Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.

Called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, the bill initially was introduced with broad bipartisan support. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, many Democrats flipped, fearing the incoming administration would use the bill not to stop terrorism, but to kneecap Trump’s political enemies.

Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.

Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.

“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.” 

“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.

On Tuesday, exactly two weeks after the November 5 election, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina reconvened in Raleigh, ostensibly to pass disaster relief for areas affected by Hurricane Helene. But, with no public notice, they snuck provisions into the bill stripping power from the state’s incoming Democratic governor and attorney general and dramatically changing how elections are administered. The bill passed the state House Tuesday night, just hours after it was publicly released, and is expected to be approved by the state Senate on Wednesday.

“It’s a massive power grab,” says Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina for the People Action. “They didn’t like what happened in the election, and they want to overturn the will of the people. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.”

Though Trump carried North Carolina, Democrats won five statewide offices—governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and school superintendent. They narrowly lead in a pivotal state Supreme Court race that is headed to a recount.

Democrats also broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state legislature, which they had held due to extreme gerrymandering. This means that unlike in previous sessions, come January, Republicans will no longer be able to override the vetoes of the state’s incoming Democratic governor, Josh Stein, who easily defeated scandal-plagued Republican candidate Lieutenant Gov. Mark Robinson.

So, in a lame-duck session, Republicans preemptively stripped power from these Democratic officials before they are sworn in.

Most notably, the bill prevents the governor from appointing members of the state election board and transfers that authority to the state auditor, who, for the first time in more than a decade, is a Republican. Under North Carolina law, the governor, a position held by Democrat Roy Cooper for the past eight years, appoints a majority of members on the state election board and county election boards. The auditor will now have that authority, giving Republicans the power to appoint majorities on the state board and 100 county election boards.

These appointments will likely have major ramifications for elections in the state. The state board administers elections and issues guidance to county officials, who in turn have the power to decide where polling places go and the number of early voting locations. In addition, both the county and state boards must certify election outcomes. That raises the possibility that the new bill will enable Republicans to cut back on voting access and refuse to certify election results should a Democrat narrowly win. Price Kromm noted that the bill was introduced only one day after results showed Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs leading her GOP opponent by just 623 votes after trailing by more than 10,000 votes on election night.

“Legislators have put forward a bill that fails to provide real support to communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene and instead prioritizes more power grabs in Raleigh,” Cooper said in a statement.

For years, Republicans have been trying to prevent Democratic governors from appointing a majority of election board members, but they have repeatedly been blocked by voters and the courts. So now they have bypassed the precedent and handed the power over to the state auditor—a position with no expertise or previous authority in elections.

“This makes no logical sense other than he has an R next to his name.”

“No other state has that,” says Price Kromm. “This makes no logical sense other than he has an R next to his name.”

Other Democratic officials will also see their power stripped under the new legislation. The bill prevents the state’s incoming attorney general, Jeff Jackson, from filing lawsuits that contradict the positions of the legislature or joining lawsuits that originate in other states or with private actors, which state attorneys general frequently do.

The bill also changes the composition of the state courts. It eliminates two judicial seats held by judges who ruled against the legislature in voting rights cases and creates two new judicial positions that will be appointed by the GOP legislature. And, it specifies that the governor can only fill judicial vacancies with members of the same party, which would prevent Stein from appointing a Democratic judge to fill the position of an outgoing Republican judge.

This is not the first time Republicans have convened a lame-duck session to strip power from Democrats—and not just in North Carolina. They did so when Cooper beat Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, preventing him from appointing members to boards of University of North Carolina schools, restricting the number of state employees he could hire or fire, and subjecting all of his nominations to confirmation by the GOP-controlled state Senate, which was not previously required.  

Back in 2018, after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers defeated Republican Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Republicans also held a lame-duck session before Christmas to strip Evers of power and pass new laws making it harder to vote. Democrats called it a soft coup, and Evers viewed it as a precursor to the January 6 insurrection. “There hasn’t been a peaceful transition of power,” he told me.

The latest power grab in North Carolina could foreshadow the next few years in Washington under GOP control—and how the Republican Party’s antidemocratic tendencies have become more institutionalized, going much deeper than Trump. As Price Kromm puts it, “It’s batshit crazy down here right now.”

Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power.

In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.”

“I’ve said many times,” he continued, “you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.”

The remarks, both unifying and a call for calm, sharply contrasted with the Trump campaign’s rhetoric in the final stretch of the election, which included Trump just this weekend saying he would be “ok” with journalists being shot at. Biden’s speech was also radically different from the near-constant conspiracy theories Trump and his allies promoted after Trump lost the 2020 election—which, as recently as today, he has continued to insist he won.

President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Sz pic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2024

Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said. Of course, now that Trump has won, the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night.

The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.”

“The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.”

Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday. “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results.

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”

The dual speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris’ and Biden’s post-election remarks reminded Americans what leadership looks like: recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As Americans cast their votes in an election dominated by debates over inflation and the cost of living, a ballot measure in Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state is dividing the Democratic Party on the issue of how to address skyrocketing rents.

Proposition 33—dubbed the Justice for Renters Act—would repeal the state’s controversial Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which for decades has restricted local governments’ ability to cap rent increases. Currently, Costa-Hawkins blocks counties and cities from imposing rent controls on apartments, condos, and single-family homes built after a certain date—1995 in much of the state, but years earlier in some cities, such as San Francisco. It also prohibits vacancy control, meaning that even landlords who are subject to rent controls can raise rents up to the market rate when a new tenant moves in.

Some cities have already enacted new rent control plans in anticipation of Prop. 33 passing. In October, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve legislation that would expand rent control to approximately 16,000 additional units if the initiative passes. 

In some ways, Prop. 33 is similar to President Joe Biden’s proposal this past summer to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent over the next two years for large landlords who want to obtain federal tax breaks. Two weeks after it was rolled out, speaking to a crowd in Atlanta, Harris appeared to voice support for the president’s plan, vowing to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.” But since then, according to the Nation, she has largely left promises for direct tenant protections out of her public statements. The outlet observed that instead of renters, Harris seemed to be focusing on homeowners, pushing policies like tax incentives for developers to build for first-time homebuyers. 

Harris’ reluctance to embrace rent control may mark a small victory for YIMBYs, the “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing movement that first emerged in San Francisco in the 2010s as a more market-based approach to the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs, many of whom are Democrats, have largely opposed Prop. 33, arguing it would cause new rental construction to grind to a halt. An analysis by California YIMBY, an advocacy group focused on ameliorating the state’s housing shortage, argued that passing the measure “will likely worsen housing affordability by empowering NIMBY jurisdictions to block new housing.” 

NIMBY, a largely pejorative label meaning “not in my backyard,” describes locals who oppose construction and redevelopment in their neighborhoods—ranging variously from affordable housing, to homeless shelters, to luxury condos, to public transportation infrastructure. According to Matthew Lewis, the communications director at California YIMBY, NIMBYs include residents from across the political spectrum. While conservative NIMBYs might oppose new buildings to maintain the status quo or inflate property values in their neighborhoods, many left-aligned NIMBYs strongly oppose market-based development out of fears over gentrification or ideological commitments. Between those poles lies a significant group of mainstream liberal NIMBYs, who, as New York Magazine’s Curbed puts it, “believe in affordable housing until it’s in their neighborhood.” In 2022, Barack Obama called them out, specifically arguing that resistance to “affordable, energy-sustainable, mixed-use and mixed-income communities” contributes to the housing crisis. 

“When you have very right-wing NIMBYs agreeing with left NIMBYs that we should do all the things necessary to prevent more homebuilding, it kind of makes you go, huh?” Lewis said.

For Lewis, the story of a rent-controlled city like San Francisco characterizes the debate. According to the city’s housing plan, about 70 percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-stabilized units, built before June 1979. But this hasn’t helped the affordability crisis, as the percentage of the city’s households who were rent-burdened—that is, who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent—increased by roughly 15 percent from 1990 to 2015 for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the median San Francisco income. And according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Partnership, in 2024, over half of all renters in the state—roughly 3 million residents—are rent-burdened. 

“I think our opponents on the left misconstrue that rent control is this mechanism of broad affordability,” Lewis said. “But what it’s supposed to do is provide stability and security of tenure for lower income tenants. In a city like San Francisco, what you end up with is millionaires living in rent-controlled housing.” 

To get it right, Lewis suggests that the city first has to “unleash a building boom” by constructing housing and renting it out at market rate so developers can recoup investment costs and continue to build. “Then when those buildings become eligible for rent control—after 15 or 20 years—you have this abundant supply of rent-stabilized units because you’ve never stopped building,” he argues. 

Many housing justice advocates reject that argument. In a 2021 article for Housing is a Human Right, a prominent group now backing Prop. 33, Patrick Range McDonald wrote that such market-based strategies resemble the real estate industry’s failed “trickle-down housing policy” that has led to the ongoing crisis. Comparing it to giving tax cuts to the rich, McDonald wrote that “corporate landlords and major developers will generate billions in revenue by charging sky-high rents for market-rate apartments, making massive profits off the backs of the middle and working class.” 

In a May 2024 analysis charging that California YIMBY has sided with corporate landlords to defeat Prop. 33, McDonald wrote that this YIMBY proposal of “filtering” actually “fuels gentrification and displacement in working-class neighborhoods, including communities of color,” since, he says, developers will only build luxury housing to maximize profits. 

For his part, Lewis contends that many of Prop. 33’s leftist supporters are acting in direct opposition to affordability by arguing that only government-funded social housing projects can solve the problem. “I think that this is where YIMBYs really part ways with the left,” he said. “The market can just move substantially faster than the government can, if you let it.” While Lewis concedes that the government should play a substantial role in providing subsidized housing for low-income residents, he says that “you can’t have a functioning system where the government is basically shutting down housing production for most of the market.” 

Rent control, Lewis says, contributes to the housing shortage. He points to New York City, which has an estimated 26,000 older, rent-stabilized units that are empty, according to findings from the 2023 survey, because limits on rent increases make it difficult for landlords to keep up with maintenance costs and building codes. 

The debate is raging among economists, too. A University of Chicago poll found that an overwhelming 81 percent of economists surveyed opposed rent control. But in 2023, 32 prominent economists signed a letter supporting nationwide rent control. The document referred to a 2007 study following rent control policies for 30 years across 76 cities in New Jersey. It found “little to no statistically significant effect of moderate rent controls on new construction.” There is also research connecting housing supply reductions to systemic loopholes, such as exceptions that allow landlords to evict all tenants in a building to convert their rental units into market-rate condos. 

Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, a coalition of local tenant organizations in California, argues that rent control and new development can work in concert. “We fight for housing that folks can afford. Millions and millions of people’s wages simply are not anywhere close to meeting market rates,” Singh says. “We’re fighting for people living in crowded conditions, people who are homeless, and people one step away from being homeless.” 

It’s not tenant advocates but current laws restricting rent control that are the real problem, Singh claims: “Because of Costa-Hawkins, we are actually bleeding the supply of rent-controlled housing that’s affordable at below market rates. That’s a unit that you’ve lost. That’s the supply loss.”

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of nearly one million affordable rental units in California for “extremely low income renters,” or residents who earn less than 30 percent of the state median income. “There’s a huge issue with folks with disabilities on fixed incomes, including seniors, who need accessible housing,” Singh says. They can’t access rent-controlled housing in places like San Francisco because the units are too old to have the necessary accommodations—they’re all constructed before 1979. 

Instead of working on legislation that will solve the affordability crisis, Singh says that many YIMBYs are “leaving a status quo in place that’s untenable” by bringing up “insane hypothetical scenarios.” 

Susie Shannon, the policy director at Housing Is A Human Right—which has put over $46 million into its support for Prop. 33—says Tony Strickland is one of these hypotheticals. Strickland, a conservative city council member in wealthy Huntington Beach, is an example of a NIMBY to many pro-development advocates. YIMBYs argue that he would use rent control laws like Prop. 33, if passed, to circumvent California’s affordable housing mandates by setting unreasonably low rent caps designed to stifle new housing development, according to the Orange County Register. 

Shannon pointed to an op-ed by Strickland, in which the councilman said his words had been taken out of context and affirmed that he has been “a lifelong opponent of rent control.” He clarified that he does support some language in the ballot measure that stops the state from using the court system to block local rent control decisions. Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. 

Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the number one enemy of several California pro-development groups, says the amount of money backing the campaign against Prop. 33—over $120 million according to the Los Angeles Times—is telling. The two largest opposition donors are the California Apartment Association at nearly $89 million and the California Association of Realtors at $22 million.

“What has sucked up a lot of the debate from [Prop 33] opponents is discussing…what impacts rent control has on construction financing,” Preston says. “But what’s really driving the opposition is vacancy control”—the possibility that with the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, local governments would limit the amount a landlord could increase rents between tenants.

Preston believes that without vacancy control, cities are essentially powerless to regulate rents. “That’s why it is worth it for the California Association of Realtors, the California Apartment Association, and the landlord lobby to invest,” he says. 

While more than 650,000 people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night and living without shelter has increasingly become a crime, everyone I talked to maintains that there is a way to solve the housing crisis. 

For Lewis, it’s expanding funding for programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers developers incentives for making a portion of their construction affordable for low-income residents. He also favors upzoning to increase housing density by allowing more multifamily units in areas previously reserved for single-family homes. 

For tenant advocates like Singh and Preston, it’s about the increased dialogue around housing on the national stage, as well as the repeated attempts to create a federal social housing authority.

“I think there’s a sense within the tenant movement in California that it is inevitable at some point that Costa-Hawkins will be repealed because most people support rent control,” Preston says. “I hope Prop. 33 passes, but if it doesn’t, I expect it’ll be back on a future ballot and in future legislative efforts.”

The contrast between the intentions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on reproductive rights could not be clearer—no matter how much Trump tries to suggest otherwise.

Trump appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade and has famously flip-flopped on his stances on abortion. Back in 2016, for example, he briefly floated the idea of punishing women who get abortions, but then, following public outcry even from some anti-abortion groups, his campaign walked that back. At his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last month, he twice refused to say whether or not he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one—and then claimed earlier this month that he would. And in August, Trump appeared to suggest he would vote to expand abortion rights on the ballot measure in Florida, where he maintains his Mar-a-Lago estate and where abortion is currently banned at six weeks’ gestation; just a day later, he reversed course following backlash from the anti-abortion crowd.

Harris, on the other hand, has consistently campaigned as a vocal supporter of abortion rights. She has highlighted the fallout of the overruling of Roe for women in need of abortion care, and warned about the likelihood of Republicans’ passing a national abortion ban if Trump is reelected. In her presidential campaign, she has promised voters her administration would pass a law that would “restore reproductive freedom.”

But there’s a problem, even should she win. Any hope for such a law depends on Democrats winning control of Congress, which looks unlikely. (When confronted about this, Harris has called for ending the filibuster to make it easier for such legislation to pass.) For some advocates, the promises Harris makes also lack any details of what protections she would support and how her policies would move beyond Roe—if at all.

Roe was “the ultimate floor, and not the ceiling, of what we need for making abortion affordable and accessible for all who need it,” Nourbese Flint, president of the advocacy group All* Above All, told me. Under Roe, states were still permitted to restrict abortion access after the point of so-called fetal viability, and it did not protect women from criminalization over their pregnancy outcomes, including when they used abortion pills to end their pregnancies without supervision from a doctor.

Even if Republicans do win Congress, as president, Harris would still have options to protect and expand abortion access—options that appear on a reproductive freedom wish list supported by hundreds of advocates. Several told me that they are still waiting to see more specific details on abortion access and justice policies Harris would support—and they are hoping those details would go beyond restoring Roe. “That is not a useful campaign slogan, to say we’re going to restore the bare minimum,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, author of the new book Liberating Abortion.

(A spokesperson for the Harris campaign did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.)

Despite President Joe Biden’s reluctance as a devout Catholic to express full-throated support for abortion rights, legal experts say his administration has gotten behind measures that have prevented some of the most extreme Republican efforts to further criminalize abortion. Biden’s Department of Justice, for example, issued guidance in December 2022 saying that the Comstock Act—a 19th-century anti-obscenity law—cannot be marshaled to ban the mailing of abortion pills, as Project 2025 and anti-abortion Republicans argue it can.

Rachel Rebouché, Dean of Temple University’s law school and an expert in reproductive rights laws, notes that if right-wing judges—including those on the Supreme Court—ruled that Comstock should be applied to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion, a Harris-run DOJ could simply refuse to prosecute such cases. This is a place, she says, where Harris potentially “has the most power.” Meanwhile, Project 2025 explicitly recommends that the DOJ prosecute those who provide and distribute the pills under a Trump presidency.

Her administration could also continue, and even strengthen, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services attempts to require hospitals—even in states with bans—to provide emergency abortion care when necessary to save the parent’s life or protect their health. Legal challenges took that case to the Supreme Court earlier this year, where the justices ultimately punted on interpreting the federal law’s applicability to abortion care in emergency situations. Project 2025, on the other hand, claims that “EMTALA requires no abortions” and says HHS should stop investigating hospitals that have failed to comply with its interpretation of the law.

Under Biden, the Food and Drug Administration made the two pills used in medication abortion—mifepristone and misoprostol—easier to access by repealing restrictions that required them to be picked up in person. They now can be ordered online and delivered by mail. (As I have reported, this method now accounts for about 1 in 5 abortions nationwide). Under Harris, the FDA could remove even more restrictions that remain on medication abortion—including limits on who can prescribe them—according to Elisa Wells, co-founder of Plan C, a resource that provides information on how to access abortion pills. “All of them need to go,” Wells told me.

While anti-abortion Republicans have baselessly alleged the pills are dangerous, more than 100 scientific studies have confirmed they are overwhelmingly safe and effective—including when they are prescribed virtually and mailed. The FDA, Wells said, should “update the approval to reflect science and not politics.” Project 2025 recommends the exact opposite: It says the FDA should immediately re-instate the in-person requirement to access the pills and in the longer term should revoke approval of the drugs entirely. But the FDA and HHS would likely face continued legal challenges if they did try to enact these protections—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo earlier this year, in which the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies, could make it harder for those agencies to enact regulations protecting abortion rights, as my colleague Nina Martin has reported.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing abortion access is the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion with minimal exceptions, leaving millions of low-income people on Medicaid without insurance coverage for abortion. (Paying for an abortion out of pocket can cost upwards of $500, or far more in the second trimester, according to KFF.) This year and since 2016, the Democratic Party platform has called for the repeal of Hyde, and it was one of the campaign promises Harris made the first time she ran for the presidency in 2020. Biden, too, has repeatedly excluded Hyde from his proposed federal budgets over the last few years, but it has always reappeared in the finalized budget passed by Congress. Still, Rebouché says, Harris “could refuse to sign the budget until Hyde is gone.” Conversely, Project 2025 calls for strengthening Hyde and codifying it into law.

Flint, from All* Above All, which has campaigned to overturn Hyde, said the policy shows the ways that abortion can be inaccessible even if it’s technically legalized, as it was under Roe. “If we do not figure out how to get government funding,” she told me, “we are on the precipice of another crisis, where there’s going to be a lot of folks not being able to get abortions, regardless of whether it’s legal or not.”

“We are on the precipice of another crisis, where there’s going to be a lot of folks not being able to get abortions, regardless of whether it’s legal.”

Perhaps one of the most significant ways in which a Harris presidency could alter the reproductive rights landscape is one of the most obvious. “She could shape a Supreme Court that is not the Dobbs court,” Rebouché notes. Three of the current justices—including two conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—are in their 70s, and could potentially retire during the next president’s term. As Rebouché sees it, it’s likely that a future liberal-leaning court shaped by Harris could one day undo Dobbs. “We should continue to talk about Dobbs just the way Alito described Roe: ‘Egregiously wrong’ and ‘erroneously’ decided.” The significance of Harris’ ability to pave the way for undoing Dobbs becomes all the more clear when one, again, looks at Project 2025’s plans: “The Dobbs decision,” it says, “is just the beginning.”

This summer, more than 380 reproductive rights and justice organizations and activists—including Flint’s All* Above All—signed onto a 17-page memo called “Abortion Justice, Now: Protecting Abortion At the Federal Level.” The brief primarily calls for passing federal legislation that abolishes the so-called viability line established in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “We know that viability is directly connected to fetal personhood, which is directly connected to the criminalization of pregnancy,” Jenni Villavicencio, a practicing OB-GYN and one of the primary authors of the brief, told me. “We really want to call attention to anybody making policy, including a possible future Harris administration, that is unacceptable to enshrine any sort of limit” for abortion access.

Two pieces of legislation—both introduced last year—are highlighted as model policies that could help expand access. The first is the Abortion Justice Act, sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), which would establish a federal right to abortion without limits, provide $350 million in annual grant funding to support abortion access, and increase the number of abortion-providing facilities. The EACH Act, introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) would effectively repeal Hyde. Spokespeople for both politicians said that they, or their colleagues, plan to re-introduce some version of the legislation in the next session of Congress.

Major medical groups also support abolishing gestational limits from abortion policy, and in August, more than 400 physicians also signed onto a letter, spearheaded by the group Physicians for Reproductive Rights, asking Biden and Harris to support “moving beyond the legal framework created by Roe,” in part by supporting abortion access later in pregnancy. But the issue of gestational limits has long divided the reproductive rights movement, which has struggled to balance where to compromise in its quest for broad abortion rights, as my colleague Madison Pauly has reported. Notably absent from the signatories of the memo, for example, are some of the largest abortion rights groups, including Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom For All. (Spokespeople for those groups did not respond to requests for comment.)

For Democrats, this has long been a tough needle to thread. The anti-abortion right has argued that Democrats support abortions later in pregnancy or, as Trump has insisted without basis, “even after birth.” But more than 90 percent of abortions nationwide take place within the first trimester, according to CDC data, and many Democrats, including Harris, have said they support the viability limit that existed under Roe, with later-term exceptions for emergency complications. Harris reiterated that at her debate with Trump, when he repeated his lies about Democrats supporting infanticide.

As Bracey Sherman, author of Liberating Abortion, points out, many of the tragic cases the Harris campaign has highlighted—in which people with wanted pregnancies had miscarriages, nonviable pregnancies, or other health emergencies requiring abortion—may not have had different outcomes under Roe. “There is no evidence that those people would be helped because they would still be stuck with the same viability line and the exception line,” she said. “We need to be pushing for abortion access at any time, for any reason, for anyone, anywhere in this country.”

Villavicencio, for her part, says she recognizes the necessity of compromise in policymaking. “What we patently reject,” she adds, “is compromise when it is for people who are the most marginalized”—specifically the young, low-income people, and people of color, many of whom struggled to access abortion care under Roe. Under Harris, she and other advocates see a possibility for a fresh start. As Flint, of All* Above All, says, “We have an incredible opportunity in the ashes of Roe v. Wade to build the thing that our community needs.”

But that all depends on who wins on Tuesday.

Update, Nov. 1: This story has been updated to clarify the Biden administration’s interpretation that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide abortion care to protect patients’ health—not just their lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.

The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.

It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”

As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”

“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.

The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”

“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.

The signatories are both Democrats and Republicans and represent 37 states, including several swing states, according to Dr. Alice Chen, a volunteer organizer with Doctors for Harris. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with more information about the signatories of the letter.

After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.

While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)

WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024

Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”

Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.

This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.

Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.

After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.

The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.

It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”

As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”

“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.

The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”

“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.

The signatories are both Democrats and Republicans and represent 37 states, including several swing states, according to Dr. Alice Chen, a volunteer organizer with Doctors for Harris. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with more information about the signatories of the letter.

After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.

While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)

WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024

Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”

Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.

This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.

Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.

Good news, patriots! American voters have finally found something they can agree about: Their candidate is going to win in November. That’s according to a new survey by Bright Line Watch, a group of researchers who, since 2017, have been tracking the state of American democracy and potential threats to it. The survey finds some hopeful news about Americans’ faith in elections, but it also offers stark warning signs about threats to democracy that could arise if there’s a huge mismatch between voters’ expectations and the ultimate winner of the election.

The new survey asked about 2,700 people how they plan to vote in the presidential election. As with most polls, the results revealed a close race, with 46 percent of respondents saying they’d vote for Trump, while 49 percent will pull the lever for Vice President Kamala Harris. The researchers weren’t interested in only the horse race, though. They wanted to explore likely voters’ expectations for the election outcome. That’s because they have found that, as was the case in 2020, unexpected results tend to drive fraud and malfeasance around elections and mistrust in the integrity of the system.

The survey found that nearly 90 percent of both Republicans and Democrats expect their candidate to prevail in November. Sizable minorities also believe their candidate will win in a blowout. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans and more than a quarter of Democrats believe that their candidate will win by “quite a lot.” That disparity between outcomes and expectations, particularly among the most partisan media consumers, can make voters on the losing side vulnerable to the sorts of misinformation and conspiracy theories spread by Trump and his supporters’ 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign that laid the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

“You can absolutely imagine something similar” happening this year “especially when Trump is telling people ‘we’re going to win unless they steal it,'” says Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College professor of government and a co-director of Bright Line Watch. “He’s playing into this in a way that is obviously dangerous and reckless.”

Despite similar expectations of victory among Democrats, Nyhan says it’s harder to imagine Harris supporters responding the same way MAGA devotees did in 2020. Bright Line surveys show that Democrats tend to be more accepting of election results. Plus, everyone expects Harris to concede if she loses.

Lest you think that Democrats are completely impervious to election misinformation and conspiracy theories, the Bright Line researchers are here to prove you wrong. “Polling shows Democrats are vulnerable,” Nyhan says. For instance, the Bright Line survey found that more than a third of Democratic respondents falsely believe that the assassination attempts on Trump were staged to help his election prospects.

Also recall the 2016 election, Nyhan says, when Hillary Clinton was predicted to win the presidential election. Many Democrats, he says, embraced conspiracy theories to explain Trump’s unexpected victory. Bright Line surveys show that today, Democrats still falsely believe in fairly high numbers—more than 50 percent of those polled—that Russia changed actual votes to swing the 2016 election in favor of Trump. (While Russia did hack computers at the Democratic National Committee and target state election systems in 2016, there is no evidence that Russia electronically tampered with people’s votes.)

Of course, Democrats who believe this myth about Russia didn’t storm the Capitol to challenge the election results. The difference, Nyhan says, is that Democratic elites don’t amplify fringe theories the way Republicans do. “There’s been no figure on the Democratic side who’s rejected the norms of democracy in the same way as Trump,” he says.

The Bright Line survey did offer some areas where disinformation has not captured voters’ attention. Attempts by Trump supporters to question Vice President Kamala Harris’ citizenship have persuaded “only” 22 percent of Republicans that she’s ineligible to run for the presidency. That’s a big improvement since Trump’s “birther” campaign against former President Barack Obama helped convince more than 70 percent of Republicans that he was ineligible for office. And the percentage of Republicans who believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020 has gone up slightly from 33 percent in October 2022 to 38 percent in September this year. Even 23 percent of those who say they are more Trump supporters than Republicans are willing to concede the 2020 election to Biden, compared with 16 percent in October 2022.

GOP voters also seem to have recovered some of their confidence in election integrity, perhaps because they’re so sure that Trump will prevail in November. Nearly 60 percent of the respondents now say they believe their votes will be counted fairly, as opposed to 49 percent who did so two years ago. Nonetheless, Republican voters suffer from a fair amount of cognitive dissonance when it comes to their faith in the electoral system.

“Everyone thinks the fraud is happening somewhere else. There’s not a high degree of internal consistency on these claims.”

Many people who think their own vote for, say, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), or the local dog catcher will be fairly counted apparently also believe the national vote will be fully corrupt. According to the Bright Line survey, 80 percent of Republicans believe their state votes will be counted accurately, but that figure falls precipitously when they’re asked about the national vote count. Only 57 percent of Republicans in the survey thought the national election would be fair. “Everyone thinks the fraud is happening somewhere else,” Nyhan says. “There’s not a high degree of internal consistency on these claims, obviously.”

Republican beliefs in widespread voter fraud, however, seem to have diminished since 2022. For instance, GOP respondents to the Bright Line survey were somewhat less likely to believe that voting machine software is changing votes. Independent voters were even less likely to believe it. The Bright Line report doesn’t speculate as to why this might be the case. But there is one possible explanation: the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which last year forced Fox to pay nearly $800 million to the company for making false claims about its voting machine software.  

After the settlement, Fox and other right-wing news outlets had to stop their false attacks on the integrity of voting machines. “It took it out of the right-wing information stream from those places,” says Nyhan. Still, he suspects there’s more to the decline than this one lawsuit. He thinks conservative voters are simply hearing less about voter fraud overall, aside from Trump’s oft-repeated claims that illegal immigrants are infiltrating the election system, a fiction that 70 percent of the survey respondents embraced.

Indeed, after four years of consistently attacking the electoral system as fraudulent, Republicans had a problem heading into 2024: how to convince their supporters to cast a ballot after they’d been persuaded by Trump that their votes wouldn’t count? To that end, the Republican National Committee has stopped pressing the voter fraud narrative and spent the last year trying to convince voters that their ballots will be secure, including the mail-in ballots Trump previously claimed were used to steal the 2020 election. The Bright Line Watch numbers suggest that perhaps the campaign is working.

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Kingsolver is headlining a fundraiser for the Harris Victory Fund. She’ll join actress Ashley Judd and former Kentucky poet laureate Silas House for a “virtual conversation” about perspectives from rural Appalachia. The event coincides with a recent push by Vice President Kamala Harris to reach out to rural voters, who overwhelmingly support former President Donald Trump.

Kingsolver is an obvious Democratic counterweight to vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The Ohio senator came to fame through his book Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicled his dysfunctional family history that had roots in rural Kentucky. The Trump campaign has touted his appeal to working-class and rural white voters. Unlike Vance, who was raised in suburban Ohio, Kingsolver actually grew up in rural Kentucky and still lives in Appalachian Virginia. She won the Pulitzer for a novel set in the very places Vance claims to speak for.

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump,” she told me when I interviewed her in May. “When I go to the grocery store, I’m going to Trump rally. When I drive to town, I go past gigantic Trump 2024 signs. This is where I live.”

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump.”

Impoverished rural areas represent some of Trump’s strongest base. He won 65 percent of the country’s rural voters in 2020, and the totals were even higher in many parts of Appalachia. The Harris campaign has been trying to make inroads in many of these oft-forgotten places, particularly in swing states, in an effort to narrow Trump’s margins. In 2020, for instance, Trump won Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, 62–36 percent. But Harris made an appearance there last Thursday. And former President Bill Clinton has been deployed to the rural South in an attempt to also strengthen her appeal with these voters.

“We got to turn out folks, obviously, in base Democratic areas, but we also need to persuade a lot of people,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’ battleground states director, told CNN last week. “Shaving margins where you can, in counties that maybe Trump won 70-30, but if we can lose them 60-40 or 65-35, that makes a big difference over dozens of counties in a state.”

Kingsolver’s prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, is a Dickensian coming-of- age tale set in the hollows of Appalachia where young Demon struggles through addiction, foster care, family disintegration, and the general failures of the American social welfare system all while trying to remain rooted in the hill country he loves. It’s an empathetic portrayal of the people Vance mostly scorned in his memoir. It’s no surprise, then, that the Harris campaign might see Kingsolver as a useful campaign surrogate who could help bridge the gap between the California coastal liberal and rural voters who overwhelmingly support Trump.

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A post shared by Barbara Kingsolver (@barbara.kingsolver)

The young protagonist of Demon Copperhead is born in Lee County, Virginia, a real place where 45 percent of the children live below the poverty line. The disability rates among adults in Lee County are twice the national average—nearly 50 percent of the elderly residents have a disability. Trump also won nearly 85 percent of the vote there in 2020. Kingsolver thinks the dismal state of infrastructure, health care, and education opportunities in rural America leaves its residents vulnerable to someone like Trump, who claims to see them.

“He channels their rage,” she told me, even if his agenda will do little to help their material condition. “What they have in common is that they feel like the government has failed them. Any other attempt to sort of reduce Trump voters to a monoculture is really very bigoted.”

There’s a moment in Demon Copperhead where Demon is talking to his friend Tommy, who recently started working at a local newspaper where he has discovered for the first time how the rest of the world views Appalachia. “Blight on the nation” read the headline of one story that crosses his desk. Demon tries to explain how the world is organized to Tommy, and the way everyone needs someone to dump on—much like a kid kicking a dog after getting yelled at by his mom, who got smacked by his stepfather. “We’re the dog of America,” he explains. Demon thinks his friend spent high school in the library, instead of watching the “hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies” that a local station had aired for a month.

“And the comedy shows, even worse,” Demon adds, “with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha.” Tommy, dismayed, wonders why the people of Appalachia had to be the ones who got kicked around.  “Just bad luck, I reckon,” Demon replies. “God made us the butt of the joke universe.”

When I read this section, I thought it could easily describe the way the media often portrays Trump supporters. “As Demon says in the book, ‘We can see you. We have cable,’” Kingsolver told me. “You act like you’re making these jokes behind our backs. We see it. I wrote the whole book just to write that part.”

Kingsolver is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal.

Earlier this year, I had been struggling (and failing) to write a sympathetic story about Trump’s most hardcore supporters and the way they tend to be ridiculed—often for good reason—by liberals and in the media. Frustrated, I called Kingsolver to see if she could offer some guidance in understanding and writing about these complicated Americans who are so easily caricatured. She summed up the stereotypes succinctly: “We’re just backward hillbillies that don’t have ambition or drive because if we did, we would all be JD Vance, vying to be Vice President right now.”

Indeed, she is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal. “It really galls me that people are ready to write off 50 percent of the population as crazy, stupid, uninformed, whatever. That’s so elitist.” She understands why Trump’s rural supporters are so angry—and why they like him so much.

Kingsolver spent some of her childhood in Congo, where her parents worked as public health missionaries. (Her father was a doctor.) She lived there when the country won its independence from Belgium in 1960. “When Belgium pulled out abruptly, and there were no educated Congolese, the whole social service network was handled by volunteers and missionaries,” she said. “Well, that’s kind of what’s going on here. So many of the services are handled by nonprofits like RAM [Remote Area Medical]. It’s like Doctors Without Borders, who come to rural Tennessee.” She adds, “It’s a very normal thing for kids here, like for a 13-year-old child never to have been to the dentist.” The RAM clinics, she said, are “like Coachella, except not as happy…with hundreds and hundreds of people with their kids trying to get seen by a doctor. It’s like the Congo. We’re depending on missionaries for what the government should be doing here.”

Then there is language used in public conversations to describe Trump’s rural supporters, which she insists would never be acceptable for other marginalized communities. “Progressive people will really bend over backward not to laugh at someone who has faced other kinds of prejudice, to give people the benefit of the doubt and say, Okay, structural racism has left this poor woman not very well informed,” she told me. “We will try hard to meet her in the middle. You’re not doing the same thing for people who are suffering from structural classism, and from sort of rural oppression.” Not to mention a host of “rural stereotypes, from educated, informed, progressive, well-meaning people.” She recalled a recent book tour for Demon where “the first question of a live radio interview was, ‘Why do you choose to write about degenerate people?’ Degenerate?”

And yet, there are good reasons why liberals are often so quick to disparage Trump supporters. It’s not hard to find them outside a Trump rally, for instance, offering up insane political beliefs and conspiracy theories. I told her about some of the ones I have met this year, almost all of whom believe Trump won the 2020 election.

“It’s not literally insane for people to believe that, when every news source available to them, including the leader of their church, is telling them that,” she countered. “We all rely on the sources we trust. I think it would be crazy for some people not to think that when it’s absolutely what everybody around them says.” Kingsolver continued. “What progressive people say about gender sounds crazy to a lot of my neighbors and a lot of my family—the idea of like, you’re not born with a gender, you decide on your gender. That sounds insane to a lot of people. When you talk between these silos, everybody sounds crazy.”

Despite her roots in Appalachia, Kingsolver has feet in two worlds. In July 2023, first lady Jill Biden was seen reading Demon Copperhead on the beach in Delaware. When I talked to Kingsolver in May, she told me she had been trying to get the Biden campaign to do an event in Bristol, Virginia, to reach out to rural voters. Less than two weeks later, she attended a state dinner at the White House for William Ruto, president of Kenya.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are having a beach day at Rehoboth Beach. The first lady is reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Photo by CNN’s @JayMcMichaelCNN pic.twitter.com/05Fzl6s3Ou

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 30, 2023

The Bristol event didn’t materialize before Biden dropped out of the presidential race. But Harris seems to have picked up where Biden left off by deploying Kingsolver for Friday’s fundraiser, where the top-tier ticket costs $6,600. (Kingsolver fans can still tune in for the conversation for $25.) Kingsolver won’t be on the campaign trail jousting with Vance. Friday’s fundraiser is her only Harris event. “I’m actually terrible at knocking on doors or making phone calls,” she says. “I am a writer. So when I saw an announcement for the first of this series of ‘Writers for Harris events, I immediately wanted to sign on. This is what I can do!” 

At a town hall organized by Univision on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed a key constituency eluding the Democratic Party: Latino voters. Her pitch, like much of the campaign, focused on the contrast between her and Donald Trump. “I very much believe that the American people are being presented with two very different visions for our country,” she said.

Still, Harris mostly fronted a “tough on the border” position during the appearance. After moments of empathy and a brief mention of fighting for DACA recipients, Harris touted a now-defunct restrictive border bill pushed by President Joe Biden that overlooked groups like the Dreamers. The vice president talked concrete on crackdown and vaguely on policies to help immigrants. She had a chance to be specific on both counts.

One of the first questions Harris fielded came from Ivett Castillo, the grieving daughter of an undocumented Mexican-born woman who had passed away six weeks prior. “You and I have something in common,” Castillo told Harris. “We both lost our mother.”

Castillo, who lives in Las Vegas, went on to describe how she had been able to help her father get legal status, but not her mother. “She was never ever able to get the type of care and service that she needed or deserved,” Castillo said, sobbing. “So my question for you is: What are your plans or do you have plans to support that subgroup of immigrants who have been here their whole lives, or most of them, and have to live and die in the shadows?”

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

Harris expressed sympathy for Castillo and urged her to remember her mother as she had lived. And she also mentioned a bill that the Biden administration proposed to offer a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. (Harris blamed the fact that it wasn’t picked up by Congress on the “inability to put solutions in front of politics.”)

But that was the extent of Harris’ answer to the question about her policies for the 11 million undocumented people living in the United States. Instead, the Democratic nominee quickly pivoted to the one piece of the immigration debate both parties seem to be laser-focused on exploiting this election cycle: the border.

“A bipartisan group of members of Congress, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came together with one of the strongest border security bills we’ve had in decades,” she said, noting how it would have boosted the border patrol force and help tackle the flow of fentanyl. (The vast majority of fentanyl is brought into the country through ports of entry by US citizens, not immigrants.) Harris then accused her opponent of deliberately killing the proposed legislation in order to keep the border a salient electoral issue. “He would prefer to run on a problem than fixing a problem,” she said.

Harris’ choice to weave in border security in a question specifically about longtime undocumented immigrants living in the interior of the United States—and to frame it as a problem to be fixed—shows how far to the right Democrats have come on immigration.

In fully embracing the perception that immigration can’t be anything other than a liability for Democrats and a winning trampoline for Republicans, the party has all but ceded the “moral leadership” President Joe Biden so vehemently vowed to reclaim in the aftermath of Trump’s devastation.

But if Harris’ goal was to underscore the differences between her and Trump’s views and policies on immigration, she missed an opportunity to do so. The Univision audience at the town hall and watching from home heard nothing about the Biden administration’s move to make it easier for undocumented spouses of US citizens to obtain legal status. Nor did they hear about the Republican candidate’s disastrous plans to arrest, detain, and mass deport millions of undocumented immigrants, tearing up families and ruining critical industries.

Some polls suggest stricter border enforcement and, to a lesser extent, Trump’s mass deportation proposal resonates with some Latinos. Even if experts say such plans could impact not only undocumented immigrants, but also mixed-status families and those with legal status. The message may not have caught on. In part, because it seems the campaign has done little to explain the potential catastrophe wrought by mass deportation. (As the New York Times reported, many have not heard about the details of the actual agenda.)

It’s not surprising that Harris has adopted a defensive stance on immigration. From the beginning of her expedited presidential campaign, the former prosecutor has been facing attacks from Republicans falsely dubbing her the “border czar.”

But Harris was also once an unapologetically vocal supporter of undocumented immigrants. When vying for the Democratic nomination ahead of the 2020 election, she released a plan to use executive action to provide a pathway to citizenship to millions of Dreamers. Now, her official platform and rally speeches default to a boilerplate appearance of compromise in the form of “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

It’s not for a lack of emotion. Harris, like Biden, seems to thrive when relating to people and their struggles. “It’s about the dignity of people,” she said at the town hall. “And about the importance of doing what we can as leaders to alleviate suffering… What I think it’s backward in terms of this thinking that it’s a sign of strength to beat people down, part of the backward nature of those kinds of thinking is to suggest that empathy is somehow a weakness. Empathy meaning to have some level of care and concern about the suffering of other people and then do something to lift that up.” She later added: “There’ a big contrast between me and Donald Trump.”

If there was ever a moment to highlight what New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer aptly put as “Trump’s dangerous immigration obsession” and what’s at stake—beyond the more abstract warnings about a threat to democracy and the rule of law—that would have been it. If more people understood what mass deportation really means, maybe a quarter of Democrats would not support it.

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Kingsolver is headlining a fundraiser for the Harris Victory Fund. She’ll join actress Ashley Judd and former Kentucky poet laureate Silas House for a “virtual conversation” about perspectives from rural Appalachia. The event coincides with a recent push by Vice President Kamala Harris to reach out to rural voters, who overwhelmingly support former President Donald Trump.

Kingsolver is an obvious Democratic counterweight to vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The Ohio senator came to fame through his book Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicled his dysfunctional family history that had roots in rural Kentucky. The Trump campaign has touted his appeal to working-class and rural white voters. Unlike Vance, who was raised in suburban Ohio, Kingsolver actually grew up in rural Kentucky and still lives in Appalachian Virginia. She won the Pulitzer for a novel set in the very places Vance claims to speak for.

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump,” she told me when I interviewed her in May. “When I go to the grocery store, I’m going to Trump rally. When I drive to town, I go past gigantic Trump 2024 signs. This is where I live.”

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump.”

Impoverished rural areas represent some of Trump’s strongest base. He won 65 percent of the country’s rural voters in 2020, and the totals were even higher in many parts of Appalachia. The Harris campaign has been trying to make inroads in many of these oft-forgotten places, particularly in swing states, in an effort to narrow Trump’s margins. In 2020, for instance, Trump won Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, 62–36 percent. But Harris made an appearance there last Thursday. And former President Bill Clinton has been deployed to the rural South in an attempt to also strengthen her appeal with these voters.

“We got to turn out folks, obviously, in base Democratic areas, but we also need to persuade a lot of people,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’ battleground states director, told CNN last week. “Shaving margins where you can, in counties that maybe Trump won 70-30, but if we can lose them 60-40 or 65-35, that makes a big difference over dozens of counties in a state.”

Kingsolver’s prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, is a Dickensian coming-of- age tale set in the hollows of Appalachia where young Demon struggles through addiction, foster care, family disintegration, and the general failures of the American social welfare system all while trying to remain rooted in the hill country he loves. It’s an empathetic portrayal of the people Vance mostly scorned in his memoir. It’s no surprise, then, that the Harris campaign might see Kingsolver as a useful campaign surrogate who could help bridge the gap between the California coastal liberal and rural voters who overwhelmingly support Trump.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Barbara Kingsolver (@barbara.kingsolver)

The young protagonist of Demon Copperhead is born in Lee County, Virginia, a real place where 45 percent of the children live below the poverty line. The disability rates among adults in Lee County are twice the national average—nearly 50 percent of the elderly residents have a disability. Trump also won nearly 85 percent of the vote there in 2020. Kingsolver thinks the dismal state of infrastructure, health care, and education opportunities in rural America leaves its residents vulnerable to someone like Trump, who claims to see them.

“He channels their rage,” she told me, even if his agenda will do little to help their material condition. “What they have in common is that they feel like the government has failed them. Any other attempt to sort of reduce Trump voters to a monoculture is really very bigoted.”

There’s a moment in Demon Copperhead where Demon is talking to his friend Tommy, who recently started working at a local newspaper where he has discovered for the first time how the rest of the world views Appalachia. “Blight on the nation” read the headline of one story that crosses his desk. Demon tries to explain how the world is organized to Tommy, and the way everyone needs someone to dump on—much like a kid kicking a dog after getting yelled at by his mom, who got smacked by his stepfather. “We’re the dog of America,” he explains. Demon thinks his friend spent high school in the library, instead of watching the “hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies” that a local station had aired for a month.

“And the comedy shows, even worse,” Demon adds, “with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha.” Tommy, dismayed, wonders why the people of Appalachia had to be the ones who got kicked around.  “Just bad luck, I reckon,” Demon replies. “God made us the butt of the joke universe.”

When I read this section, I thought it could easily describe the way the media often portrays Trump supporters. “As Demon says in the book, ‘We can see you. We have cable,’” Kingsolver told me. “You act like you’re making these jokes behind our backs. We see it. I wrote the whole book just to write that part.”

Kingsolver is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal.

Earlier this year, I had been struggling (and failing) to write a sympathetic story about Trump’s most hardcore supporters and the way they tend to be ridiculed—often for good reason—by liberals and in the media. Frustrated, I called Kingsolver to see if she could offer some guidance in understanding and writing about these complicated Americans who are so easily caricatured. She summed up the stereotypes succinctly: “We’re just backward hillbillies that don’t have ambition or drive because if we did, we would all be JD Vance, vying to be Vice President right now.”

Indeed, she is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal. “It really galls me that people are ready to write off 50 percent of the population as crazy, stupid, uninformed, whatever. That’s so elitist.” She understands why Trump’s rural supporters are so angry—and why they like him so much.

Kingsolver spent some of her childhood in Congo, where her parents worked as public health missionaries. (Her father was a doctor.) She lived there when the country won its independence from Belgium in 1960. “When Belgium pulled out abruptly, and there were no educated Congolese, the whole social service network was handled by volunteers and missionaries,” she said. “Well, that’s kind of what’s going on here. So many of the services are handled by nonprofits like RAM [Remote Area Medical]. It’s like Doctors Without Borders, who come to rural Tennessee.” She adds, “It’s a very normal thing for kids here, like for a 13-year-old child never to have been to the dentist.” The RAM clinics, she said, are “like Coachella, except not as happy…with hundreds and hundreds of people with their kids trying to get seen by a doctor. It’s like the Congo. We’re depending on missionaries for what the government should be doing here.”

Then there is language used in public conversations to describe Trump’s rural supporters, which she insists would never be acceptable for other marginalized communities. “Progressive people will really bend over backward not to laugh at someone who has faced other kinds of prejudice, to give people the benefit of the doubt and say, Okay, structural racism has left this poor woman not very well informed,” she told me. “We will try hard to meet her in the middle. You’re not doing the same thing for people who are suffering from structural classism, and from sort of rural oppression.” Not to mention a host of “rural stereotypes, from educated, informed, progressive, well-meaning people.” She recalled a recent book tour for Demon where “the first question of a live radio interview was, ‘Why do you choose to write about degenerate people?’ Degenerate?”

And yet, there are good reasons why liberals are often so quick to disparage Trump supporters. It’s not hard to find them outside a Trump rally, for instance, offering up insane political beliefs and conspiracy theories. I told her about some of the ones I have met this year, almost all of whom believe Trump won the 2020 election.

“It’s not literally insane for people to believe that, when every news source available to them, including the leader of their church, is telling them that,” she countered. “We all rely on the sources we trust. I think it would be crazy for some people not to think that when it’s absolutely what everybody around them says.” Kingsolver continued. “What progressive people say about gender sounds crazy to a lot of my neighbors and a lot of my family—the idea of like, you’re not born with a gender, you decide on your gender. That sounds insane to a lot of people. When you talk between these silos, everybody sounds crazy.”

Despite her roots in Appalachia, Kingsolver has feet in two worlds. In July 2023, first lady Jill Biden was seen reading Demon Copperhead on the beach in Delaware. When I talked to Kingsolver in May, she told me she had been trying to get the Biden campaign to do an event in Bristol, Virginia, to reach out to rural voters. Less than two weeks later, she attended a state dinner at the White House for William Ruto, president of Kenya.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are having a beach day at Rehoboth Beach. The first lady is reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Photo by CNN’s @JayMcMichaelCNN pic.twitter.com/05Fzl6s3Ou

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 30, 2023

The Bristol event didn’t materialize before Biden dropped out of the presidential race. But Harris seems to have picked up where Biden left off by deploying Kingsolver for Friday’s fundraiser, where the top-tier ticket costs $6,600. (Kingsolver fans can still tune in for the conversation for $25.) Kingsolver won’t be on the campaign trail jousting with Vance. Friday’s fundraiser is her only Harris event. “I’m actually terrible at knocking on doors or making phone calls,” she says. “I am a writer. So when I saw an announcement for the first of this series of ‘Writers for Harris events, I immediately wanted to sign on. This is what I can do!” 

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday unveiled a new plan to offer a Medicare benefit to help pay for at-home, long-term care for senior citizens and people with disabilities. In announcing the plan on ABC’s daytime talk show The View, Harris said the plan could ease the caregiving burdens of the so-called “sandwich generation“—which constitutes nearly a quarter of Americans overall—as well as help people avoid the exorbitant costs of nursing homes and assisted living.

“There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle: They’re taking care of their kids and they’re taking care of their aging parents, and it’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work,” Harris said. “We’re finding that so many are then having to leave their job, which means losing a source of income, not to mention the emotional stress.” According to the Harris campaign, more than 67 million people are covered by Medicare and about 4 million enroll annually; 105 million Americans act as caregivers for loved ones.

If realized, Harris’ plan could be particularly revolutionary for women, who research has repeatedly shown take on the bulk of caregiving duties at home. A report published by the Commonwealth Fund earlier this year, for example, found that in 2020, women made up more than 60 percent of caregivers to an adult or child with disabilities; That report also found that 26 percent of American women said they acted as a caregiver to a family member, compared with 22 percent of American men.

Harris did not provide specifics or an estimated cost for the plan. But speaking on The View, Harris said the plan would be financed by allowing Medicare “to continue to negotiate drug prices against these big pharmaceutical companies,” meaning that money saved from the Biden administration’s landmark deal would go toward funding senior care. A senior campaign official said the plan would also be financed by increasing discounts drug manufacturers cover for certain brand-name drugs in Medicare, cracking down on hidden costs from pharmacy benefit managers, and other measures. A recent analysis from the nonpartisan Brookings Institution found that such a plan would cost an estimated $40 billion a year.

On the campaign trail, Harris has spoken about taking care of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, after she was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 2009), a point the vice president repeated during her appearance on The View.

“I know caregiving is about dignity,” Harris said on Tuesday.

Vice Pres. Kamala Harris explains her proposal for Medicare to cover in-home health care for seniors: "It's about independence for that individual." pic.twitter.com/09Lkz9DXQl

— The View (@TheView) October 8, 2024

The appearance is part of a weeklong media blitz for Harris, which started with a 60 Minutes interview that aired on CBS Monday night as well as an appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy. The Democratic presidential nominee will also appear on The Howard Stern Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The contrast with her opponent is stark: Trump, on the other hand, bailed on his 60 Minutes invite and ranted about Harris’ interview on Truth Social. Oh, and he has repeatedly discussed cutting Medicare, which Project 2025—the extremist guidebook to a second Trump term—also recommends.

Update, October 8: This post was updated with statistics about the role American women play in caregiving.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday unveiled a new plan to offer a Medicare benefit to help pay for at-home, long-term care for senior citizens and people with disabilities. In announcing the plan on ABC’s daytime talk show The View, Harris said the plan could ease the caregiving burdens of the so-called “sandwich generation“—which constitutes nearly a quarter of Americans overall—as well as help people avoid the exorbitant costs of nursing homes and assisted living.

“There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle: They’re taking care of their kids and they’re taking care of their aging parents, and it’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work,” Harris said. “We’re finding that so many are then having to leave their job, which means losing a source of income, not to mention the emotional stress.” According to the Harris campaign, more than 67 million people are covered by Medicare and about 4 million enroll annually; 105 million Americans act as caregivers for loved ones.

If realized, Harris’ plan could be particularly revolutionary for women, who research has repeatedly shown take on the bulk of caregiving duties at home. A report published by the Commonwealth Fund earlier this year, for example, found that in 2020, women made up more than 60 percent of caregivers to an adult or child with disabilities; That report also found that 26 percent of American women said they acted as a caregiver to a family member, compared with 22 percent of American men.

Harris did not provide specifics or an estimated cost for the plan. But speaking on The View, Harris said the plan would be financed by allowing Medicare “to continue to negotiate drug prices against these big pharmaceutical companies,” meaning that money saved from the Biden administration’s landmark deal would go toward funding senior care. A senior campaign official said the plan would also be financed by increasing discounts drug manufacturers cover for certain brand-name drugs in Medicare, cracking down on hidden costs from pharmacy benefit managers, and other measures. A recent analysis from the nonpartisan Brookings Institution found that such a plan would cost an estimated $40 billion a year.

On the campaign trail, Harris has spoken about taking care of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, after she was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 2009), a point the vice president repeated during her appearance on The View.

“I know caregiving is about dignity,” Harris said on Tuesday.

Vice Pres. Kamala Harris explains her proposal for Medicare to cover in-home health care for seniors: "It's about independence for that individual." pic.twitter.com/09Lkz9DXQl

— The View (@TheView) October 8, 2024

The appearance is part of a weeklong media blitz for Harris, which started with a 60 Minutes interview that aired on CBS Monday night as well as an appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy. The Democratic presidential nominee will also appear on The Howard Stern Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The contrast with her opponent is stark: Trump, on the other hand, bailed on his 60 Minutes invite and ranted about Harris’ interview on Truth Social. Oh, and he has repeatedly discussed cutting Medicare, which Project 2025—the extremist guidebook to a second Trump term—also recommends.

Update, October 8: This post was updated with statistics about the role American women play in caregiving.

The suburbs of North Dallas were once the headquarters of a very particular pre-MAGA version of the Republican Party: genteel, gun-toting, and churchgoing. The men wore beaver-fur cowboy hats, and the women were hairsprayed to the high heavens. As we reported in 2011, the 75205 zip code—some of which falls into the 32nd Congressional District of Texas—was the “most enthusiastically Republican enclave in the country.” But then, changing racial demographics made the district ripe for Democratic picking. In 2018, a 35-year-old Black civil rights lawyer named Colin Allred ousted Pete Sessions, an 11-term Republican congressman. Allred, a stocky former NFL linebacker, has been reelected to the seat twice since, campaigning on his moderate sensibilities and willingness to reach across the aisle. 

Now, Allred is running that same play against US Sen. Ted Cruz, a hard-line Republican, in an ever-tightening race. At the Texas Tribune Festival in September, Allred seemed to be nostalgic for that fading Republican archetype who once populated the district he now represents. He described growing up with the “real conservatives,” whom Cruz, he said emphatically, is not. Allred paints Cruz as a divisive extremist and has been courting Republicans who “don’t see themselves reflected in this version of the Republican Party.” 

And that strategy seems to be working—last week, the Cook Political Report shifted the race to “lean Republican.” Most polls show Allred within single digits of Cruz, and one has Allred leading by one point. With Democrats defending incumbents in Ohio and Montana, flipping Texas could make the difference in maintaining their governing majority in the Senate. After some Democrats pushed the party to invest more in Allred’s campaign, both the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic National Committee announced investments in Texas.  

But Texas Democrats have not won a statewide election since 1994. The closest they have come was former El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s freewheeling 2018 campaign against Cruz. O’Rourke famously campaigned in all 254 counties, crisscrossing the state in his maroon Dodge Caravan. He livestreamed his every move on Facebook: chatting while getting a haircut, skateboarding in a Whataburger parking lot, and going on predawn jogs with supporters. O’Rourke ultimately lost by fewer than three points—which some Democrats count as a victory—and won a place as a mythic figure in the state party. He is the ghost haunting Allred’s campaign. Every dollar raised, poll conducted, and door knocked inspires comparisons to 2018’s high-water mark.

By most measures, Allred is a strong candidate and has assembled quite a war chest, having outraised Cruz this year. And the junior senator from Texas certainly appears concerned about the race—Cruz’s campaign has called the election the “fight of our lives.” And in a surprising twist, the hyperpartisan Cruz, who built his career as a culture warrior, has attempted to gain an advantage by arguing that he has a bipartisan record. 

Allred, who can come off as stiff and overly scripted, hasn’t inspired the kind of Democratic fervor that O’Rourke enjoyed. But he has been appealing to moderate Republicans and independents who may be alienated by Cruz’s MAGA approach, talking openly about Democratic failures to address the border crisis. The central question: Is running a middle-of-the-road campaign the strategy for winning a race that O’Rourke so narrowly lost? 

Campaigning for statewide office in Texas, which is slightly larger than France and has a population of 30 million, is comparable to running for president of some countries. Hispanics are now the largest population group in the state, and the numbers of Black and Asian residents are also growing. Texas contains four of the most populous cities in the US and some of the most expensive media markets. Allred’s robust campaign coffers have made it possible for him to blanket urban centers with television ads. But a more difficult challenge is what veteran journalist and editor of the website Quorum Report Scott Braddock called the “imagination gap”: Texans under the age of 30 have never seen a Democrat win a statewide election. 

The last Democrat to do so was Bob Bullock, who was reelected as lieutenant governor in 1994, the same year that former President George W. Bush first became governor. Since then, there have been a series of high-profile losses. From the “dream team” of statewide candidates in 2002 to popular Houston Mayor Bill White’s gubernatorial campaign in 2010, Democrats have routinely raised their hopes, only to be crushed by Republicans. In 2014, they thought they had a real shot at the governor’s mansion with Wendy Davis, the state senator who rose to national prominence when her marathon filibuster delayed a restrictive abortion bill. Bolstered by Battleground Texas, a new PAC launched by two Obama campaign alums, Davis ran on a compelling biography as a single mother who wound up at Harvard Law School. But her campaign struggled to stay on message and was outraised and outspent by Greg Abbott in his first gubernatorial campaign. She lost by 20 points. 

In 2018, Texas Democrats found a new standard-bearer in O’Rourke, the lanky, indefatigable 46-year-old US congressman from El Paso. He made a point of throwing out the Democratic playbook, initially pledging to go without pollsters and consultants and to refuse donations from corporations and super-PACs. O’Rourke was a kind of political Rorschach test. Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said, “O’Rourke was successfully able to be everything to everyone.” He had progressive bona fides, supporting universal health care, abortion rights, and an assault rifle ban. He capitalized on Democratic outrage around former President Donald Trump’s family separation policies, leading a Father’s Day protest outside a detention facility for immigrant children. But he could also be, as Jones put it, a “post-partisan pragmatist.” He had a centrist voting record in Congress and a long-standing friendship with Republican US Rep. Will Hurd—the two livestreamed their road trip from San Antonio to Washington, DC, in 2017. Ignored by Cruz for the first several months of the campaign, O’Rourke’s shifting and sometimes contradictory narratives went largely unchallenged. 

“O’Rourke was successfully able to be everything to everyone.”

With an army of volunteers and record-breaking fundraising from both inside and outside the state, O’Rourke came tantalizingly close to defeating Cruz, losing by 2.6 points. As Gus Bova wrote in the Texas Observer, O’Rourke “broke the mold” in 2018, defying political gravity and reinvigorating Texas Democrats. But after disappointing showings in the 2019 Democratic presidential primary and the 2022 gubernatorial race, some have wondered whether O’Rourke’s political career is over. O’Rourke now leads a voter registration PAC and recently joined second gentleman Doug Emhoff on a fundraising turn through Texas—including a stop at his beloved Whataburger. 

When it comes to the prospect of a blue Texas, one can’t blame Democrats for feeling like Charlie Brown winding up to kick the football again, despite knowing that Lucy is going to yank it away every time. And it might be hard to rustle up enthusiasm for a candidate who is decidedly less compelling than O’Rourke. 

For the last eight years, Democrats have harbored hopes that, eventually, Trump and his allies will become so extreme that they will alienate their own base. And for many, Cruz could be the perfect example of a Republican who should have been jettisoned by the GOP long ago. When he arrived in the Senate in 2013, fueled by the insurgent tea party, he made a name for himself as a far-right obstructionist with a penchant for showmanship. That year, his long-shot attempt to undercut the Affordable Care Act—involving a 21-hour Senate speech and a reading of “Green Eggs and Ham”—led to a two-week government shutdown and was harshly criticized by other Republicans. Then there was his ill-fated and embarrassing presidential primary bid in 2016, which culminated in a surprising speech at the Republican National Convention during which he urged delegates to vote their consciences and declined to endorse Trump. But Cruz walked back his condemnation of Trump when it became apparent that it would irreparably harm his political career. And, of course, there is Democrats’ favorite Cruz gaffe of them all: jetting off to Cancun, Mexico, during a deadly winter storm in 2021. (He apologized upon his return.) These days, Cruz also makes time to record his thrice-weekly podcast.

Nonetheless, polling finds that Cruz remains popular among Texas Republicans, and he may be bolstered by Trump’s appearance on the ticket. But a June poll found that only 25 percent of self-identified independents, a key voting group, approved of him. His recent attempts to rebrand as an effective legislator and unsung bipartisan hero may speak to that concern.   

Early in the race, Allred’s campaign was so lackluster that it inspired a great deal of grumbling from within the Texas Democratic Party. “Where is Colin Allred?” a prominent West Texas lawyer and Democrat asked on X in August. Allred had done few public events and made even fewer media appearances before the final night of the Democratic National Convention, when he gave a speech shortly before Vice President Kamala Harris. For most people outside Texas (and even some within it), this was likely the first time they heard that Cruz was facing a challenger. In the weeks since then, Allred’s campaign has picked up its pace. But Allred has mostly opted for smaller meetings over large rallies and town halls, and his campaign has organized mostly identity-focused coalition groups—including women, Asian Americans, and Black Texans. Last week, his campaign announced “Republicans for Allred,” chaired by former US Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a prominent anti-Trump Republican who also endorsed Harris.

The Allred campaign declined to make the candidate available for an interview and instead suggested I speak to Olivia Julianna, a social media activist who is advising the campaign on youth voter turnout. When asked why larger rallies haven’t been a focus of his campaign, she replied, “This is a more strategic, targeted way of reaching people and bringing them in on these very issue-focused events that are about [what] they care about the most.” 

At the Texas Tribune Festival, Allred was asked about a note from O’Rourke, who said in an interview that he’d like to see more of Allred, particularly in “unscripted” moments. It’s difficult to campaign in such a large state, Allred said, a bit defensively, and pointed out that he had made 50 stops in 22 cities in the past month.

Allred’s restraint is underscored by comparisons with O’Rourke, who was endlessly available to voters. Even Cruz, perhaps relieved to know that he will not have to face O’Rourke again, has spoken with some admiration about O’Rourke and noted that he and Allred are “very different candidates.” In August, Cruz told the Texas Tribune: “Beto O’Rourke was charismatic. He was tireless. He campaigned all over the state, and he became a phenom.”

Matt Angle, a longtime Democratic political strategist in Texas, said Allred’s more traditional, buttoned-up campaign can still be successful, as having high message discipline is usually considered to be a good thing in a candidate. “Some people like the excitement of someone who is spontaneous, [and] there’s a lot to be said about leading a pep rally,” Angle told Mother Jones. “But I like candidates who are trying to figure out how to win.” 

“Democrats in Texas always face this a no-win situation: The more they appeal to moderate voters, the greater the risk they run that the base doesn’t turn out for them…The more they focus on the base, the more they alienate moderate voters and push them over to the Republicans. ”

Some Democrats have worried that Allred is taking the base for granted and focusing too much on moderates. Even though he endorsed Harris’ presidential bid, he’s largely kept her and other national Democrats at arm’s length. In fact, it sometimes seems as though Allred would rather voters not view him as a Democrat at all. In May, he told Texas Monthly that the race is “not about voting for Democrats. This race is about me versus Ted Cruz specifically.” 

Jones, the professor from Rice University, said the best strategy, which Allred seems to be employing, is relying on Harris to mobilize progressives while he targets moderate Republicans and independents. “Democrats in Texas always face this a no-win situation: The more they appeal to moderate voters, the greater the risk they run that the base doesn’t turn out for them,” Jones said. “However, the more they focus on the base, the more they alienate moderate voters and push them over to the Republicans. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Allred’s policies are generally consistent with those of the Democratic Party: He wants to expand Medicaid, codify Roe v. Wade, and reduce gun violence. But he has attempted to distance himself when it comes to immigration and border security, which have become the centerpieces of his campaign. A June poll found that 47 percent of Texans strongly disapproved of President Joe Biden’s approach to immigration and border security. Immigration has become a weak point for Democrats at large, as border crossings have risen to record levels and strained federal and local resources. To combat accusations of being weak on the border, Democrats have begun to support some immigration policies that they opposed under Trump, and, as many have pointed out, are sometimes indistinguishable from Republicans in their rhetoric of being “tough” on the border.

Allred is not an exception, and he has been willing to go further than other members of his party. In January, he voted alongside two other Texas Democrats in support of a Republican-led congressional resolution that condemned Biden’s border policies. On the campaign trail, he often cites his family connection to the Rio Grande Valley—his maternal grandfather was a customs agent at the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville—and he’s said current immigration policies have placed an undue “burden” on border communities.

But Allred’s rhetoric on border security was not always so tough. In 2018, when he was running for the House of Representatives, he called Trump’s border wall “racist” and pledged to tear it down. Yet last October, he commended Biden’s decision to continue border wall construction, describing it as a “necessary step.” In a recent TV spot reminiscent of a Ford F-150 ad, Allred emerges from a white pickup truck to survey the border wall. The law enforcement officials accompanying him declare that Cruz has been “all hat, no cattle” on border security, while Allred has been “tough” and “[stood] up to extremists in both parties.” 

Allred’s campaign declined to respond to specific questions from Mother Jones on border security. His campaign website says he supports “common-sense” immigration measures and pathways to citizenship for those who are “obeying the law, working hard, [and] paying taxes.”

I asked Joaquin Castro, the Democratic congressman from San Antonio, about Allred’s position on the border. He said his congressional colleague is trying to strike a “reasonable balance,” disagreeing “with the dehumanization of people” while pushing for more funding for border security.

Earlier this year, a bipartisan border security bill failed to pass because of pressure from Trump. Described by Biden as the “strongest border deal the country has ever seen,” the measure was the result of negotiations with some of the most conservative members of Congress, including Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford. It would have increased funding for enforcement, restricted asylum applications, and expanded the government’s authority to deport migrants. The bill’s failure presented a unique opportunity for Democrats to turn the border blame game back on Republicans. Allred has campaigned widely on Cruz’s opposition to the deal, saying Cruz voted against it only because, like the former president, “he wanted to have the issue to run on in November.”

A persistent Democratic mantra is that Texas is not so much a red state as a non-voting blue one. In 2020, Manny Garcia, who was then the state Democratic Party’s executive director, told Reuters, “Texas is in play because there are more of us than there are of them.” But organizers emphasize that electoral transformation takes time and investment. Michelle Tremillo, co-executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, said her group focuses on engaging Black and Latino first-time voters and “building that cycle of participation is long-term work.” Democrats already have made progress in county and district elections—such as with Lina Hidalgo, a 27-year-old Colombian immigrant who defeated a popular Republican incumbent to lead the Harris County Commissioners Court in 2018. “With each election cycle, we are chipping away at a statewide gap,” Tremillo said. 

Such voter mobilization efforts are relatively new in Texas, particularly on the statewide level. A decade or so ago, political infrastructure for Democrats in Texas was like “actual infrastructure in Afghanistan,” said Braddock, the journalist. There were Democrats concentrated in large urban counties, but there was “nothing to connect them,” he said. State-level campaigns were largely left to do everything on their own: fundraising, coordinating events, and organizing volunteers for phone banks and door-knocking. Angle, the political strategist, told Mother Jones that back then, “the resources to expand and coordinate to win a statewide race weren’t available.” 

The 2018 O’Rourke campaign showed Democrats that a statewide grassroots effort was both possible and effective. There are now more progressive voter groups in Texas—some run by O’Rourke campaign alums. Katherine Fischer, who worked on O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and now runs Texas Majority PAC, said, “There’s now a much stronger network performing organizing work, which lessens the campaign’s burden.”

“Success this year is not measured by who wins. It’s measured by watching how much closer they get.”

This past summer, Texas Democrats announced that Allred’s campaign would bundle its efforts with downballot Democratic candidates, coordinating volunteers and sharing data. Called the “Texas Offense,” the campaign described it as the “first statewide coordinated grassroots effort in 20 years.” A recent press release reported that the coalition had logged 600 events and 3,000 volunteer shifts. 

Democrats like to call Texas a “game-over” state—if they secure its 40 Electoral College votes, Republicans will find it very difficult to win the presidency. Although Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win in Texas in 1976, Democrats are quick to point out that the margins have progressively narrowed in the last decade. In 2012, Barack Obama lost Texas by 15.8 points. Hillary Clinton lost by nine, and Biden lost by 5.6. This year, Democrats are simply hoping to move the needle closer in the presidential race. “Success this year is not measured by who wins. It’s measured by watching how much closer they get,” said Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a Democratic advocacy group. 

However much Democrats may hope for an Allred victory, not many are expecting one. After 30 years of being proven wrong, Democrats are tempering their optimism—and their low expectations might prove to be a real liability for Allred. On a recent episode of the Bulwark Podcast, O’Rourke told journalist Tim Miller that politics is a “confidence game.” 

“Can [Allred] generate enough excitement to convince people that he can win?” O’Rourke asked. “If people believe this is possible, then they’ll act like it’s possible.” 

At Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), something will be missing: on-air fact-checking.

The Associated Press reports that moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS will not point out the candidates’ inaccuracies during the 90-minute debate, scheduled to take place in New York City at 9 p.m. Eastern. Instead, the network says the candidates can fact-check each other and that its misinformation unit, consisting of about 20 people, will provide real-time fact-checking during the debate in an online live blog and on-air afterwards.

The network’s plan garnered extensive, immediate criticism from reporters and press watchers alike. Some journalists accused CBS of failing to live up to its mission, while others charged that they were bowing to Trump’s camp, which attacked ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir for pointing out Trump’s many lies in his debate earlier this month against Kamala Harris. Trump falsely claimed, for example, that Democrats execute babies after they’re born and that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating peoples’ house pets. Following the debate, CNN reported that Harris lied once, about the historical significance of the unemployment rate under Trump, while Trump lied more than 30 times.

There are a few questions to consider before judging the significance of CBS’s move: Can on-air, live fact-checking actually shape viewers’ opinions about a candidate’s trustworthiness, or has it indeed become part of the culture wars? Also, how many debate viewers will actually visit the CBS website or tune in to watch the post-debate fact-check?

Particularly in these times, journalists have to do more than give the candidates a pair of microphones and let them have at it.

But even without these answers, critics of CBS have a point, considering that Vance also has an extensive record of flat-out lying. Recall, for example, that Vance unleashed the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, leading to Trump repeating it on the debate stage to tens of millions of viewers. And before Trump named Vance his running mate, the Hillbilly Elegy author was one of the many Republicans who went on television to question the 2020 election results—despite the fact that more than 60 lawsuits the Trump campaign filed questioning the integrity of the election were found to be without merit.

Particularly in these times—when the Republican candidate for the presidency is a convicted felon who tried to subvert the 2020 election and still refuses to admit his loss—journalists have to do more than give the candidates a pair of microphones and let them have at it. As Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein wrote in 2019, “Journalists can’t just dispassionately chronicle two equally valid ‘sides.’ A free press needs (and is needed by) lowercase-d democracy. We can’t exist without it.”