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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.

Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.

Musk’s paid referral strategy has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data.

So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts. 

It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:

Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.

This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.” 

His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)

Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.

This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.

It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:

Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.

After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.

Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)

This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.

The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.

Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.

Musk’s paid referral strategy has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data.

So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts. 

It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:

Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.

This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.” 

His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)

Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.

This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.

It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:

Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.

After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.

Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)

This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.

The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.

When large numbers of migrants, seeking an escape from poverty and dangerous conditions back home, began arriving in a small industrial city in southern Ohio a while back, they brought with them their own set of peculiar beliefs concerning pets.

“They hated domesticated animals and had little use for ‘critters’ that weren’t for eating,” one former resident would later write of the newcomers. The author recounted the story of a migrant who had threatened to feed a relative’s pet steak laced with antifreeze. It was strongly implied that the same man had previously murdered a neighbor’s dog. Local authorities fielded complaints about yet another migrant who kept slaughtering chickens in his backyard and carving them up, right on the spot.

All of this might be an accepted part of the culture where those migrants came from, but to “the established middle class of white Ohioans,” the author argued, the new arrivals “simply didn’t belong.” They had too many children, and they kept bringing even more people with them—many of them needing jobs and housing—as part of an extended chain migration. “[M]any parts of their culture and customs met with roaring disapproval,” the author wrote. The analysis fixated on the “racialness” of the newcomers, who, in the eyes of townies, had brought to the Midwest the habits of Black people from the Deep South.

The author, you may have guessed, was Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and the influx of migrants who threatened hallowed Midwestern values were his relatives. It was his Papaw, James Vance, the senator recounted in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, whose belligerence preceded the untimely passing of a neighbor’s dog. The elder Vance had arrived in Kentucky as a teenager from Eastern Kentucky, where, in his grandson’s account, he faced the possibility of prosecution for his “affair” with a 13-year-old girl (Vance’s Mamaw) and of retribution from her family. 

Vance, who in recent weeks has falsely smeared Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, as a group of cat-abducting “illegal aliens” straining resources and threatening the health and safety of the community, told a different kind of migration story in his book. The outsiders who were drawn to the area by its surplus of industrial jobs, though foreign in their ways, were not “villains,” he wrote: “They were just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way.”

Hillbilly, which chronicles Vance’s tumultuous upbringing in the southern Ohio city of Middletown, where he lived off and on with a mother who suffered from drug addiction, and his elderly Mamaw, made Vance a star when it was published in 2016. As Vance has inched to within a coin toss of the vice presidency, and undergone a political evolution from center-right Trump critic to MAGA warrior, the book and its characters have continued to feature prominently in his message. At his Republican National Convention address in July, Vance pointed to the story of his family, and its ancestral cemetery in Kentucky, as evidence that the United States is “not just an idea,” but a “homeland” for his people.

“The notion of being separated from everyone and everything I loved was terrifying,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly, explaining why he had once covered for his mother’s behavior. “So I shut my mouth, told the social workers everything was fine, and hoped that I wouldn’t lose my family when the court hearing came.” One of the book’s only real policy prescriptions was to roll back regulations on foster-care, so that people without formal accreditation—like his Mamaw—could more easily assume guardianship in complicated family situations.

But at the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Vance used the now-familiar story of his mother’s drug use, which did compel her to live apart from her children for long periods, as justification for a mass deportation program that could separate children from their parents. “I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and has gotten clean,” Vance said at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. “I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels.”

And he offered a defense of his attacks on Haitians with legal status who were drawn to Ohio by work and community—like the Vances long ago—and planted their roots. “You’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” he said. “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed.” In Springfield, Vance took the heroic story of his Middletown hillbillies, and flipped it on its head.

It’s not that Vance lets his “people” off easy. If you’ve read Hillbilly, the pathologizing of Haitians in Ohio, and fear-mongering about their social mores would sound familiar. In his memoir, the senator depicts a regional culture that was, in his estimation, ill-equipped for 21st-century society. 

Vance went after his Scots-Irish “hillbillies” hard. Places like Middletown had too many people who were “immune to hard work,” he wrote. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”

When they did work, it was largely in name only. Vance described timing his own co-workers’ bathroom breaks during a summer job. It was “impossible to fill” a warehouse position “with a long-term employee.” He feared these people’s lifestyles would “make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” The culture of the white working-class “encourages social decay,” he concluded, and many of the area’s residents were a drain on public resources—people who “gamed the welfare system.” 

“I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about,” Vance wrote. “Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole.”

Like the earlier generation of Middletown residents, who watched the hillbilly migration with suspicion, Vance also resorted to racializing the behavior he witnessed. “Bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs,” he concluded.

Vance believed the problems facing communities like Middletown, and by extension Springfield, were a product, in part, of intergenerational trauma and abuse that was endemic to his maternal grandparents’ Appalachian Scots-Irish culture. Most of his family lore “involved the kind of violence that should land someone in jail,” he wrote. His Papaw, the Kentucky migrant, “could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat,” in the words of Vance’s Uncle Jimmy. Vance’s Mamaw once lit his Papaw on fire. 

And while Vance has singled out recently-arrived Haitians as bad drivers, dangerous experiences on the road form a recurring subplot of his book. His grandfather was a habitual drunk driver who would “leave his car on the road, or even sideswipe a telephone pole as he maneuvered.” His grandmother, in Vance’s recounting, may have been worse behind the wheel: “Mamaw was trying to merge onto the highway after a brief stop for gas,” he writes. “She didn’t pay attention to the signs, so we found ourselves headed the wrong way on a one-way exit ramp with angry motorists swerving out of our way.” Young JD once crawled into the backseat while his mother was driving, hoping that wearing two seat belts at once would save him from what seemed like an inevitable crash.

Vance’s criticism of his neighbors in southern Ohio was part of what made the book such a hit among liberal audiences in 2016. Here was a man from Trump Country, validating the judgment of outsiders. As Vance’s Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, said in August, “JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley millionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.”

The difference is that the violent drunks lighting each other on fire are, in Vance’s narrative, the spiritual heart of America. They were the foundation to his idea of a homeland, and they still are.

“Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics,” Vance wrote. “[M]y people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes,” he continued, referring to an incident back in Kentucky, in which a man accused of rape was taken from a jail and killed before he could face trial.

There’s nothing they can’t do to lose that kind of acceptance. There’s nothing the Haitians can do to gain it. Some migrant families must be separated, so that other migrant families are not. You could call all of this hypocrisy if you want, but that would elide what’s really happening. If someone considers themselves the heir of the Southern Bourbons, and waxes nostalgic for the immigration crackdowns of the 1920s, you don’t have to try too hard to square what makes the Scots-Irish lovable sinners and Caribbean transplants an existential threat. The answer is barreling down on you. It’s practically running you off the road.

By the time he endorsed former President Donald Trump in late August, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid had long ceased to be a functioning campaign. He had collapsed in the polls, failed to qualify for the ballot in many states, and basically stopped doing events.

Yet, in death, his campaign found new life—as a way to game the democratic process for his favored candidate.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt.

After dropping out, Kennedy sued to be removed from the ballot in deep red states, and swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, where his presence might take votes away from Trump. But he fought to stay on the ballot in blue states. He continued to encourage people in those places to vote for him for a time, even though he was endorsing Trump. In New York, Kennedy sued to be put back on the ballot. When his effort there was unsuccessful, he appealed to the US Supreme Court—which ruled against him.

One state was happy to accommodate RFK Jr.’s bit of gamesmanship. In North Carolina, a lower court removed Kennedy from the ballot in early September, only for the notoriously partisan North Carolina Supreme Court to step in to “protect voters’ fundamental right to vote their conscience and have that vote count.” The high court ordered the State Board of Elections to restore Kennedy to the ballot. But ballots were already printed. There was also the matter of state law: Early voting by absentee ballot was scheduled to begin on September 6. 

As Mark Joseph Stern explained at Slate, Kennedy had announced that he was suspending his campaign a day after the state’s deadline for removing a candidate from the ballot and only submitted a request to get off the ballot five days after the Trump endorsement. He acted with all the tact and urgency of a man with a dead bear cub in his trunk.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt. It lost two full weeks of early voting because the state supreme court found a special Kennedy Clause in its constitution. 

Finally, after a fairly heroic effort by state and county workers, ballots were set to start being mailed out to in-state voters on September 24. Then, just as the window opened again, Hurricane Helene slammed it shut again.

The storm, which smashed through Florida and southern Appalachia this weekend, caused catastrophic destruction which affected communities are only beginning to take stock of. It washed out roads, knocked out power, killed at least 130 people, and flooded scores of communities. And with that immediate hit, came a number of logistical ripple effects.

Importantly, the US Postal Service announced that it was suspending operations in a number of North Carolina zip codes, and temporarily shuttering post offices in 39 Western North Carolina communities. In the immediate term, that means that people in those areas will have difficulty sending and receiving mail, and the USPS will have difficulty processing it. It is hard enough to simply move around.

As Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board in Wake County (which includes the capital, Raleigh) explained on X, any long-term complications with the delivery and mailing of absentee ballots because of Helene could have an impact well outside the storm’s footprint. Residents who have temporarily relocated, or been displaced, or are simply attending college in a different part of the state, for instance, might be counting on a home county in the affected area to mail them an absentee ballot.

It is not a good idea, while people are struggling to access water and other basic supplies, to try to game out what something actually means for the election. (It is mostly a pointless exercise even when they aren’t.) Although absentee voting surged during the pandemic election of 2020, it fell off in 2022 and residents do not rely on mail ballots the way people in, say, Arizona do. But it goes without saying that weeks of delays in violation of state statutes, followed by a once-in-a-century storm, will have simply made things logistically harder for people than they otherwise would have been or should have. 

Residents will have a far shorter window for early voting than they were supposed to have—and that the law says they should have—because of RFK and the state supreme court. That window will now get even shorter because of the storm. Acts of God may be unavoidable, but shameless acts of partisanship are perhaps not.

By the time he endorsed former President Donald Trump in late August, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid had long ceased to be a functioning campaign. He had collapsed in the polls, failed to qualify for the ballot in many states, and basically stopped doing events.

Yet, in death, his campaign found new life—as a way to game the democratic process for his favored candidate.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt.

After dropping out, Kennedy sued to be removed from the ballot in deep red states, and swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, where his presence might take votes away from Trump. But he fought to stay on the ballot in blue states. He continued to encourage people in those places to vote for him for a time, even though he was endorsing Trump. In New York, Kennedy sued to be put back on the ballot. When his effort there was unsuccessful, he appealed to the US Supreme Court—which ruled against him.

One state was happy to accommodate RFK Jr.’s bit of gamesmanship. In North Carolina, a lower court removed Kennedy from the ballot in early September, only for the notoriously partisan North Carolina Supreme Court to step in to “protect voters’ fundamental right to vote their conscience and have that vote count.” The high court ordered the State Board of Elections to restore Kennedy to the ballot. But ballots were already printed. There was also the matter of state law: Early voting by absentee ballot was scheduled to begin on September 6. 

As Mark Joseph Stern explained at Slate, Kennedy had announced that he was suspending his campaign a day after the state’s deadline for removing a candidate from the ballot and only submitted a request to get off the ballot five days after the Trump endorsement. He acted with all the tact and urgency of a man with a dead bear cub in his trunk.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt. It lost two full weeks of early voting because the state supreme court found a special Kennedy Clause in its constitution. 

Finally, after a fairly heroic effort by state and county workers, ballots were set to start being mailed out to in-state voters on September 24. Then, just as the window opened again, Hurricane Helene slammed it shut again.

The storm, which smashed through Florida and southern Appalachia this weekend, caused catastrophic destruction which affected communities are only beginning to take stock of. It washed out roads, knocked out power, killed at least 130 people, and flooded scores of communities. And with that immediate hit, came a number of logistical ripple effects.

Importantly, the US Postal Service announced that it was suspending operations in a number of North Carolina zip codes, and temporarily shuttering post offices in 39 Western North Carolina communities. In the immediate term, that means that people in those areas will have difficulty sending and receiving mail, and the USPS will have difficulty processing it. It is hard enough to simply move around.

As Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board in Wake County (which includes the capital, Raleigh) explained on X, any long-term complications with the delivery and mailing of absentee ballots because of Helene could have an impact well outside the storm’s footprint. Residents who have temporarily relocated, or been displaced, or are simply attending college in a different part of the state, for instance, might be counting on a home county in the affected area to mail them an absentee ballot.

It is not a good idea, while people are struggling to access water and other basic supplies, to try to game out what something actually means for the election. (It is mostly a pointless exercise even when they aren’t.) Although absentee voting surged during the pandemic election of 2020, it fell off in 2022 and residents do not rely on mail ballots the way people in, say, Arizona do. But it goes without saying that weeks of delays in violation of state statutes, followed by a once-in-a-century storm, will have simply made things logistically harder for people than they otherwise would have been or should have. 

Residents will have a far shorter window for early voting than they were supposed to have—and that the law says they should have—because of RFK and the state supreme court. That window will now get even shorter because of the storm. Acts of God may be unavoidable, but shameless acts of partisanship are perhaps not.

On a quiet Saturday morning in June, a few days before their deadline to collect signatures for a referendum to enshrine the right to an abortion in the Arizona Constitution, Sandy Adler and three friends from Stand Indivisible AZ were standing with clipboards and literature by the entrance to a park in Scottsdale, waiting for the last stragglers to come in.

The four women—Adler, Julie Karcis, Sandy Kravetz, and Barrie Stachel—had been hitting up acquaintances and staking out friendly businesses for months. After the state supreme court reinstated an 1864 territorial law that banned abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, Stachel brought her petition sheets to a house party and collected 25 signatures in half an hour. When Adler showed up at a coffee shop where they often gathered signatures on Sundays, there was a line of people waiting to sign. She kept a stack of petitions in her car, just in case, she told me. Karcis, a notary public, had begun making house calls to bring forms directly to supporters who could not otherwise meet up. 

“We go where the signature is,” Adler said.

By the final weekend, they were running into the sort of problem that any organizer would be glad to have: So many people had already signed that it was becoming harder to find people who hadn’t. In July, Arizona for Abortion Access, the non-partisan coalition that’s leading the referendum campaign, showed up at the secretary of state’s office with 823,685 signed petitions—a record for a citizen-led ballot initiative in Arizona, and well more than double the threshold to get on the ballot. (To put that number in perspective, it’s nearly two-thirds of Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs’ winning vote haul two years ago.)

“[Republicans] are going to try and pull shady maneuvers and scams to get their way. We know to expect the unexpected when it comes to our opposition. We are seeing them out lying about what the measure does, and we’ve seen that in other states.”

The crew from Stand Indivisible was one small part of a movement of more than 7,000 volunteers who fanned out across the state after the campaign kicked off last August. They camped out at tattoo parlors, bookstores, and trailheads; a climbing gym; a crystal shop; and even, organizers boasted, a bunco club for retirees in Bullhead City. The stakes are huge in a state of more than 7 million people, where the repeal of the territorial law this spring left a newer 15 week-ban on the books, and exceptions only for medical emergencies. If Proposition 139, which guarantees the right to an abortion until the point of fetal viability, passes in November, Arizona will become at least the fifth state to adopt such protections by popular vote since the US Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade in 2022.

But the ballot measure could also have ripple effects in the state’s volatile politics. Abortion is likely to play a significant role in the fight for control of the state legislature, where Republicans hold both chambers by one-seat margins, and Democrats are aiming to capitalize on a groundswell of voter enthusiasm for the amendment. Donald Trump has claimed that, in jettisoning Roe, the Supreme Court had merely freed states to experiment with the laws that best fit. Arizona offers a glimpse of what that looks like on the ground: A determined grassroots movement is taking the initiative to restore a constitutional right—while restrictionists, after finally winning the prize they always wanted, have thrown everything at the wall to try to stop them.

Arizona’s abortion politics has shifted dramatically over the last few years, as years of hard-line conservative governance clashed with post-Roe electoral realities. Not long before the Dobbs ruling in 2022, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law banning all abortions after 15 weeks, with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. But the state had never repealed the earlier law from 1864, which banned all abortions, period, except to save the life of the mother. That law was unconstitutional under Roe. But after Dobbs, many Republicans wanted it enforced. Kari Lake, the 2022 nominee for governor who is now the party’s candidate for US Senate, called it a “great law” and believed that Arizona would be “paving the way and setting course for other states to follow.”

Instead, the state supreme court granted an injunction that blocked the 1864 law for nearly two years. When the state supreme court finally upheld the territorial law this spring and the near-total ban went into effect, abortion opponents flailed. Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court had made the law constitutional again, said he was opposed to it. Lake said she was now against the law, denied she had ever supported it, and sometimes still sounded like she was for it. Republicans in the legislature initially blocked efforts to overturn the statute—even gaveling out of session to avoid taking up a repeal bill. Eventually, the legislature did throw out the old law, but with almost every Republican voting against it. By making the 15-week ban the standalone law, they managed to produce an outcome that plenty of Republican leaders claimed they wanted, but which rank-and-file members had mostly opposed at every step of the way.

“I think that if the last couple of months have demonstrated anything to Arizona voters, it is that politicians and judges cannot be entrusted with this very important issue,” Cheryl Bruce, campaign manager for Arizona for Abortion Access, told me, when we met at the group’s office above a coffee shop in Phoenix.

“There is still an extreme ban on the books, and there will be an extreme ban here in Arizona until we pass this ballot measure.”

Supporters of abortion rights briefly tried to gather signatures for a ballot initiative in 2022, but the short timeline between the Dobbs ruling and the midterms doomed the effort. A coalition of major groups including Planned Parenthood, the Latino organizing powerhouse Living United for Change Arizona (LUCHA), and SEIU affiliate Healthcare Rising, committed millions of dollars to get a proper campaign underway in 2023. But as reproductive rights referenda won big in places like Ohio and Michigan, opponents have stepped up their efforts to stop them.

“They are going to try and pull shady maneuvers and scams to get their way,” Bruce predicted in June. “We know to expect the unexpected when it comes to our opposition. We are seeing them out lying about what the measure does, and we’ve seen that in other states. But ultimately voters, I think, can discern what is and is not true and support this issue very broadly.”

Anti-abortion Republicans in Arizona have tried a variety of methods to defeat the referendum. The Arizona Mirror reported in April that Republicans in the legislature were considering putting their own, far more restrictive abortion referendum on the ballot that would be in competition with the citizen-led initiative. A group called It Goes Too Far, which is backed by the right-wing Center for Arizona Policy, led a “Decline to Sign” campaign during the signature drive, with little success. After the signature deadline, the anti-abortion organization Arizona Right to Life sued to stop the referendum from appearing on the ballot, arguing, unsuccessfully, that the law’s wording “misrepresents the initiative’s effect.” And in perhaps the most cynical twist, a Republican-dominated legislative committee, which was responsible for drafting “impartial summaries” of ballot initiatives for voter guides, used the term “unborn human beings” to describe fetuses. A Maricopa County court forced the panel to change its wording in July, but last month, the state supreme court ruled that the language could remain. 

The attempts to undercut the abortion-rights amendment have coincided with a broader effort to make it harder for organizers to get citizen-driven initiatives on the ballot in future elections, after a wave of successes in recent years that raised the minimum wage, and guaranteeing in-state tuition for non-citizens. Another voter question this year, which was placed on the ballot by Republican legislators, would require organizers for proposed constitutional amendments to collect signatures from at least 15 percent of the gubernatorial electorate in each legislative district. Currently, organizers are required to collect the equivalent of 15 percent of the statewide electorate, but without regard to individual districts.

The Arizona referendum is officially non-partisan. The recent successes in Michigan and Ohio—and the defeat of anti-abortion measures in deep-red Kansas and Kentucky—suggest an undercurrent of support for reproductive rights that often cuts across political affiliation. And Arizona is not the only state with an abortion amendment on the ballot this fall. Voters have a chance to guarantee a right to abortion until viability in Nebraska (which currently bans abortions after 12 weeks), and Florida and Missouri (which currently ban abortion entirely). In South Dakota, which also has a total ban, a referendum would restore abortion access for the first trimester, with some exceptions in the second trimester.

Bruce believes that in a notoriously purple state like Arizona, supporters “have a more expansive opportunity here to really run the margin up on what any partisan candidate is going to be able to achieve.” 

A recent survey from Fox News found that voters approved of the Arizona amendment by a three-to-one margin—with 50 percent of Republicans saying they’d vote for it. But that surge in support among Republicans and independents who often support them has not bled over into the ranks of Republican elected officials. While a handful of Republicans broke ranks to repeal the territorial law, no Republican legislator has so far come out in support of the measure to protect abortion until viability. In fact, one of the three Republican votes for repeal in the state house, Tim Dunn, argued in a statement at the time that scrapping the territorial statute was necessary in order to stop the referendum from passing:

“Should this pre-Roe law remain in effect, I firmly believe more lives will be lost over time. The public backlash would result in codifying disturbing and unlimited abortions in the Arizona Constitution, which is something that I cannot allow to happen.”

Democrats, who ran hard against abortion restrictions in 2022 and defeated the author of the 15-week abortion ban in a key swing district, see an opportunity to draw a clear partisan line. The party is hammering the issue in nearly a dozen targeted races across the state. When I dropped by a local Democratic field office in a Phoenix shopping center earlier this year, a few dozen volunteers crowded into the space for a morning canvas tied to the anniversary of the Dobbs decision. There were signs on the wall of the cramped front room for the ballot question, and stacks of clipboards for Deborah Howard, a Democrat running for state house in a key swing district, with scripts advising volunteers to bring up the issue.

“When I was collecting signatures to get on the ballot, my spiel was, ‘Hi, I’m Deborah Howard, and I’m running to be your representative at the state capitol, and I have the Arizona Abortion Access Initiative—would you like to sign it?,’” she told me. “And people ran out the door. That’s when they unlocked their screen door. They came out, they signed the initiative, and once they were done with that, they would look at me, and they’d go ‘And what are you doing? And who are you?’ 

One of the unknown variables was how the legislature’s repeal of the near-total 1864 ban would affect the campaign. The campaign for a tossup state senate seat in LD2, which extends through the suburbs north of Phoenix, offers a test case. There Judy Schwiebert, a Democratic state representative, is facing the incumbent Republican, Shawnna Bolick, who cast a vote to repeal the 1864 law but also gave a floor speech asking voters not to sign petitions for the initiative, signed onto an amicus brief calling for Roe to be overturned, and co-sponsored a 2021 bill that would have made abortion a capital crime. (In a twist, Bolick’s husband, Clint, is a state supreme court justice who had sided with the majority in voting to uphold the territorial ban.) 

Schwiebert told me she was “concerned that when we repealed it, that that would take the air out of the issue.” 

But so far, that hasn’t come to pass, she said—because while voters wanted the legislature to repeal the law, they really wanted abortion to be out of the legislature’s hands. 

“I have found that people at doors don’t want this to be a political issue,” Schwiebert said. “They want this to be an issue that is protected in our Constitution….They’ve seen it be a political football for too long, they want it to be a personal decision.”

On Wednesday night, as prosecutors prepared to unveil a five-count criminal indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting and receiving illegal foreign campaign contributions and doing favors for the government of Turkey, the first-term Democrat released a statement accusing investigators of a vast conspiracy of their own.

“When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system,” Adams said, in a taped address recorded somewhere in Gracie Mansion, he “put the people of New York before party and politics.” The investigation and subsequent criminal charges, Adams implied, were an act of retribution from on high. “I have been facing these lies for months,” he said, “since I began to speak out for all of you.”

Adams—who has proclaimed his innocence of all charges—suggested he was being prosecuted by the Biden regime, in other words, simply because he spoke the truth about immigration.

That is false at the most elemental level. According to the New York Times, the investigation began before Adams was mayor, “and continued in secret until this past fall.” Adams’ big break with the Biden administration over the migrant crisis—which ultimately led to him traveling to Mexico to encourage residents to stop coming to “Puebla York”—came well after he took office. (At first, Adams preferred to criticize Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for busing tens of thousands of migrants to the city, although Abbott did not actually start sending buses until after Adams had incorrectly blamed him for it.) 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story.

To the extent the investigation and the city’s handling of the influx of migrants are linked at all, it is in the way that Adams’ focus on the investigation has directly affected his ability to do his job. When the FBI raided his fundraiser’s home last November, Adams was on his way to a long-awaited meeting at the White House. According to the indictment, the aide placed five phone calls to the mayor before answering her door. Adams canceled his White House meeting and returned to New York to manage the fallout.

Still, a lack of factual foundation has never stopped the New York Post, which laundered Adams’ excuse with the splashed words “I am a target” in extra-large print on its cover.

Others have since picked up the Adams line. “It sounds like if you don’t fall in line with the Biden family or this White House or this administration or the top Democrats, your life can be ruined,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox and Friends on Thursday, conveniently eliding the Justice Department’s recent prosecution of the President Biden’s son.

Trump-backing hedge funder Bill Ackman, never one to say nothing when saying something is an option, expressed his support for Adams’ “bravery” on immigration and added, “I am that much more skeptical when indictments are announced against someone whose views are not welcomed by the party in charge.”

On Thursday night, at a press conference at Trump Tower, Trump himself made the comparison as directly as he could. Per Politico:

I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city, and the federal government should pay us, and we shouldn’t have to take them. And I said: You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year. And I was exactly right. Because that’s what we have—we have people that use the Justice Department and the FBI at levels that have never been seen before.

This is not correct in almost any way. For one thing, many of the migrants that Adams has complained about have come to the United States as asylum seekers. Their particular legal status has made the job more logistically difficult for bureaucrats. But Trump is driving at something important: The Adams indictment is a particularly sour one for the right because the story Adams has been telling for more than a year is one that many conservatives are betting their electoral fortunes on in 2024.

Although Adams is a Democrat who has endorsed Harris, he represents something powerful for the MAGA movement—a leader of a diverse and largely Democratic-voting city who turned into JD Vance when faced with an influx of migrants. Like Vance, Adams has said that newcomers are driving up violent crime in a community where violent crime has actually been going down. Like Vance, he has treated the arrival of migrants as an existential threat to a way of life. If the arrival of new residents did not slow, he said at a town hall last year, they “will destroy New York.” Adams is the highest-profile case of what these conservative really believe—that once you experience what they’ve experienced, you’ll realize what they realize. It’s that old Barry Goldwater saying: Deep down, you know he’s right. 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story—one that also says something important about this political moment. Because so many of its biggest figures have themselves been indicted, the MAGA movement requires a tortured logic to keep going. When the state is coming after you for civil or criminal offenses, it must be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something right. This belief in a vast conspiracy is the bedrock of Trump’s third campaign.

But the Adams indictment—like many of the lawsuits and criminal cases that Trump has ended up as the defendant in—actually suggests a far less paranoid alternative: When the state is coming after you for accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of favors from a company controlled by the Turkish government, it might be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something wrong.

The problem for Trump, and Adams, is that lots of people see through this. You don’t have to conjure up images of a plotting and sinister Joe Biden to figure out why the mayor who asked to be paid in Bitcoin, got city jobs for his friends and family, and spent much of his waking hours holding court in the back of a restaurant ended up in someone’s legal crosshairs. From the day he took office—31 years after God told him he would—Adams has walked around with a big flashing sign saying “investigate me.” No one was really surprised the indictment happened. People were placing bets on when it would drop. Adams might still beat the charges, or turn up exculpatory evidence—perhaps after he remembers the six-digit passcode to that cellphone the feds seized way back when. But there’s no point casting around for a sinister explanation if he doesn’t. Because despite what Adams and Trump might say, sometimes a crook is just a crook—and a crime is just a crime.

On Wednesday night, as prosecutors prepared to unveil a five-count criminal indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting and receiving illegal foreign campaign contributions and doing favors for the government of Turkey, the first-term Democrat released a statement accusing investigators of a vast conspiracy of their own.

“When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system,” Adams said, in a taped address recorded somewhere in Gracie Mansion, he “put the people of New York before party and politics.” The investigation and subsequent criminal charges, Adams implied, were an act of retribution from on high. “I have been facing these lies for months,” he said, “since I began to speak out for all of you.”

Adams—who has now proclaimed his innocence of all charges—suggested he was being prosecuted by the Biden regime, in other words, simply because he spoke the truth about immigration.

That is false at the most elemental level. According to the New York Times, the investigation began before Adams was mayor, “and continued in secret until this past fall.” Adams’ big break with the Biden administration over the migrant crisis—which ultimately led to him traveling to Mexico to encourage residents to stop coming to “Puebla York”—came well after he took office. (At first, Adams preferred to criticize Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for bussing tens of thousands of migrants to the city, although Abbott did not actually start sending buses until after Adams had incorrectly blamed him for it.) 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story.

To the extent the investigation and the city’s handling of the influx of migrants are linked at all, it is in the way that Adams’ focus on the investigation has directly affected his ability to do his job. When the FBI raided his fundraiser’s home last November, Adams was on his way to a long-awaited meeting at the White House. According to the indictment, the aide placed five phone calls to the mayor before answering her door. Adams canceled his White House meeting and returned to New York to manage the fallout.

Still, a lack of factual foundation has never stopped the New York Post, which laundered Adams’ excuse with the splashed words “I am a target” in extra-large print on its cover.

Others have since picked up the Adams line. “It sounds like if you don’t fall in line with the Biden family or this White House or this administration or the top Democrats, your life can be ruined,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox and Friends on Thursday, conveniently eliding the Justice Department’s recent prosecution of the President Biden’s son.

Trump-backing hedge-funder Bill Ackman, never one to say nothing when saying something is an option, expressed his support for Adams’ “bravery” on immigration and added, “I am that much more skeptical when indictments are announced against someone whose views are not welcomed by the party in charge.”

On Thursday night, at a press conference at Trump Tower, Trump himself made the comparison as directly as he could. Per Politico:

I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city, and the federal government should pay us, and we shouldn’t have to take them. And I said: You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year. And I was exactly right. Because that’s what we have—we have people that use the Justice Department and the FBI at levels that have never been seen before.

This is not correct in almost any way. For one thing, many of the migrants that Adams has complained about have come to the United States as asylum seekers. Their particular legal status has made the job more logistically difficult for bureaucrats. But Trump is driving at something important: The Adams indictment is a particularly sour one for the right because the story Adams has been telling for more than a year is one that many conservatives are betting their electoral fortunes on in 2024.

Although Adams is a Democrat who has endorsed Harris, he represents something powerful for the MAGA movement—a leader of a diverse and largely Democratic-voting city who turned into JD Vance when faced with an influx of migrants. Like Vance, Adams has said that newcomers are driving up violent crime in a community where violent crime has actually been going down. Like Vance, he has treated the arrival of migrants as an existential threat to a way of life. If the arrival of new residents did not slow, he said at a town hall last year, they “will destroy New York.” Adams is the highest-profile case of what these conservative really believe—that once you experience what they’ve experienced, you’ll realize what they realize. It’s that old Barry Goldwater saying: Deep down, you know he’s right. 

Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story—one that also says something important about this political moment. Because so many of its biggest figures have themselves been indicted, the MAGA movement requires a tortured logic to keep going. When the state is coming after you for civil or criminal offenses, it must be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something right. This belief in a vast conspiracy is the bedrock of Trump’s third campaign.

But the Adams indictment—like many of the lawsuits and criminal cases that Trump has ended up as the defendant in—actually suggests a far less paranoid alternative: When the state is coming after you for accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of favors from a company controlled by the Turkish government, it might be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something wrong.

The problem for Trump, and Adams, is that lots of people see through this. You don’t have to conjure up images of a plotting and sinister Joe Biden to figure out why the mayor who asked to be paid in Bitcoin, got city jobs for his friends and family, and spent much of his waking hours holding court in the back of a restaurant ended up in someone’s legal crosshairs. From the day he took office—31 years after God told him he would—Adams has walked around with a big flashing sign saying “investigate me.” No one was really surprised the indictment happened. People were placing bets on when it would drop. Adams might still beat the charges, or turn up exculpatory evidence—perhaps after he remembers the six-digit passcode to that cell phone the Feds seized way back when. But there’s no point casting around for a sinister explanation if he doesn’t. Because despite what Adams and Trump might say, sometimes a crook is just a crook—and a crime is just a crime.

Not long after Eric Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in June 2021, a lot of people who are paid to be smart about such things began to speculate about what was next. 

A Wall Street Journal columnist asked if “Manchin-Adams” was “the future of the Democratic party.” Bret Stephens predicted in the New York Times that “Eric Adams is going to save New York.” Lis Smith, the oft-quoted Democratic consultant, told Politico he was “a voice we really need in the Democratic Party right now.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invited Adams to speak to the group to offer messaging tips. President Joe Biden invited him to the White House, and Ron Klain, the president’s then-chief-of-staff, told a reporter their campaigns were “not dissimilar.” Adams called himself “the Biden of Brooklyn.”

Columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects.

“It’s probably foolish to think a NYC mayor will successfully translate into being a national political figure, but I still think Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden?’” Nate Silver wrote on Twitter in 2022.

“He’s going to be good at getting media attention,” Silver continued, “and he has a chance of carving out a niche that’s different from what other Democrats are offering.”

Well, he’s certainly carved out a niche. On Thursday, after months of intensifying speculation, federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced that Adams had been indicted on five counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams has proclaimed his innocence and has vowed to stay in office while he fights the charges. But we’re now long past the point of anyone talking about his presidential prospects. 

Adams was a convenient figure in 2021 and early 2022—not because of what he actually represented, but because of what they imagined he forestalled. The Biden set, who harbored chips on their shoulders from the 2020 presidential primary—when the Times had endorsed two different senators instead of him—saw a chance to stick it to the elitist progressives who had scorned him, and re-stake their claim as the true tribunes of the Democrats base. People who believed that the protests against police had simply gone too far, saw, in the elevation of an ex-Republican ex-cop, a chance to restore the natural balance of power.

There was always a lot of projection to this picture of Adams. In the general election, he had faced token opposition from a Republican who lived in a studio apartment with 15 cats; it was not clear why Democrats who were arguing over how to beat Republicans should fixate on a Democrat who had never really had to.

The mayoral primary was hardly the proxy contest that national Democrats wanted it to be, either. Adams prevailed by a few thousand votes in a ranked-choice election over a moderate sanitation commissioner. It was an interesting election if you were interested in urban politics, the growing divide between homeowners and renters, the enduring influence of the New York Post, and the voting trends of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and outer-borough Chinese-American small-business owners. But the politics of an election in a one-party city did not neatly map onto Super Tuesday—and Eric Adams was hardly the champion anyone claimed.

According to the indictment, Adams’ alleged corruption dated back to his time as Brooklyn borough president, when he “began building relationships with foreign nationals who were seeking to influence him.” While the depth and details of his alleged entanglement with foreign moneymen was not known during the campaign, the idea that Adams’ relationships with unseemly businesspeople and fixers would lead to his downfall was always there. It wasn’t exactly a huge shock that this is who Eric Adams was. Even Andrew Yang saw this coming:

My opponent has achieved the rare trifecta of being investigated for corruption at the city, state, and federal levels. New Yorkers want a clean break from the politics of the past and we will elect new leadership, indebted only to the people, on June 22. #NYCMayoralDebate pic.twitter.com/OUGKUJWUep

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) June 3, 2021

Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Adams’ three years of governance is that there is, at the moment, astonishingly little New York City government to speak of. The police commissioner resigned in September amid an investigation related to nightclubs. The feds just raided the offices of his interim replacement. Two former fire chiefs were just indicted. The schools chief announced his forthcoming resignation less than a month into the school year, after the FBI seized his phones. The sheriff is being investigated. The city’s chief counsel recently resigned. The health commissioner stepped down. The libraries were part-time for a year because Adams invented a recession. The mayor seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time personally scuttling minor neighborhood improvements with the help of his top-deputy—a vocal opponent (like Adams) of the separation of church and state who has claimed, somewhat plausibly, to have not ridden the subway in 40 years. Basic services don’t work anymore. Adams gave a key to the city to Diddy. In 2023.

The only people who really ate good in Adams’ New York were the cops. The NYPD’s communications department doubled to a whopping 86 staffers, who got to work churning out low-budget Michael Bay films about their raids on student protesters. Police overtime for subway patrol went from $4 million when Adams took office to $155 million. He returned a sense of impunity to the force. Recently, he praised the NYPD for its “restraint” after a cop shot another cop at a subway station, along with three other people—one of whom now has brain damage.

As it happens, columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects for their own causes. The idea that Adams might someday run for president features prominently in the unsealed indictment. During one of his frequent trips to Istanbul, according to prosecutors, an unnamed Turkish businessman agreed to illegally donate at least $50,000 to Adams’ mayoral campaign, “believing that ADAMS might one day be President of the United States and hoping to gain influence.” (Those contributions ultimately fell through, after the businessman’s “legal troubles in Turkey and the United States became more public.”)

The people hyping Eric Adams as the future were always selling a bill of goods. We just didn’t realize it was so literal.

Not long after Eric Adams won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in June 2021, a lot of people who are paid to be smart about such things began to speculate about what was next. 

A Wall Street Journal columnist asked if “Manchin-Adams” was “the future of the Democratic party.” Bret Stephens predicted in the New York Times that “Eric Adams is going to save New York.” Lis Smith, the oft-quoted Democratic consultant, told Politico he was “a voice we really need in the Democratic Party right now.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invited Adams to speak to the group to offer messaging tips. President Joe Biden invited him to the White House, and Ron Klain, the president’s then-chief-of-staff, told a reporter their campaigns were “not dissimilar.” Adams called himself “the Biden of Brooklyn.”

Columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects.

“It’s probably foolish to think a NYC mayor will successfully translate into being a national political figure, but I still think Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden?’” Nate Silver wrote on Twitter in 2022.

“He’s going to be good at getting media attention,” Silver continued, “and he has a chance of carving out a niche that’s different from what other Democrats are offering.”

Well, he’s certainly carved out a niche. On Thursday, after months of intensifying speculation, federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced that Adams had been indicted on five counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams has proclaimed his innocence and has vowed to stay in office while he fights the charges. But we’re now long past the point of anyone talking about his presidential prospects. 

Adams was a convenient figure in 2021 and early 2022—not because of what he actually represented, but because of what they imagined he forestalled. The Biden set, who harbored chips on their shoulders from the 2020 presidential primary—when the Times had endorsed two different senators instead of him—saw a chance to stick it to the elitist progressives who had scorned him, and re-stake their claim as the true tribunes of the Democrats base. People who believed that the protests against police had simply gone too far, saw, in the elevation of an ex-Republican ex-cop, a chance to restore the natural balance of power.

There was always a lot of projection to this picture of Adams. In the general election, he had faced token opposition from a Republican who lived in a studio apartment with 15 cats; it was not clear why Democrats who were arguing over how to beat Republicans should fixate on a Democrat who had never really had to.

The mayoral primary was hardly the proxy contest that national Democrats wanted it to be, either. Adams prevailed by a few thousand votes in a ranked-choice election over a moderate sanitation commissioner. It was an interesting election if you were interested in urban politics, the growing divide between homeowners and renters, the enduring influence of the New York Post, and the voting trends of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and outer-borough Chinese-American small-business owners. But the politics of an election in a one-party city did not neatly map onto Super Tuesday—and Eric Adams was hardly the champion anyone claimed.

According to the indictment, Adams’ alleged corruption dated back to his time as Brooklyn borough president, when he “began building relationships with foreign nationals who were seeking to influence him.” While the depth and details of his alleged entanglement with foreign moneymen was not known during the campaign, the idea that Adams’ relationships with unseemly businesspeople and fixers would lead to his downfall was always there. It wasn’t exactly a huge shock that this is who Eric Adams was. Even Andrew Yang saw this coming:

My opponent has achieved the rare trifecta of being investigated for corruption at the city, state, and federal levels. New Yorkers want a clean break from the politics of the past and we will elect new leadership, indebted only to the people, on June 22. #NYCMayoralDebate pic.twitter.com/OUGKUJWUep

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) June 3, 2021

Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Adams’ three years of governance is that there is, at the moment, astonishingly little New York City government to speak of. The police commissioner resigned in September amid an investigation related to nightclubs. The feds just raided the offices of his interim replacement. Two former fire chiefs were just indicted. The schools chief announced his forthcoming resignation less than a month into the school year, after the FBI seized his phones. The sheriff is being investigated. The city’s chief counsel recently resigned. The health commissioner stepped down. The libraries were part-time for a year because Adams invented a recession. The mayor seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time personally scuttling minor neighborhood improvements with the help of his top-deputy—a vocal opponent (like Adams) of the separation of church and state who has claimed, somewhat plausibly, to have not ridden the subway in 40 years. Basic services don’t work anymore. Adams gave a key to the city to Diddy. In 2023.

The only people who really ate good in Adams’ New York were the cops. The NYPD’s communications department doubled to a whopping 86 staffers, who got to work churning out low-budget Michael Bay films about their raids on student protesters. Police overtime for subway patrol went from $4 million when Adams took office to $155 million. He returned a sense of impunity to the force. Recently, he praised the NYPD for its “restraint” after a cop shot another cop at a subway station, along with three other people—one of whom now has brain damage.

As it happens, columnists and politicos weren’t the only people trading on Adams’ future political prospects for their own causes. The idea that Adams might someday run for president features prominently in the unsealed indictment. During one of his frequent trips to Istanbul, according to prosecutors, an unnamed Turkish businessman agreed to illegally donate at least $50,000 to Adams’ mayoral campaign, “believing that ADAMS might one day be President of the United States and hoping to gain influence.” (Those contributions ultimately fell through, after the businessman’s “legal troubles in Turkey and the United States became more public.”)

The people hyping Eric Adams as the future were always selling a bill of goods. We just didn’t realize it was so literal.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.”

The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works.

It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed.

Like a lot of unfathomably wealthy people who have the resources to harvest their own beef, Zuckerberg now reportedly considers himself a “libertarian.” He has spent a lot of time in recent years attempting to cultivate a personal brand as a sort of happy-go-lucky #GirlDad. His new politics are not as ominous or viscerally off-putting as the red-pilled divorced energy of Elon Musk. But they are a politics. Deciding that you no longer want to advocate for a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform is as political as the act of advocating for it was. Responding to years of conspiracy theories and personal attacks from conservative politicians by cultivating closer relationships with them is a political tactic. According to the report, Zuckerberg twice talked to Donald Trump by phone this summer, while his new Republican political attache has sought to reassure the ex-president that Zuckerberg has no plans to spend money shoring up election infrastructure this year. It does not really get more political than a pleasant phone call with a man who tried a coup.

Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview. In that sense, at least, he and Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a “digital public square” where you can find everything but reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech—including criticism of him.

The truth is there is no such thing as an apolitical oligarch. Zuckerberg’s fortune came from a monopolistic enterprise that’s been used to foment ethnic cleansing and collectively unlearn a century-and-a-half of germ theory. His wealth is sustained and protected by political structures, and his spending and strategic priorities can make or break communities, newsrooms, and democratic norms. When he puts his foot down, you notice it. But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of the world’s richest men had recently experienced a major epiphany. After bankrolling a political organization that supported immigration reform, espousing his support for social justice, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support local election workers during the 2020 election, “Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.”

The Facebook founder and part-time Hawaiian feudal lord, according to the piece, “believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company,” and felt burned by the criticism he has faced in recent years, on everything from the proliferation of disinformation on Facebook to his investment in election administration (which conservatives dismissively referred to as “Zuckerbucks”). He is mad, in other words, that people are mad at him, and it has made him rethink his entire theory of how the world works.

It’s an interesting piece, which identifies a real switch in how Zuckerberg—who along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, has made a non-binding pledge to give away a majority of his wealth by the end of his lifetime—thinks about his influence and his own ideology. But there’s a fallacy underpinning that headline: Zuckerberg isn’t done with politics. His politics have simply changed.

Like a lot of unfathomably wealthy people who have the resources to harvest their own beef, Zuckerberg now reportedly considers himself a “libertarian.” He has spent a lot of time in recent years attempting to cultivate a personal brand as a sort of happy-go-lucky #GirlDad. His new politics are not as ominous or viscerally off-putting as the red-pilled divorced energy of Elon Musk. But they are a politics. Deciding that you no longer want to advocate for a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform is as political as the act of advocating for it was. Responding to years of conspiracy theories and personal attacks from conservative politicians by cultivating closer relationships with them is a political tactic. According to the report, Zuckerberg twice talked to Donald Trump by phone this summer, while his new Republican political attache has sought to reassure the ex-president that Zuckerberg has no plans to spend money shoring up election infrastructure this year. It does not really get more political than a pleasant phone call with a man who tried a coup.

Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per the piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Attempting to mute or disincentivize political speech is, of course, a political act, and it betrays an ominous worldview. In that sense, at least, he and Musk aren’t so different; they’re collectively building a “digital public square” where you can find everything but reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated with specific kinds of political speech—including criticism of him.

The truth is there is no such thing as an apolitical oligarch. Zuckerberg’s fortune came from a monopolistic enterprise that’s been used to foment ethnic cleansing and collectively unlearn a century-and-a-half of germ theory. His wealth is sustained and protected by political structures, and his spending and strategic priorities can make or break communities, newsrooms, and democratic norms. When he puts his foot down, you notice it. But when he lifts his foot up, you notice that too.

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.

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.