘Well, you know who’s gonna live there? Democrats—Democrats who shop at the Dollar Store.”

“Some people are just like, ‘Well, you know who’s gonna live there? Democrats—Democrats who shop at the Dollar Store,’” she said. You could read between the lines what this meant.

Dickey’s literature promised that she offered a choice between unity and “fear.” I had assumed that that was a dig at her infamous rival. But it was actually in response to another group in Fountain Hills—a new PAC called Reclaim Our Town (or ROT). All across town there were ROT-funded signs saying that a vote for Dickey was a vote for high-density housing, taxes, potholes, and roundabouts. (Yes, roundabouts.) In the town’s nonpartisan elections, ROT was aligned with a slate of self-identified Republicans. But it was not supporting the most famous Republican running.

“They’re backing Gerry,” Dickey said, referring to the third candidate in the race, a city councilman named Gerry Friedel, who is also vice president of the Fountain Hills Republican Club. “Joe was kind of upset about it because he keeps complaining about ‘slates.’”

Unless one candidate receives a majority in Tuesday’s election, which seems unlikely, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff election in the fall. It was clear that this race, too, seemed like an uphill battle for Arpaio. In our meeting, he complained that local Republicans were ignoring his candidacy, acting as if he weren’t running, or insisting that he would be a lame-duck if he won. Friedel’s entry suggested that at least some conservatives in Fountain Hills were leaning in the same direction as Republicans in every other primary Arpaio has entered since leaving office. Most people aren’t looking for a 92-year-old former sheriff to turn things around. They, too, would rather turn the page.

But Arpaio has never really made peace with the fact that he’s not the star of the show anymore. I don’t think he’d be running if he had. The biggest draw to the city, in his view, was not the fountain—it was Joe Arpaio, America’s former toughest sheriff. The election could put Fountain Hills on the map, he told me. “All I have to do is drop a dime and I’ll have the TV here in two minutes.” People would come from all over just to see him. I suggested that, based on his electoral history, people would be more likely to stay away, but he wasn’t having it.

This was the essential disconnect at the heart of what may well be his final campaign. Arpaio’s tenure as sheriff had ruined lives and saddled Maricopa County with massive debts. The Associated Press reported in May that the county’s tab for the sheriff’s racial profiling had reached a staggering $315 million. Arpaio’s lawlessness spurred years of political organizing that helped bring about his defeat and ultimately remade the political culture of what is now one of the nation’s tightest swing states. He was not just unpopular; his unpopularity had changed the course of history.

But instead of grappling with his legacy, he seemed to be retreating into the myth that he cultivated in media reports, and with friendly audiences for decades. Ava had once told an interviewer that her husband didn’t really have any hobbies. It was the self-image that surrounded him in his office. In his tenth decade, he is stuck in character, a fading tough guy, shuffling through his playlist in search of a track that his audience wants to hear. It didn’t matter what question I asked; the answer would always lead back to a well-worn riff about the time he arrested Elvis or a drug cartel put a contract on his head. At one point—with a preface that he might be accused of “racial profiling”—he asked me where my “folks” were from. But it wasn’t because he wanted to know; he just wanted to talk about how he’s Italian. All this baseless innuendo about Obama—that was part of the bit too. Did this shtick ever really work? For a while, at least, a lot of people found it useful for they had stories that they, too, wanted to tell.

Before I left, Arpaio offered me a souvenir: pink underwear, inspired by the attire that Maricopa County used to force inmates at his Tent City to wear. Arpaio now orders it in bulk and sells autographed drawers at gun shows to raise money for law-enforcement charities. “Pakistan’s the only country we could find that would do it all—the color, you know,” he said. His voice trailed off. I told him I was going to pass. Arpaio is still playing hits. But the audience just isn’t what it was.

When former president Donald Trump appeared at Dream City church in Phoenix in early June, he was visited on stage by a ghost from his past.

“Do you remember you had your sheriff, Sheriff Joe?” Trump said, looking off toward the crowd. “Is he here? I used to love that guy. Where is Sheriff Joe?”

From somewhere in the auditorium’s lower level, 92-year-old Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, shuffled his way slowly up toward the podium. “I didn’t know he was here—come here, Joe,” Trump said. He extended his arms dramatically as Arpaio approached, hugged him tightly, and kissed him on the cheek. Arpaio said a few words, wished Trump a happy birthday, and walked gingerly back toward his seat.

“Grab that railing, Joe!” Trump said. “Because you don’t want to pull a Biden.”

Arpaio made it down the stairs safely. But he has not exited the stage. Although neither he nor the ex-president mentioned it, Arpaio is running for office this year, after a tumultuous fall from grace and a criminal trial of his own. In 2022, after losing two straight campaigns for sheriff; getting convicted of contempt; receiving a pardon from Trump; losing another campaign for Senate; and burying his wife of 63 years; Arpaio ran for mayor of his hometown of Fountain Hills, a master-planned city of 25,000, nestled in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains about 45 minutes northeast of downtown Phoenix. He lost by 200 votes, claimed fraud, produced no evidence, never conceded, and just kept on running. 

During his 24 years as chief law enforcement officer in America’s fourth-largest county, Arpaio defined what it meant to be an anti-immigrant sheriff—inviting national media and Republican politicians to come and tour his massive outdoor jail, “Tent City,” where inmates donned pink underwear and lived without air conditioning. He ordered a volunteer posse to investigate the provenance of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, arrested a critical newspaper editor, and let Steven Seagal drive a tank into someone’s home. His early endorsement of Trump helped solidify the TV star’s standing as the loudest voice in a party of nativists. Arpaio spent years turning the on-the-ground reality of America’s immigration politics into a media-friendly spectacle of performative cruelty. But he has reached the end of the road. On Tuesday, the man who helped define an age of border insecurity will be on the ballot for what might be the final time, in a three-way open primary against the town’s current Democratic mayor and another Republican challenger. 

When I learned all this, I had what seemed like the only reasonable question: Why can’t this old man stop running?

Arpaio’s private office in Fountain Hills occupies a large suite on the first floor of the Ava Investment Building, which is named for his wife, Ava, who passed away in 2021. The couple ran a travel agency out of the complex for years. For a time in the 1980s—before the Challenger explosion, and before Arpaio came out of retirement to run for sheriff—they were attempting to break into space-tourism market by selling tickets on a 57-foot-long, 20-foot-wide vessel called the Phoenix E. Today, his office, filled with framed photos, plaques, and odds and ends from his decades in federal and local law enforcement, serves as both a living-history museum and a campaign headquarters. There are coasters with a photo of a racehorse someone named for him; yellowing newspaper clippings spanning decades; and a framed copy of Trump’s clemency decree.

It was quiet on the day I visited in late June. An aide stayed mostly out of sight, periodically fetching some printed-out press release the boss called out for, while Arpaio sat behind his desk, in front of a bobblehead of himself. We were interrupted only once, when a man stopped by to donate a bag of freshly picked cherries. It was done in such a matter-of-fact way, no one seemed to question it.

The simple explanation for why Arpaio is running for mayor, he told me, is that Ava had once suggested the idea. The longer explanation is that after being booted from office in 2016, Arpaio has run for everything else and lost. In 2018, he ran for Senate and finished third in the Republican primary. In 2020, he sought his old job as sheriff and lost in the primary to his former chief deputy. In 2022, he ran for mayor, spent an astounding $160,000, and lost again. Candidates typically make their campaigns about the future, but when I tried to ask Arpaio about his current race, he repeatedly returned to the past.

“Fox blackballed me, right after I left office,” he told me. “And the only reason they blackballed me, which you’re not gonna put in there—in fact, you have a boss?” 

Yes, I told him; I have editors. 

“They’re gonna throw this in the garbage,” he said. “Nothing. Because I’m gonna mention something and you’re sure gonna edit it out. Because I mentioned the birth certificate.”

Arpaio insisted that he had assigned his “Cold Case Posse” to investigate the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate in 2011 with the intention not of finding evidence that Obama was ineligible for the office but of clearing him. But the more information they produced, he said, the more unavoidable the reality. Finally, he had sent their work to Rome, where some “experts, great people” had looked it over for him and confirmed that Obama’s document was fraudulent. The birth certificate investigation hadn’t just cost him his prime perch in right-wing media. It was also, he suggested, the reason he ended up in so much legal trouble.

“I may be going against the grain, but I think it wasn’t the illegal immigration they wanted me out [for]—of course, they wanted me out on all that, but I think it was the birth certificate. They knew I had the evidence.”

“I got my own little idea about this,” he said. “I may be going against the grain, but I think it wasn’t the illegal immigration they wanted me out [for]—of course, they wanted me out on all that, but I think it was the birth certificate. They knew I had the evidence. Now, getting rid of me—I won’t be sheriff anymore, I won’t have a gun and badge, I’m going to go fishing, I’m going to forget everything. I think it was the birth certificate, and nobody wants to talk about the birth certificate. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about it.”

The problem with this theory of the case is none of this was true. Not the birth certificate part, of course—Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. But not the rest of it either. The Department of Justice began investigating his department during George W. Bush’s administration, before releasing a report in 2011 finding that Arpaio’s office was serially violating the civil rights of Latino residents. The case that ultimately led to Arpaio’s prosecution started with a 2007 class-action lawsuit filed by Latino residents who alleged they had been racially profiled during traffic stops. He and his subordinates serially ignored a 2013 court order to stop the unconstitutional behavior, and, according to Judge G. Murray Snow, “engaged in multiple acts of misconduct, dishonesty, and bad faith,” which ultimately led to his 2017 conviction on a misdemeanor charge of contempt of court. He was facing a maximum of six months of prison when Trump pardoned him later that year. 

But Arpaio was insistent on rebranding his own legal issues and electoral defeats, not as the comeuppance of a bad cop, but as the product of a great conspiracy. He considered himself a canary, of sorts, for Deep State retribution.

“Everything they did then, they’re doing to Trump—it’s almost like a pattern,” he said.

Besides the legal issues, the thing he was most bitter about was the way people talked about his age. “They say ‘he’s too old,’” Arpaio said. He pointed at his head. “There is nothing wrong with my mind.” He kept trying to get me to tell him that he looked young. “I don’t look my age,” Arpaio said confidently. “There’s no one in the universe who will believe my age.” He took out a letter from his physician and had me read it. He believed that when elected as mayor, his active lifestyle and cogency could serve as an inspiration to other old people. “I want them to think, wait a minute—if he can do it, we can do things instead of looking at the pool and television.”

“Even Trump says he thinks I’m 73,” he said. “I should show him my birth certificate!”

Later, I checked the tape of the Dream City speech. Trump said that Arpaio was 170.

Arpaio does have plans for what he would do as mayor, although they are colored, somewhat, by the fact that the person proposing them is most famous for running an outdoor jail in Phoenix. Arpaio explained that he tries to “de-emphasize public safety” in his campaign literature because he’s worried about being put “in a box” because of his law enforcement background. (Nevertheless, one of his proposals is to create a town police force.) One of his top goals was to breathe new life into a town with an aging Sun Belt population. He thought that it needed “more babies,” although it wasn’t clear how exactly he would bring that about. One suggestion, which was not directly related to the babies idea, was to bring in a nightclub. Reminding me that he had once lived in Boston (“I knew Red Auerbach…I’m a big Celtics guy”), he suggested that the seafood restaurant in Fountain Hills could import lobsters. Another plan was to get a nearby casino, which is run by the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, to give the city more money.

Then there was the fountain itself—the city’s namesake, which sits inside a 100-million-gallon man-made lake on a 29-acre eponymous park. The fountain can reach a height of 560 feet. But it wasn’t what it once was, he said. It was powered by three pumps, but under the city’s current mayor, Ginny Dickey, only two of them usually run, which meant that the water reached a maximum height of just 330 feet. 

“That makes me angry,” he said. “I want that to go all the way up. We were number one. Now Dubai is number one. Now we’re number five.” His plan was to turn the third pump back on, costs be damned.

A few days later, I met up with the incumbent mayor, Ginny Dickey, at her office on the second floor of the city hall. She had come from a breakfast with the local chamber of commerce. The 68-year-old Dickey, a former banker and school board member, had first moved to the area in the early 1980s and served on the city council for eight years before being elected mayor in 2018.

Dickey and Arpaio had gone head to head two years ago, and their relationship was cordial but hardly warm. Living in the same community as America’s most media-hungry sheriff could be a source of annoyance. In 2013, she noted, residents had staged a protest after Arpaio and Seagal—with cameras in tow— conducted a simulated mass shooting at a school in town. She said that Arpaio was always trying to talk to her about how they are both Italian. Dickey did not seem to give his big ideas for the town much credence. When I mentioned that Arpaio was proposing to ask a tribal casino for more money, she sounded like she had just watched a dog attempt to parallel park.

“That’s cute,” she said.

Dickey had suggested we check out the fountain, which runs for 15 minutes at the top of every hour. It was a short walk from city hall down a newly redeveloped boulevard with boutiques and nice restaurants. At 10 a.m. on the dot, the water rose and rose and kept rising. At its peak—according to the town’s official site, where it hosts a 24-hour livestream—it spouts higher than the Washington Monument, Notre Dame, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and Old Faithful. When it’s windy, no one within a few hundred feet is safe from the spray. We were standing by the side of the road clinging to the shade of a small tree, while the mayor was being eaten by ants. I mentioned that Arpaio had suggested turning on the third pump.

It was clear that this was a familiar complaint. Running the pump was expensive. And the city didn’t even have property taxes. Her first opponent, in 2018, had proposed having the pump run all the time.

“I think it adds to the intrigue and the fun to not have it on all the time,” she said. “Maybe someday we’ll put other little [fountains] around it.”

Like her most famous opponent, Dickey believed the community needed to bring in more young people, but it was clear that she had given the matter a good deal more thought. As we sat in her office, she explained that the town’s median age had been rising steeply for decades—it was now 59—and the lack of affordable housing options for families was one of the main reasons why. The city’s housing stock was 96 percent full. She and the council had found the perfect place to begin to change that: An old mall not far from downtown, which is currently anchored by a Target. Retrofitting the complex could provide reasonably-priced housing for 600 people. 

This is the reality of the office Arpaio is running for: It is not a job where you do a lot of stunts. It requires a passion for zoning and spreadsheets and strategic planning—and patience for the people who accuse you of spoiling their paradise. The Target Center, as the plan was known, had inspired furious backlash in some segments of the community.

“Some people are just like, ‘Well, you know who’s gonna live there? Democrats—Democrats who shop at the Dollar Store.”

“Some people are just like, ‘Well, you know who’s gonna live there? Democrats—Democrats who shop at the Dollar Store,’” she said. You could read between the lines what this meant.

Dickey’s literature promised that she offered a choice between unity and “fear.” I had assumed that that was a dig at her infamous rival. But it was actually in response to another group in Fountain Hills—a new PAC called Reclaim Our Town (or ROT). All across town there were ROT-funded signs saying that a vote for Dickey was a vote for high-density housing, taxes, potholes, and roundabouts. (Yes, roundabouts.) In the town’s nonpartisan elections, ROT was aligned with a slate of self-identified Republicans. But it was not supporting the most famous Republican running.

“They’re backing Gerry,” Dickey said, referring to the third candidate in the race, a city councilman named Gerry Friedel, who is also vice president of the Fountain Hills Republican Club. “Joe was kind of upset about it because he keeps complaining about ‘slates.’”

Unless one candidate receives a majority in Tuesday’s election, which seems unlikely, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff election in the fall. It was clear that this race, too, seemed like an uphill battle for Arpaio. In our meeting, he complained that local Republicans were ignoring his candidacy, acting as if he weren’t running, or insisting that he would be a lame-duck if he won. Friedel’s entry suggested that at least some conservatives in Fountain Hills were leaning in the same direction as Republicans in every other primary Arpaio has entered since leaving office. Most people aren’t looking for a 92-year-old former sheriff to turn things around. They, too, would rather turn the page.

But Arpaio has never really made peace with the fact that he’s not the star of the show anymore. I don’t think he’d be running if he had. The biggest draw to the city, in his view, was not the fountain—it was Joe Arpaio, America’s former toughest sheriff. The election could put Fountain Hills on the map, he told me. “All I have to do is drop a dime and I’ll have the TV here in two minutes.” People would come from all over just to see him. I suggested that, based on his electoral history, people would be more likely to stay away, but he wasn’t having it.

This was the essential disconnect at the heart of what may well be his final campaign. Arpaio’s tenure as sheriff had ruined lives and saddled Maricopa County with massive debts. The Associated Press reported in May that the county’s tab for the sheriff’s racial profiling had reached a staggering $315 million. Arpaio’s lawlessness spurred years of political organizing that helped bring about his defeat and ultimately remade the political culture of what is now one of the nation’s tightest swing states. He was not just unpopular; his unpopularity had changed the course of history.

But instead of grappling with his legacy, he seemed to be retreating into the myth that he cultivated in media reports, and with friendly audiences for decades. Ava had once told an interviewer that her husband didn’t really have any hobbies. It was the self-image that surrounded him in his office. In his tenth decade, he is stuck in character, a fading tough guy, shuffling through his playlist in search of a track that his audience wants to hear. It didn’t matter what question I asked; the answer would always lead back to a well-worn riff about the time he arrested Elvis or a drug cartel put a contract on his head. At one point—with a preface that he might be accused of “racial profiling”—he asked me where my “folks” were from. But it wasn’t because he wanted to know; he just wanted to talk about how he’s Italian. All this baseless innuendo about Obama—that was part of the bit too. Did this shtick ever really work? For a while, at least, a lot of people found it useful for they had stories that they, too, wanted to tell.

Before I left, Arpaio offered me a souvenir: pink underwear, inspired by the attire that Maricopa County used to force inmates at his Tent City to wear. Arpaio now orders it in bulk and sells autographed drawers at gun shows to raise money for law-enforcement charities. “Pakistan’s the only country we could find that would do it all—the color, you know,” he said. His voice trailed off. I told him I was going to pass. Arpaio is still playing hits. But the audience just isn’t what it was.

In the month that followed President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, it has sometimes been hard to escape the conclusion that, for all the warnings that the Republican candidate was an existential threat to democratic governance who must be defeated in November, many of the people tasked with stopping him really didn’t seem to feel that way. You did not expect much different from Rep. Jared Golden, a Blue Dog co-chair who represents a Trump-leaning Maine district. But the lack of real fear or urgency was the unspoken, or sometimes spoken, subtext of so many stories. The sorts of ambitious Democrats who might, all things being equal, want to nudge Biden and challenge Trump themselves, were waiting until 2028. Someone described as a “senior House Democrat” told Axios, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” If there was one Biden comment that stung more than all the others, it was his response to a question from George Stephanopolous during his first post-debate interview about how he’d feel in January if Trump went on to win. 

“I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did as good a job as I know I can do,” Biden said, “that’s what this is about.”

But not everyone was as resigned to a Democratic loss as that senior House Democrat. While Biden’s stubbornness exacerbated liberal frustrations with the party’s gerontocracy, one of the most persistent and influential voices in persuading him to pass the torch turned out to be a Democrat who had already done so—the 84-year-old former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. A Politico story on Monday offered details on the San Francisco congresswoman’s pressure campaign, which she was reportedly prepared to escalate:  

Senior Biden aides were bracing for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who’d worked behind the scenes to encourage others in the party toward the kind of collective action that might finally push the president to end his campaign, to go public this week and possibly even disclose Democratic polling clarifying Biden’s dire political straits.

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

Pelosi’s efforts to marshal support within her caucus for a new candidate is a remarkable and fitting capstone to a career that has been spent doing some variation of what she did these last few weeks: assembling just enough of a quorum to move the party’s agenda forward.

The former speaker’s skill as a herder of cats is easiest to appreciate if you simply look at the opposition. It has been 21 years since she first became the figurehead for Democrats in the House. (She is now merely an extremely influential emerita.) In that period, Republicans have gone from Dennis Hastert to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, to Paul Ryan, to Kevin McCarthy, to Mike Johnson. I can think of three extended periods in which the caucus was struggling to decide on anyone at all. Because of the intransigent House Freedom Caucus, House Republican leadership has been largely unable to function for about a decade. Anyone who has ever watched a Republican general-election campaign ad understands that Pelosi’s longevity could be a liability too. But that was sort of the deal you got: It is hard to keep a caucus together, and no one in American politics was better at it.

Pelosi’s closest parallel is Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who first took over the Senate Republican conference in 2007, the same year Pelosi first became speaker. But where McConnell could never bring himself to meaningfully rebuke Trump—not even when the ex-president was at his political low point, following January 6—Pelosi ultimately chose to use what leverage she had to drive Biden from the race.

That Pelosi picked this fight with Biden is a testament to the fact that even on her way into the sunset, she’s still got it. But it’s also a recognition of how many legacies are at stake. Democrats spent more than a decade digging out from the wreckage of 2010. You don’t just move on from an electoral wipeout, and Pelosi’s legacy is on the line this fall too. Trump has promised to revisit the Affordable Care Act, which he was one Senate vote away from repealing in 2017. He wants to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act, which included landmark investments in climate adaptation and green energy. (Trump is particularly upset about the law’s electric-vehicle mandate.) Roe is already gone. Republicans are coming for the civil service and the administrative state. Obergefell could be on the chopping block. He is poised, in other words, to turn the Obama and Biden eras into historical footnotes and render much of Pelosi’s life’s work obsolete.

Faced with that choice, Pelosi chose to go down fighting for her legacy. And by bowing out to a younger and healthier next-in-line, Biden did too.

On the first night of the Republican National Convention, I settled into a seat in the upper levels of Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum to watch the most incongruous political address of my life. The speaker was Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The subject was the betrayal of the American worker. The audience included many of the kinds of people he held responsible for that treachery.

O’Brien, whose union has not endorsed Donald Trump, started off nice but soon got angry. He slammed the “economic terrorism” of corporations firing employees who try to organize and attacked business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce. As he worked further into his list of grievances, the applause grew more and more tepid, until it finally just seemed to stop. Trump and his newly announced running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio—whom O’Brien singled out for praise for having recently walked a picket line—stood politely throughout. Occasionally, the former president turned to his would-be vice president, cracked a joke, and smiled.

If you suspended your skepticism for a moment, it looked like a glimpse of the anti-corporate, anti-elite Republican Party that Vance, a self-styled spokesman of “forgotten” people, has promised to usher in. Then I checked my notifications and found the Republican Party that Vance more concretely represents. Around the same time O’Brien took the stage, another figure who has historically shied away from events like the RNC was shaking up the race in his own unprecedented way: The Wall Street Journal reported that one of the world’s richest union-busters, Elon Musk, was planning to donate $45 million a month to a super-PAC supporting the Republican campaign. 

The Republican convention was defined by the basic tension between the image Trump sought to project and the purpose his candidacy ultimately serves. In many ways, some cosmetic and others not, it was a far different event than any Republican convention in memory. The gathering offered a glimpse of a potentially unbeatable electoral coalition this November—a unified MAGA movement that’s making inroads with Black men, Latino voters, Gen Z, and union members. Republicans were expanding the tent by granting admittance to anyone who shared their antipathy to migrants, pronouns, and $5 gas. Vance, a Never Trumper–turned–MAGA heir, was a symbol of that vibe shift, promising an ideological realignment built to last. But his star turn in Milwaukee suggested a different story, one that might sound less like O’Brien and more like Musk. It was not the rise of the workers. It was the restoration of the bosses.

I spent much of the day after O’Brien’s speech talking to Republicans about his remarks. Everyone was in favor of the union leader speaking (though Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, in an extremely Ron Johnson moment, told me that he hadn’t seen it). But it wasn’t so much due to the content of the speech. O’Brien’s appearance was an example, Trump supporters told me, of the sort of deal-making and coalition-building they believed only he could swing. It would “shred the Democrats,” as one Nebraska Republican put it.

Indeed, the whole convention sometimes seemed like a demonstration of Trump’s power of persuasion. From the model and rapper Amber Rose to Linda Fornos, a Nicaraguan immigrant who sells life insurance in Las Vegas, and San Francisco investor David Sacks, the refrain was the same: They never thought they’d find themselves agreeing with Trump—until Trump won them over. Come to think of it, that is also the story of Vance.

Some of the people I talked to were supportive of a more pro-labor GOP. Barbara Porcella, a Republican from Long Island in New York who comes from a family of union plumbers, told me O’Brien “nailed it, he absolutely nailed it.” Perhaps not coincidentally, New York is one of the states where Trump has made the biggest inroads in recent years. A Politico story on the state’s drift reported that union leaders were “alarmed” by Trump’s strength among their members.

“I don’t know why the unions vote Democrat,” Porcella said.

It’s Day Two of the RNC, and there’s a bizarre ripple racing through the delegate class: Are we unionists now? @garrison_hayes speaks with @timothypmurphy about the historic appearance of Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, at the… pic.twitter.com/2Pwe25oiOS

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 17, 2024

But the answers to that question were toting red lanyards just like hers. Every time I went to the convention floor from the media filing area later that night, I took an escalator past the Uline Lounge, a VIP area named for the Wisconsin-based packaging moguls who have poured vast amounts of money into combating union power. Sitting behind Trump in the presidential box one night was South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who in January, in the midst of a yearslong battle with the International Longshoremen’s Association, pledged to fight the union “all the way to the gates of hell.” Not far away, foot traffic came to a standstill as people lined up to take a photo or have a word with Markwayne Mullin, the senator from Oklahoma who nearly fought O’Brien at a hearing. Also in the building was Tate Reeves, the Mississippi governor who signed a joint statement with McMaster and four other governors in April declaring that the United Auto Workers’ organizing efforts in the South “threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” (Disclosure: I and most Mother Jones employees are members of the UAW.) 

One of the week’s memorable visuals was West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, the party’s nominee to replace Joe Manchin in the Senate, appearing on stage alongside his bulldog, Babydog, who sat on a little chair. Babydog was pretty cute. Justice’s record isn’t. Retired coal miners have sued the party-switching billionaire resort owner repeatedly to force his companies to pay the health benefits they promised. Everywhere you turned there was someone for whom unions were not a vital new constituency in a workers’ party, but a speed bump on the road to higher profits. 

“We’ve become the party of the working men and women in this country; Democrats are the party of wokeness,” Johnson told me, after saying he’d look up O’Brien’s speech on YouTube “if it’s a good one.” There was room, he added, to “talk to, particularly, private-sector unions.” 

But Johnson has never offered much support for private-sector unions, nor has he backed the sort of workers whom Vance would later, in his own speech, blame Democrats for selling out. Johnson was one of the party’s loudest proponents of offshoring American manufacturing jobs. He once told a group of Realtors: “Let the billions of people around the world…provide us these goods—high-quality, dirt-cheap.”

Outside the arena Tuesday, I found Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor whose 2011 law gutted the ability of public-sector unions to collectively bargain. (A recent state court ruling struck down much of that law.) Walker’s union-busting push defined a whole era of conservative governance. He was the fulfillment of a dream—a million white papers and donor retreats crawled so that one day he might walk.  

“[I’m] glad that he was there, glad that he seems to be supporting the president,” he said of O’Brien. “I don’t always have to agree with every speaker on everything, but I was happy he was there, just as I was happy to have union”—he paused to choose his words carefully—“private-sector union support when I was running for governor.” 

I asked the state’s most famous union-buster if Republicans should take the Teamster’s advice and become more pro-union. He offered a substitution.

“I think they’re pro-worker,” he said. “That’s the key.”

After O’Brien left town, with a good deal of his membership criticizing him for the stunt, the party’s public flirtation with organized labor seemed to fade away for a while. No one in this new workers’ party mentioned unions again Tuesday night or for most of the program Wednesday. The Teamsters were like any number of people and issues in Trump’s orbit: The value was in having his name attached to theirs; the rest was diminishing returns.

It fell to Vance, on Wednesday, to pick up the subject and mold it into something more palatable to the audience. “We need a leader who fights for the people who built this country,” he told the audience, and who “answers to the working man, union and non-union alike.” Vance spoke those words deliberately, as if there was something profound about his having said it out loud—the way a politician might have once declared their support for same-sex marriage.

Vance’s speech was, like O’Brien’s, the kind of thing you never would have heard at the Republican convention in years past. Weaving in stories from his bestselling memoir, he sketched a picture of Middletown, Ohio, as a place that Democrats and Republicans gutted with destructive trade deals and disastrous foreign policy. “Jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war,” he said. Vance was well-positioned to make that case. He is a famously good storyteller whose life story is so compelling that, as his wife, Usha, pointed out moments before, it has already been the subject of a Ron Howard film.

But Vance was chosen not just because of the people he once knew back home, but because of the people on his Venmo now. Take that big incoming donation from Musk. The Tesla founder had reportedly spent the last few weeks lobbying Trump to choose Vance as his running mate. So had billionaire Palantir founder Peter Thiel, with whom Musk and Vance had both worked. As my colleague Jacob Rosenberg wrote this week, Vance may have started as a rural-white whisperer for liberal elites, but he rose to power in the MAGA universe through his ability to explain Trumpism to conservative and libertarian Silicon Valley elites.

The burgeoning anti-monopolist wing of the GOP is a real thing. Some elected officials, including a few whom O’Brien had praised by name, have shown more of a willingness to publicly align themselves with certain unions. But the people who phoned Trump to lobby for Vance are not clamoring for passage of the PRO Act. They did not call in their chits to get Republican senators to vote to shore up Teamster pensions. They aren’t advocating for a living wage for restaurant workers. They are the people O’Brien was purportedly there to tear down. Thiel is a monopolist. Musk wants to make trucking autonomous. The Tesla boss, who is now one of the biggest political donors in history, has threatened to take away stock options from unionizing employees at Tesla and is currently suing to eliminate the National Labor Relations Board. For these people, the appeal of Vance is not any gesture to the UAW, but a kind of sweeping, techno-authoritarian transformation. They are not anti-elite. They are the elite.

You don’t have to speculate about how Trump would deal with unions as president, because he has been president before. During his first term, Trump’s NLRB appointees were notoriously anti-union, and corporate interests such as Musk are banking on his army of conservative appointees to the federal bench gutting labor protections even further. That’s in stark contrast to the man Trump is running against, whom the New Yorker called “the most pro-labor president since FDR,” largely thanks to the aggressive intervention of his NLRB.

On Wednesday, as Vance offered his toned-down style of class war, Trump offered more signs that a second term would continue to favor the c-suite in a lengthy interview with Bloomberg. He was proposing nearly $1 trillion in corporate tax cuts and floating JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon as his future Treasury secretary. Trump had already promised oil company executives that he would put the brakes on electric-vehicle incentives while asking for $1 billion in campaign cash.

Trump, in a rambling acceptance speech Thursday, reiterated that promise while rebranding it as a deal for workers. He would scrap the new electric-car incentives on day one, he said, and impose a massive tariff on Chinese vehicles made in Mexico. (Biden has already imposed one.) Then he singled out the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, who in the last year had secured a new contract with the Big Three after a historic strike and presided over the first successful union drive at a Southern automobile plant.

“The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen,” Trump said of the Chinese vehicles, “and the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately, and every autoworker—union and non-union—should be voting for Donald Trump.”

It was a fitting end to the Republican rebrand that wasn’t—a billionaire boss, whose catchphrase is “You’re fired,” reaching out to the workers of the world by demanding their leader be laid off.

It wasn’t just the pro-worker facade. The convention was different in other ways, too. The assassination attempt added a shock of religious fervor to a cause that had never been lacking in it. Tucker Carlson called Trump’s survival “divine intervention.” On my first day in town, I met a woman who had been standing right behind Trump when the ex-president was shot, then drove more than 500 miles just to see him again. It was just a thing she had to do. A Florida woman who had stood behind Trump at a different rally just a few days before that told me that taking a bullet for the ex-president would have been the great honor of her life. 

“I’d be pleased. I’d be happy,” she said. “And my mom says the same thing.”

People stopped posing for photos with the Trumpian thumbs-up and started raising their fists instead. On my way to the security checkpoint, a guy dressed as Uncle Sam wheeled up to me on an electric scooter and turned to show me the white patch on his ear. You saw more and more of those little white squares over the course of the week. The whole thing was a sign from God, supporters said, and to be fair, spiritual awakenings have often stemmed from less. Musk himself had been caught up in the moment, confessing his loyalty to Trump on a dashed-off X post minutes after the shooting, as if he had suddenly gazed into the fiery furnace and seen the truth. 

The party had never seemed so unified, even if the reason for that unity was that everyone who might otherwise have spoken out had stayed home or been cast aside. Vance was there because some of the people in this same movement had wanted to hang former Vice President Mike Pence. (That Pence had survived was not generally considered an act of providence.) Sitting in Milwaukee, seeing a party that was so much more put together than it was when it last won in 2016, and so much more deliberate in its outreach, it was hard to shake the impression that this might all actually work. The Democrats were something more than a mess. The polls were all coming up Trump.

It is a powerful coalition, but it is not a particularly well-balanced one. Some people are going to cash in, and some people are going to get screwed. The bad news for O’Brien, and the good news for Musk, is that it’s usually the people who spend $200 million who leave the auction with what they paid for.