01 November 22
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In the state’s midterms—which could determine the balance of the Senate and the integrity of the Presidential race in 2024—Democrats are fighting for the vote. Republicans are fighting to undermine it.
Mastriano is, by almost any measure, one of the most extreme candidates currently running for office. Since 2019, when he was elected to the State Senate, he has supported prayer in schools, the abolition of gay marriage, and conversion therapy, a medically discredited practice to “reverse” homosexuality. Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature has tried to ban abortion, but it has been blocked by the Democratic governor, Tom Wolf. Mastriano has promised to outlaw the procedure without exception, and to prosecute women who get abortions and doctors who perform them for murder. Perhaps most notably, in 2020, Mastriano was one of the architects of the attempt to overturn the results of the Presidential election and award Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Donald Trump. On January 6, 2021, he attended the insurrection at the Capitol. (Mastriano did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article, but he has said that he left the Capitol when it “was no longer a peaceful protest.”) J. J. Abbott, a political strategist with Commonwealth Communications, told me, “He engaged in a conspiracy to overturn Pennsylvania’s election. And there’s little dispute about that.”
In the barn, the story of the stolen election dominated the evening. Webb Kline, who runs Missiontrux, a program that recruits truckers to work as missionaries, took the lectern and compared the Democrats to Nazis. “This is Auschwitz!” he said. “They are coming for you.” The reign of the G.O.P. establishment also needed to end: “Tell them we’ve got our own candidates, and those guys are taking your place.” Kline praised a canny and influential organizer in the state named Sam Faddis, a career C.I.A. operations officer, who had led a team to destabilize Saddam Hussein in Iraq. After Faddis retired, he began writing and editing And Magazine, which is now a newsletter that publishes a mix of news and elaborate conspiracy theories. (Faddis told me that the newsletter “tells the truth.”) Kline said that Faddis had found “definitive evidence” that the election was rigged.
Mastriano has pledged to radically transform voting in the state. Last May, Faddis invited sixty-nine right-wing groups—including We the People, Ballot Security Now, and Unite PA—to the rotunda of the state capitol, in Harrisburg, to sign an “Election Integrity Declaration.” The oath, which begins with the words “We the People,” calls for the abolition of most voting that is not done in-person “with photo identification, proof of U.S. citizenship, state residency and hard copy paper ballots.” These measures could restrict voting among poor people, people of color, and other likely Democrats; they would also force poll workers to count ballots by hand, a process that could make tampering easier. And even the notion of widespread fraud lays the groundwork for future denials of election results. Toni Shuppe, Mastriano’s presumptive nominee for Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who will certify elections if Mastriano wins, led a prayer at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. In Harrisburg, she sanctified the voting declaration by praying for a “spirit of unity” in the burgeoning movement.
When the slushy-and-hot-dog stand closed and the barn rally began to break up, I walked among the crowd. Adele Stevens, a sixty-four-year-old who owns the horse center, milled around, yanked by a border collie. Stevens, who is Puerto Rican, told me that she was tired of hearing Republicans cast as “racist.” She also told me that, unlike Mastriano, she supports “a woman’s right to choose.” But in 2021, amid resentment over Covid lockdowns, she and a dozen neighbors, including Kline, had started a chapter of We the People to combat “abusive” government overreach; they read the Constitution aloud and researched the deep state. “If you were a Democrat trying to figure out the truth about something, it would be hard to find because you’re not part of these groups,” she said. “We’re on Telegram, we read things, we look at alternative news.” She told me that, for example, she had recently learned that George Soros secretly owned Fox News, and that this explained why the network had turned against Trump. (Soros does not own Fox News.) She liked Mastriano’s commitment to taking on voter fraud: “Anyone can just walk in and give someone else’s name.”
Election denialism is now so mainstream that it has become a kind of Republican purity test. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, the majority of G.O.P. midterm candidates have publicly claimed that the 2020 election was stolen. Dan Cox, the Republican candidate for governor in Maryland, has called Mike Pence a “traitor,” and bragged about serving as one of the “volunteer lawyers” who helped Trump fight the results in Pennsylvania. Eric Schmitt, a Senate candidate in Missouri, was among the attorneys general who sued to overturn Pennsylvania’s vote. Kari Lake, who is running for governor of Arizona, has said that she would not have certified Biden’s victory in her state. At the same time, Steve Bannon has called on his supporters to volunteer as precinct captains. “We’re taking this back village by village, precinct by precinct, and they can’t stop it,” he said, on his podcast. Some of these candidates will lose, but some will win, and they will influence how future elections are run. “Hopefully most of these deniers won’t make it into office,” Charlie Dent, who served as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania until 2018, told me. “But elected officials are planting seeds of doubt. And that’s a concern.”
During the primary, Mastriano faced a field of moderate Republican candidates. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, spent eight hundred thousand dollars on ads highlighting Mastriano’s campaign. Observers have argued that the effort reflected a common strategy in which candidates boost their most extreme potential opponents in the hope that they will also be the easiest to beat. When I spoke to Shapiro recently, he emphasized that the ads were critical of Mastriano, and that they probably hadn’t affected the outcome, because Mastriano was already the front-runner: “I didn’t have a primary, so we were ready for the contrast.” But Democrats used this strategy in at least five states this year; in Michigan, they funded John Gibbs, an election denier who has opposed women’s right to vote, and he won his primary by a narrow margin. The tactic, however, was risky. This July, Mastriano was polling within three points of Shapiro. “The idea that Shapiro put money toward getting Mastriano elected is a little unnerving,” Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College, told me. “If you do the math, from the health-of-a-democracy point of view, this loss would be epic.” He added, “It’s Russian roulette.”
In this year’s midterm elections, much hangs on how Pennsylvanians vote. “What’s at stake is faith in the legitimacy of democracy,” Ari Mittleman, who runs the bipartisan nonprofit Keep Our Republic, told me. The race between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz could determine the balance of the U.S. Senate, and is currently a tossup. The shape of the Pennsylvania legislature could decide the future of reproductive access and voting rights in the state. And one of the gubernatorial candidates—who, if he wins, will oversee future elections—is an election denier. “This is my fear,” Malcolm Kenyatta, a Democratic state representative, told me. “Republicans are going to a place of only accepting elections when they win, and that’s dangerous as hell.”
To outside observers, Pennsylvania once appeared reliably blue: the state voted for every Democratic President from 1992 until 2016. “Those victories masked the reality that Pennsylvania was, by most other measures, deeply purple,” Borick said. The legislature has been under G.O.P. control for nearly twenty-five years. This is, in part, a result of the fact that Republican voters historically turn out for midterm elections at higher rates than Democrats. “If you scrape together five to ten thousand dollars from acquaintances at your church or rod-and-gun club, you can knock on one thousand doors and win,” Mittleman said. The oil-and-gas and insurance industries pumped money into Republican campaigns to swing the legislature. In 2011, Republican lawmakers carved some of the most misshapen districts in the nation. For the next seven years, until the state Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional, the districts pushed state politics further to the right.
Trump played on working-class grievances to turn formerly blue swaths of the state red. Pennsylvania’s No. 1 industry is still agriculture, and many farmers came to believe that regulation was driving them out of business; steel workers and coal miners resented that jobs were being moved offshore and that unions were disintegrating. Trump also stoked distrust of the government. Pennsylvanians’ level of trust in state and federal politicians is among the lowest in the country. Katie Muth, a Democratic state senator, told me, “I don’t trust the government, and I’m in it.” In 2020, pandemic lockdowns intensified the anger of those who felt squeezed. “That’s when the bitterness began,” Stevens, of We the People, told me. Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian billionaire who started the investment group Susquehanna with earnings from poker games and horse racing, funded candidates who took part in anti-masking and anti-vax rallies. And, after the 2020 vote, government distrust focussed on the notion that Democrats had stolen the election.
In the past year, grassroots groups, led by Faddis and others, have come to describe themselves as part of a statewide “patriot movement,” which Borick characterized as a “broadly defined populist and xenophobic movement.” Faddis, who has built a network of these groups called the Pennsylvania Patriot Coalition—which includes We the People; Ballot Security Now, which pushes for changes to voting laws; and Firearms Owners Against Crime, which focusses on the Second Amendment—told me, “The patriot movement is the Tea Party, MAGA, and America First all rolled into one.” He added, of his network, “Sometimes, at meetings, it’s hundreds of people, sometimes it’s eight guys in a barn.” Members of these groups think of themselves as part of a kind of conservative civil-rights movement: an alliance with a variety of aims but a shared fight for individual rights. Some groups, like the Three Percenters, are armed militias. A 2020 analysis by ACLED and MilitiaWatch, groups that monitor political violence, ranked Pennsylvania among the states at highest risk of election-related militia activity. A recently leaked membership list of the Oath Keepers militia included four elected officials from Pennsylvania.
The movement is fuelled in some quarters by what scholars call Christian Nationalism, which is centered on the notion that America is and should be a Christian country. Few people self-identify as Christian Nationalists; in 2021, Mastriano asked me, “Is this a term you fabricated?” But social scientists describe it as a belief system characterized by Dominionism: the idea that God has ordained Christians to exercise control over political institutions in order to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. “They don’t believe in one person, one vote,” Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale, told me. “They think they’re involved in a battle between good and evil.”
In 2020, this ideology helped drive the moral call to overturn the election. “Some of their most fanatical supernatural beliefs have been mainstreamed into the MAGA movement, such as the notions that Democrats are demonic or engaged in witchcraft,” Jennifer Cohn, an election-security advocate, told me. In November, 2020, Abby Abildness, the state director of Pennsylvania’s Prayer Caucus and an “apostle” with the New Apostolic Reformation, a network of pastors, hosted a series of “Jericho marches”—religious precursors to the insurrection. Followers gathered in Harrisburg, likening it to the Biblical city of Jericho, where, according to Scripture, God knocked down the walls. At similar marches in some states, people wore animal skins and blew rams’ horns, as they imagined the ancient Israelites did on their way into battle. Abildness declared her intent that, with God’s help, Pennsylvania’s electors would “go to the President” rather than to Biden. (Abildness told me, “Our Jericho march was a peaceable, worshipful prayer march allowing God to move and bring forth His purposes and election integrity in our nation.”) Earlier this year, Vote Common Good, a progressive evangelical group, sponsored a tongue-in-cheek billboard along Pennsylvania’s Route 19 that featured Mastriano and the line “Blessed are the insurrectionists.”
In 2019, Mastriano starred in an independent film, which he also helped fund, called “Operation Resist,” set during the Second World War. In a bit of historical revisionism, the film casts evangelical Christians as members of a religious minority in Germany who were persecuted along with Jews. Mastriano plays an American military spy helping to evacuate them from the country. In one bizarre moment, Mastriano is jumped by a Nazi played by his son, Josiah, whom Mastriano chokes until he is unconscious. “Tell Hitler he’s next!” Mastriano says. The film occasionally skips to the present, where, at a school-board meeting, “politically correct editors” try to erase the Holocaust from school curricula. Mastriano shared a similar message in a recent ad: “Radical leftists are using the schools, the media, and Hollywood to indoctrinate your kids with woke ideology.”
Mastriano grew up in a Catholic, Democratic family in Hightstown, New Jersey. His father, Richard, spent twenty years in the Navy. His mother, Janice, served as a Democratic member of the school board, until, according to the local news organization PennLive, she said that “most homosexuals are pedophiles,” and lost her bid for reëlection. In high school, Mastriano joined an evangelical group called the Way. In 1986, he began a career in military intelligence, serving in Germany; he was later deployed to Iraq, during Operation Desert Storm. At one point, Mastriano has said, his battalion was facing a squadron of Saddam Hussein’s élite forces. At home, Rebbie began a prayer circle to engage in “spiritual warfare,” leading God to send down a sandstorm to vanquish Saddam’s troops. “Prayer changed the course of nature and perhaps the outcome of the war,” Mastriano wrote on his Web site. During the war in Afghanistan, he was deployed there three times. In 2017, Mastriano became a professor at the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Two years later, Mastriano won a special election for the State Senate. He pushed bills that would mandate prayer in schools and allow adoption agencies to turn away same-sex couples. “ ‘Separation of church and state’—anyone who says that, show me in the Constitution where it says it,” Mastriano has said. “It’s never been there.” In the spring of 2020, when Governor Wolf called for places of worship to suspend in-person services, Mastriano appeared at protests alongside armed men who wore fatigues and Hawaiian shirts, a look associated with a militia called the Boogaloo Bois.
In November, 2020, Mastriano agreed—reluctantly, according to leaked e-mails exchanged with associates of the Trump campaign—to be the “point person” for the effort to overturn Pennsylvania’s election. (“I am after truth,” he wrote to me in 2021. “Is it not appropriate to ask questions and seek answers to ensure each person has a legal vote?”) Several counties were delaying certification in an attempt to undermine Joe Biden’s victory. Mastriano convened a mock tribunal at a Gettysburg hotel, with Rudy Giuliani playing the role of faux prosecutor. Via speakerphone, Trump called in to outline his frustrations. “This election was rigged,” he said. Mastriano, who claims that he spoke to Trump “at least fifteen times,” travelled with his son to the White House, but tested positive for COVID and was ushered out of the building. Trump said, “There is no one in Pennsylvania who has done more, or fought harder, for election integrity than State Senator Doug Mastriano.”
Mastriano is a proponent of the so-called independent-state-legislature theory, a fringe idea that holds that, among other things, legislatures have the power to allot electoral votes as they please, regardless of the vote. In 2020, Republican legislators in Pennsylvania selected an alternative slate of electors, who signed certificates claiming that Trump had won. These certificates, along with those of alternative electors from six other battleground states, were submitted to the National Archives for congressional deliberation. Mastriano and several of these electors have since been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the insurrection. (Mastriano has sued the committee to block the subpoena.) This fall, in the state capitol, I watched as two of the fake electors made the rounds in the rotunda, shaking the hands of Republican lawmakers.
In December, 2020, Mastriano took part in two Jericho marches. Later, on a conference call, he prayed that God would help protesters “seize the power” on January 6th. He continued, “Bless these letters that President Trump asked me this morning to send to Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy outlining the fraud in Pennsylvania, and this will embolden them to stand firm and disregard what has happened in Pennsylvania until we have an investigation.” Mastriano was scheduled to address the crowd from the Capitol steps on January 6th, and he used campaign funds to pay for six buses of supporters to travel to Washington. Weeks later, when I spoke to him by e-mail for a previous piece, he told me, “Everyone that I know of left early, returned to their buses and was not involved in any nefarious or illegal activities.” But videos and time-stamped photographs indicate that he was present after the rioting began, at the back of a crowd that tore down police barricades. (Mastriano has denied crossing police lines.) Several of Mastriano’s supporters have been accused of felonies. Sandra Weyer, a woman from Mechanicsburg, was charged with conspiracy to obstruct Congress. Samuel Lazar, a man from Lebanon County who was nicknamed “Face Paint Blowhard” on the Internet, was charged with assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon and disorderly conduct. (The cases are still pending, and both have denied wrongdoing.)
Since securing the G.O.P. nomination, Mastriano has led a highly unconventional campaign. He has blocked reporters from covering his rallies and installed a “security team” of Oath Keepers to guard his events. He has organized much of his campaign on Gab, a fringe social-media platform. Luis Rueda, who led the C.I.A.’s efforts in Iraq, where he was Faddis’s boss, told me that the campaign’s use of election misinformation reminded him of intelligence officers’ deployment of propaganda to press for regime change abroad. “Mastriano is waging a classic PsyOps campaign,” he said. The idea that Mastriano could be in charge of future elections in Pennsylvania has alarmed some observers. “Officials are legally bound to follow the mandate of the secretary of state,” Abbott, the political strategist, said. “There’d be almost no way to reverse their directives in regard to voting.”
The upcoming election has thus become a fight not just to win the vote but to safeguard the integrity of the electoral system. Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, said that he hopes his record has earned him the electorate’s trust. His politics are moderate. As the state’s attorney general, he launched an investigation into Catholic-clergy sex abuse, won a settlement from opioid distributors, and found frackers responsible for environmental crimes. “Shapiro is running on the idea of competency,” Borick told me. “He just looks competent and sane.”
Recently, I met Shapiro on a campaign stop at Super Natural Produce, a grocery store in a Latino neighborhood in Berks County. Shapiro, who is forty-nine, inspected a pile of pork shoulders; their price had doubled since the start of the pandemic. He attempted polite banter with a woman behind a counter, in a mix of English and Spanish, but she didn’t understand, so he smiled and moved on. There were few voters around to court, but Shapiro told me that he believes in “showing up” in person. The strategy has worked in the past; in 2020, he outperformed every other Democrat on the ticket, including Biden. Berks County also has a particular electoral significance. In May, local officials refused to count mail-in ballots with undated envelopes, until a judge intervened. “It actually gives me chills,” Mittleman, of Keep Our Republic, told me.
If Shapiro is trying to woo technocratic Republicans spooked by Trump’s extremism, John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, has taken a left-populist approach, in an attempt to win back working-class defectors. On a recent Sunday afternoon, the gym at Montgomery County Community College was packed with women who had come to see him. Hundreds more waited to enter. Inside, the crowd was a sea of T-shirts in Planned Parenthood pink that read “FETTERWOMAN.” Fetterman was late, and people started calling out “John!,” as if coaxing a rock star onstage. “He’s a no-show!” a woman shouted. Then a campaign volunteer began herding a flock of photographers toward the stage, and John Fetterman, wearing boots and a Carhartt hoodie, appeared. “I am John Fetterwoman!” he announced amid a roar.
Fetterman’s opponent, Mehmet Oz, is a doctor who grew to prominence as a health expert offering dieting advice on “Oprah.” He has suggested that zodiac signs can indicate health information and has touted raspberry and coffee-bean extracts as miracle weight-loss cures. His Republican-primary opponent was David McCormick, a financier whose wife had ties to Trump, but Trump endorsed Oz. Oz’s campaign has focussed on pandemic-era government overreach and election denial.
Fetterman grew up in York, Pennsylvania; his father owned an insurance business. After graduating from the Harvard Kennedy School, he returned to Pennsylvania and served as the mayor of Braddock, and then as the state’s lieutenant governor. Borick told me, “He’s found that spot between higher-educated Democrats, who are the real burgeoning movement, and paired it with an image and experience on the ground—a little Harvard, a little Braddock—rolled into a six-foot-eight-inch package.” He added, “If you’re thinking of long-term remedies that can combat this grassroots, far-right patriot movement, it could be burly Democrats.”
Fetterman gained ground early by taking aim at Oz’s élitism, a tactic that Republicans often employ against Democrats. In August, Fetterman retweeted a video of Oz complaining about the price of “crudités.” Fetterman wrote, “In PA we call this a . . . veggie tray.” He has asserted that Oz lives primarily in New Jersey, not in Pennsylvania. (Oz has responded that he has a house in the suburbs of Philadelphia.) He enlisted Snookie, from “Jersey Shore,” to tell Oz in a video that he’d be “back home in Jersey soon.” He started a petition to induct Oz into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
The strategy seemed to be succeeding. One former Trump voter told me, of Oz, “I don’t know why he needs, like, thirteen houses when most Pennsylvanians only have one.” At a gun-rights rally, I met a bisexual woman carrying a rifle and waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag in rainbow colors. She told me that she became a gun-rights activist in college, after a carful of people drove past her one night calling out homophobic slurs. “They circled me three times and I was sure I was going to be attacked,” she said. “I was eighteen and it wasn’t legal for me to have a gun, and yet I could’ve been killed.” She would never vote for Shapiro. “He tried to bypass the Constitution and ban a gun-parts kit,” she said. But she was also turned off by Oz, and his “ridiculous high-end organic” vegetables: “He is so out of touch.”
Recently, however, Fetterman’s lead has begun to shrink. In May, Fetterman suffered a stroke. There was little effort to pull him from the race. “It’s really difficult to replace a candidate,” Abbott said. “Fetterman had won the primary with such an overwhelming margin.” When he returned to the campaign trail, supporters noticed that he sometimes garbled his words. Republicans posted memes of his flubs.
This summer, I texted Fetterman asking to sit down with him, and he texted back that day. But, when I tracked down his press person, Joe Calvello, at a reproductive-rights rally this fall, he apologized. “John hasn’t granted an in-person interview since his stroke,” Calvello said. Fetterman was still suffering from speech and auditory-processing delays, which affected his ability to understand what was being said and to answer clearly. With the use of closed-captioning, though, he could participate in a conversation. Calvello sent along tweets that he said Fetterman had written, including a response to a photo Oz posted of himself feigning a touchdown at the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium. “The Cowboys blow!” Fetterman wrote. But last week’s live debate did little to assuage voters’ concerns. A team of stenographers transcribed Oz’s comments so that Fetterman could follow along, but he frequently misspoke, and struggled to explain a controversial policy shift. “I do support fracking,” he said, at one point. “I don’t, I don’t—I support fracking. And I stand and—I do support fracking.” A prominent Democrat in Pennsylvania described the event to me as a “total shit show.”
Oz has weaponized Fetterman’s condition in a way that can seem ugly. Fetterman has asked audience members at rallies to raise their hands if they, or a parent or child, have suffered a health crisis. “I certainly hope that you did not have a doctor in your life making fun of it,” he said recently. Some supporters have implied that questioning Fetterman’s fitness is a form of ableist discrimination. In October, an NBC reporter stated that Fetterman had trouble comprehending their small talk, which occurred without captions. The journalist Kara Swisher, who suffered a similar stroke, defended Fetterman: “Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.” Others, pointing out that we often ask Presidential candidates to release their medical records, have argued that Fetterman’s health is relevant to how he will serve as a senator, and will likely influence voters. “This is an audition for a job and people have questions,” Dent, the former congressman, who is supporting Oz, told me.
Eventually, Fetterman agreed to speak to me by video chat, which features automatically generated captions. In the early twenty-tens, I worked in Braddock, and Fetterman’s home was around the block from my office. We sometimes spoke, or shared a takeout order. Back then, at ease on his couch, he seemed brash and self-assured. But onscreen this fall, sitting before a backdrop of yellowed hotel-room curtains, Fetterman looked nervous and gaunt. I asked him about his campaign, and he stumbled, catching himself immediately. “The martyr—excuse me—the margins coming out of red counties are critical,” he said. It was humanizing, in a way, to see him less swaggering. “I have a really much kind of deeper kind of connection now with people that have all those kinds of challenges,” he said. It remained unclear, though, whether this sort of empathy would win at the ballot box. “I’m grateful that I survived,” he told me. “I’m grateful that I’m able to bounce back in a way that allows me to be in the race.”
The U.S. Senate campaign in Pennsylvania has garnered tremendous national attention, and for good reason. But Democrats often focus disproportionately on national races, and neglect races for state legislatures, where much of the country’s rightward lurch is taking place. “Other than something crazy-bananas happening, very little information makes it out of Harrisburg,” Muth, the state senator, told me. “At the top of the ballot, politicians want it to seem like they’re the ones holding the line on abortion or voting. But the truth is, the fate of those decisions really begins at the state level, where no one is paying any attention.”
If Republicans win the Pennsylvania legislature, even a Democratic governor might not be able to block their efforts. In 2020, at the height of COVID, the legislature, led by Mastriano, put forward a referendum to limit the governor’s power to impose lockdowns. It passed with fifty-four per cent of the vote, and has become a blueprint for getting around the governor’s veto. An omnibus referendum, planned for the spring, would ban abortion, roll back voting rights, and mandate election audits. Others could amend the state constitution to, say, change how Presidential electors are appointed. In September, at Trump Tower in New York, Donald Trump met with Faddis, from the Pennsylvania Patriot Coalition; Doug McLinko, a Bradford County commissioner who sued over the state’s voting procedures after the 2020 election; and the political strategist Michael Caputo. The trio said that they sat in Trump’s personal office, overlooking a rainy Central Park, and pressed him to lend his support to a proposed bill or referendum that would ban mail-in voting in the state, except in cases where voters are unable to vote in person. Faddis told me that, with the law as it is, there was a danger that no Republican, including Trump, could win the Presidency in Pennsylvania in 2024. “We wanted Trump to put his finger on the scale,” Faddis said. According to Faddis, Trump was enthusiastic: “He was one hundred per cent in support of it.” (Trump did not respond to a request for comment.)
Muth told me, “If we flip two seats in the State Senate, we can block these kinds of bills.” Rage over the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, in June, may make this possible. Andrea Koplove, from Turn PA Blue, told me, “What I’m hearing at the doors and what we’re seeing with voter registration and volunteers is unprecedented. Women are showing up in droves.” In 2018, only three per cent of voters said abortion was their top issue; in 2022, twenty per cent did. La’Tasha D. Mayes, a reproductive-justice activist from Pittsburgh campaigning for the State House of Representatives, told me that the reversal of Roe has bolstered support for her candidacy: “The general election in Pennsylvania will tell the tale of the future of abortion in our commonwealth.”
On a recent evening at Love City Brewing, in Philadelphia, a group of young women gathered to raise money for progressive legislature candidates. Suburban white women compose a major swing demographic. At the edge of the crowd, Sarah Shelton, a twenty-four-year-old social worker, stood awkwardly by the open bar. “I’ve never gone to anything like this before,” she said. Shelton had recently moved to Philadelphia from Virginia. “I grew up in the white evangelical world,” she told me. “I thought abortion was wrong.” Her grandfather, a Pennsylvania politician, had served in Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, and her brother worked at a conservative organization that had filed an amicus brief to reverse Roe. But in 2016 Shelton told her dad that she was reconsidering her position on abortion. He sent her an article that described the procedure in graphic terms, and she read it sobbing, but stood firm. “I knew that I had to be able to look my dad in the eye and defend it,” she said. At the brewery, she decided to go door to door in support of progressive candidates fighting for reproductive rights.
The spectre of abortion bans is threatening to fracture the loyalty of Republican women, more than a third of whom favor keeping abortion legal in most or all cases. At Local Tap, a bar in Lansdale, Carrie DelRosso, a forty-seven-year-old state representative who is running for lieutenant governor alongside Mastriano, attended a meet and greet with a group of middle-aged women. “I’ve been fighting school boards since I was eleven years old!” she announced. DelRosso, who wore a red business suit, began to recite her stump speech, but the crowd grew restless. “When a lot of people are going door-knocking and talking to family, friends, neighbors, we’re all hearing that a lot of women are concerned about Doug with the women’s-rights issues,” an occupational therapist said. “I feel like it’s really hurting him.” Another woman in the audience called out, “They’re really concerned about abortion!”
DelRosso attempted to answer with a personal anecdote: “My daughter was born at thirty-three weeks. She wasn’t breathing. Josh Shapiro might have killed her!” The audience shifted uneasily. “There’s got to be exceptions!” a woman shouted. DelRosso attempted to change the subject, but the room was lost to her. A woman sitting on a barstool said, of Mastriano, “He seems too much like a colonel,” and stiffened her arms and legs to imitate a wooden soldier. Afterward, I asked DelRosso to clarify her position on abortion. “I support exceptions,” she told me. “Very much.” This was a departure from Mastriano’s platform. Mastriano himself has backpedalled recently, saying that the matter won’t really be up to him but “up to the people.”
This fall, Mastriano began to sink in the polls. He had refused, on a number of issues, to move to the center after the Republican primary. Shapiro has raised more than fifty million dollars for this race, and Mastriano has raised less than four million, leaving him unable to pay for television advertisements. Increasingly, Republicans were speaking out against his candidacy. The Commonwealth Leaders Fund, an organization funded largely by Jeffrey Yass, donated fifteen thousand dollars to Mastriano when he first became a state senator, and the Commonwealth Children’s Choice Fund, another group funded in part by Yass, gave him ten thousand dollars the following year, but those relationships have since ended. Matt Brouillette, the treasurer of the Commonwealth Leaders Fund, told me, “We spent millions of dollars trying to beat Doug in the primary. Our problems with him weren’t about policy—we didn’t think he could win critical swing voters, or that he could govern.” It’s possible, of course, that Mastriano’s supporters are not responding to polls; a recent article on the Bulwark, a center-right news Web site, raised the fear that Mastriano’s base could resemble a fifty-foot shark—invisible to observers, but no less real. Mastriano, certainly, has remained steadfast. In September, he announced that, to win God’s favor, he would undertake a forty-day fast, to end on Election Day.
In September, I joined Shapiro at the Gettysburg battlefield, where, in 1863, the Union Army drove back the Confederates, turning the tide of the Civil War. Mastriano has often used the battlefield as a backdrop for his campaign. Lance Wallnau, a QAnon celebrity, cited Abraham Lincoln’s remarks at the battlefield while speaking at a Mastriano rally: “Pennsylvania will be like Little Round Top, and America will have a new birth of liberty.” In 2020, after a hoaxster posted on social media that Antifa was coming to Gettysburg to pull down Confederate statues, Mastriano showed up, alongside white nationalists, to defend them. This past April, at Gettysburg, Julie Green, a self-styled prophet, told Mastriano that God had this message for him: “Doug, I am here for you and I have not forsaken you. The time has come for their great fall—for the great steal to be overturned.”
Shapiro was filming a video for social media there, in Mastriano’s symbolic back yard. Before he shot it, we climbed the ridge of Culp’s Hill, where Confederate soldiers had battled Union troops to claim the high ground. Shapiro noted that Mastriano had chosen to wear a Confederate uniform for his faculty photograph at the U.S. Army War College in the 2013-14 academic year, and until recently it had hung in the institution’s hall. “He opted to wear the uniform of a traitor,” Shapiro said, “those who literally fought to defend slavery.” After we descended Culp’s Hill, and Shapiro wandered off toward the camera, I spied three Civil War reënactors wilting in wool uniforms. Two were wearing Union blue; the third was clad in green—the uniform of a Union sniper called a Berdan Sharpshooter, he explained. I asked them how the upcoming election, and the political tenor in Pennsylvania, had become so polarized. “Look down at where you’re standing,” the man in green said.
Two hours later, I accompanied Shapiro to his campaign office in Chambersburg. Gathered there was a group of young men who’d formed a Students for Shapiro organization at Shippensburg College, in a traditionally red part of the state. “We’re like a blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup,” one told me. I also spoke to a mother and daughter, both registered Republicans, who were voting for Shapiro. The daughter, who was in her late forties, asked to remain anonymous, for fear that speaking against Mastriano might cost her her job. She found Mastriano’s mix of militarism and Scripture alarming. “He’s a Hitler wannabe,” she said. She wasn’t voting for Oz, either: “His signs look best when you turn your head. They read ‘NO.’ ” Sheri Morgan, the chairwoman of the county Democratic committee, wearing a pair of aviators, noted that there was real rage around this election. She told me that recently, near a polling place, “a Mastriano supporter claimed that I was intimidating him by standing outside. He screamed at me, ‘I’m going to fucking run you over!’ ” She added, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Mastriano will, in all likelihood, lose the election. “Women may win this round, but one electoral loss will do little to defeat the movement,” Borick, the political scientist, said. And whether or not the results of the election will be honored remains a question. “The biggest threat to the election isn’t voter suppression, it’s subversion,” Kenyatta, the state representative, told me. Around the country, Republican candidates are refusing to commit to honoring the results. “I’m going to win the election, and I will accept that result,” Kari Lake, the gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, has said. An aide to Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, told the Times that there was “no reason to believe” that state officials “are very serious about secure elections.” DelRosso has dodged the issue, saying, “We’re not going to lose. I’m a winner.” Mastriano has ignored multiple requests from media outlets for comment on the subject. But he has already raised doubts about the election, claiming, in a now deleted Facebook video, that it would take a large turnout “to overcome the fraud.”
Battles over results are looming. Courts have issued contradictory rulings on whether undated ballots should be counted, setting up a future contest. After meeting with Toni Shuppe’s organization Audit the Vote, York County commissioners have decided to count ballots by hand. Since 2020, election workers across the state have received numerous threats. A spokesperson for Pennsylvania’s secretary of state told me, “It’s disturbing that these workers are still experiencing these issues.” Some of Mastriano’s supporters have announced that a motorcycle rally called Governor Douglas Mastriano’s Ride to Victory!!! will take place on Election Night in the state capital, which observers worry may be a harbinger of violence. “This is the warmup act for 2024,” Mittleman, of Keep Our Republic, told me.
At Gettysburg, just below Culp’s Hill, there is a creek called Spangler’s Spring, where both Union and Confederate boys collected water; the place became a symbol of common ground. Today, the spring is barred by a grate and a padlock. “There is no common ground,” Shapiro told me. The most frightening aspect of Mastriano’s candidacy, he said, was his repeated refusal to respect the electoral process. “I’ve run against seven or eight Republicans and wanted to win every race, but I’ve never felt they posed a threat to the underlying system,” Shapiro said. “Never.” He added, “This guy is a clear and present danger to our democracy.”
The artilleryman nicknamed Lysyi (R) says he is fond of the BM-21 Grad missile launcher, which is more than 50 years old. (photo: BBC News)
Tired and battered by months of war, Ukrainians are nevertheless undeterred by Russia's offensive. Our correspondent travelled across the east of the country to hear moving accounts from soldiers and civilians, including a grandmother of 75 who was beaten, cut and raped in her home by an enemy soldier.
Medics taking a break, and soldiers who have brought in wounded comrades, stand in the doorway smoking, listening to the incessant drum of heavy autumn rain, punctuated by sharp blasts and dull crumps of shellfire.
In the street outside are the burnt-out hulks of cars and vans. Broken glass and smashed masonry are piling up next to buildings that have been hit.
A couple of dogs, once family pets judging by their desire for human company, shrink into corners of the porch. One of them lies trembling, not interested in scraps of food offered by the soldiers.
Most of Bakhmut's civilians have long since moved to somewhere safer. The living creatures still there under fire share a certain solidarity. The dog, one of the exhausted-looking hospital staff explained, was traumatised by the sound of explosions.
On a journey from Bakhmut in Donbas in the east, to the other end of the front line in Kherson Oblast, it was clear that Ukrainians are tired, battered, locked into the debilitating routines of war, but still determined to fight the Russians to stay independent.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision in February to invade, to subdue a people he claims are the same as Russians, has sharpened their sense of nationhood.
The surgeon
One of the surgeons at the war hospital in Bakhmut, Volodymyr Pihulevsky, agreed to talk. He worked in emergency medicine in a civilian hospital until he was mobilised on 24 March.
We spoke in an improvised operating theatre, with two tables. It was clean and well supplied, but the monitors and resuscitation equipment in it were basic.
The hospital was quiet, as rain pelted down from low cloud that hung over Bakhmut - weather that usually reduces the volume of shelling. The theatre was not in use, so Volodymyr had time to talk.
"Fortunately, this morning, there are not so many wounded people. But there were days and even weeks when there were lots of wounded, including shrapnel wounds, traumatic leg amputations as a result of shelling or mine explosions, also bullet wounds.
"We have had to work 24 hours a day, even two days in a row without even a chance to sit down - we just stop for food, or the toilet."
Volodymyr also takes his turn on the front line, giving immediate medical aid to the wounded.
"This was very difficult. Sometimes the choice is between risking your own life and the lives of wounded guys. I've never seen someone to be scared to die. No-one sits and waits even during the shelling. Everyone goes to take the wounded, to give them first aid. Then we put them in a car and bring them here.
"It is not as psychologically difficult as it is scary… only people with a mental illness don't have fear."
The surgeon said that in the war hospital they had to treat wounds that before the invasion they might see once or twice in a few years.
"Working in the emergency hospital, I saw many deaths. But that was in peacetime. Here I see how our boys fight. The wounds they receive ruin their lives. It depresses me more than anything else.
"It's terrible to see the pain of our soldiers. To see the trauma they get in this war. The most terrible thing is to see the suffering of our country. This is the most terrible. The rest is just our job."
A few minutes later a soldier walked in from an ambulance with a hand smashed by a sniper bullet. Another was carried in on a stretcher, soaked in mud and blood with multiple shrapnel wounds. Volodymyr walked rapidly to the triage area to get to work.
Anyone expecting the histrionics of emergency rooms in TV mini-series would be disappointed. Volodymyr and the medics in Bakhmut were calm, spoke quietly, and moved fast to stabilise the patients before more men were brought in from the front line.
The artilleryman
To get to the fighting means driving along tracks churned into deep mud in the endless farmland.
Our BBC team had permission to visit an artillery unit tucked away in a narrow stretch of woods in a valley. We promised not to say anything to reveal the location of their dugouts, other than the fact that their camp was on one of the Donbas front lines.
The constant soundtrack was shellfire - sometimes close, loud, sharp exchanges with the Russians, sometimes bass notes rumbling in from further down the long and active confrontation line.
The unit was armed with two BM-21 Grad missile launchers. The man in charge of one of them did not want to use his real name. Call me Lysyi, he said, a nickname that means "Bald".
Before he signed a military contract in 2019, the artilleryman was a builder, who renovated apartments. Now he commands a highly destructive weapons system, whose designers in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s mounted an oblong array of 40 missile firing barrels on a powerful truck. The BM-21 is a tried and trusted killing machine. It can devastate an area of around a hectare (10,000 sq m) - in other words a large field of vehicles and troops.
Lysyi is in his early 30s. He supervised the loading and firing of the Grad like a man who had plenty of practice. It is not high tech. His crew screwed the fuses on to the front of the missiles by hand and tightened a small fastening to keep them in place. Then they manhandled the missiles into the barrels. When one of them failed to click into place, Lysyi gave it a shove with his insulated, knee-high Wellington boot. All the men wore them, as the autumn mud is so deep and viscous.
The artilleryman was matter-of-fact about his life since the invasion.
"I was woken up at 4:20am February 24th. Since then, I've been fighting. It's the same as it was at the beginning. It is very monotonous. We move from place to place.
"What do I do? We go and launch shells at the targets that they give us. We are fighting. No-one said this was going to be easy. But we manage."
The unit's two BM-21 launchers are both parked in scrapes bulldozed out of the hillside. They don't fire from their camp.
When the target co-ordinates came through, the truck and its missiles were driven out of the scrape, a green monster emerging from liquid mud that went halfway up its huge tyres. The Grad lumbered through more mud to a wide-open field on higher ground, that looked badly exposed and felt it when Russian shells started landing.
Lysyi and his men worked fast, ignoring the impacts about a hundred yards (91 metres) away, and let loose two volleys of missiles. Then they have to pack up and move fast before the Russians hit their position with counter battery fire. I could see the smoke and flame as a couple more Russian shells detonated.
Our Hyundai 4x4, defeated by the struggle to follow the huge BM-21 through the thick mud, would not start. At least the mud absorbed some of the force of the incoming shells. Before the Russian gunners could find their range, Lysyi and his men stopped so we could hop aboard their BM-21. They took us back to a safer place, then they went back to rescue the 4x4 and its driver, who had stayed under fire trying to start it.
Off-road vehicles, even ones that might have spent earlier, peacetime lives on the school run, are in short supply in Ukraine.
Back at the camp, Lysyi said they would like more modern equipment, but he had a grudging affection for the ancient Grad BM-21.
"My truck is 52 or 53 years old. We repair it on our own, give her a second life, because it's our lives at stake."
What about the operation we had just seen, launching missiles under fire, and driving in a vehicle more than half a century old over a field clogged with mud as more shells landed?
"Of course, everyone is scared. But we overcome our fear and go fight. There was shelling. Nothing dramatic. We escaped the shelling. Our 'old lady' helped us. We escaped."
The teacher
Liudmyla Mymrykova loves her home village. It is mostly in ruins now, but it is easy to see how before the war Myroliubivka must have been a peaceful oasis in the farmland around the city of Kherson. All the houses have their own land. Wild birds perch on the woodpiles, in search of insects. Ducks, chickens and geese wander through the overgrown gardens of owners who fled months ago.
Ukrainian soldiers, who recaptured the village in September as they started their push towards Kherson, have taken over the few houses that have intact walls and roofs. One of them is Liudmyla's, with neat rows of fruit trees and roses that need pruning.
I met her in a safer city nearly two hours away, in a tiny house lent to her by relatives. As her great-grandson Anatoly, almost a toddler, gurgled and played in the room next door, Liudmyla told me how she longs to go home, and how her beloved village descended into hell when the Russians captured it in March. How she survived months of terror, and how she was beaten, cut and raped in her own living room.
Liudmyla is a composed woman of 75, a widow who was a teacher until she retired, and well known locally as the village's historian. At the start of the year she did not believe that President Putin would order his men deeper into Ukraine, with such brutal consequences.
"We considered them to be a fraternal nation. I couldn't imagine [they] could do things like that to people."
The Russians arrived on 24 March. The first ones, Liudmyla said, came through Crimea, and behaved well. Often in wars frontline soldiers are more disciplined than rear echelon troops who follow them.
The worst came from the east, from militias raised in the separatist, pro-Moscow Ukrainian regimes in Luhansk and Donetsk. They terrorised the village, demanding vodka and wine, stealing cars and fuel and looting houses. The militiamen took men away in hoods, and tortured them - in at least one case until he died.
Liudmyla says that the Russian troops, who were frightening enough, "did not consider the militiamen to be human". The supposed allies fell out, drunkenly brawling with each other, and even exchanging gunfire.
A month into the occupation, Liudmyla had the chance to leave with her daughter Olha for territory held by the Ukrainians. But she refused Olha's pleas for her to get to safety, because she was hoping to safeguard her property, and especially the collection of documents she had assembled about the history of her village and her family.
Once Olha and a close friend who lived nearby had left, Liudmyla was alone, always scared, taking medication for high blood pressure but finding the strength to navigate her way through long, lonely days. Her dogs would bark when strangers approached. Then, on the night of 13 July: "At half past eleven I heard a very loud knock at my window.
"My body stiffened. Who could it be? My face, my body, my legs, my arms felt paralysed. I closed all the windows, but one of them was still a little open. I saw a soldier there. I hesitated about letting him in. What should I do? I didn't have anything to hit him. Would I be able to cope with him?
"When I opened the door, he immediately punched me in the face. He knocked out two of my teeth and broke my nose. I was covered with blood. He started beating me in the chest with the butt of his rifle. He hit my body. He started hitting me on the head. I didn't understand what I'd done wrong.
"He pulled my hair. And since it was dark in the kitchen, he couldn't see where he was, and he staggered around the furniture, then threw me onto the sofa and began to strangle me. I could not swallow water for two weeks.
"Then he took off my clothes and raped me. He cut my stomach. Until now, I have scars on my stomach. The deep ones still haven't healed, the smaller cuts have healed."
Liudmyla recognised the man, who was aged around 60 and stank of alcohol. He was, she thinks, from a separatist militia. He had already been to her house, stealing diesel, then bringing soldiers who had stayed there until she persuaded them to leave.
The rapist demanded tobacco and beat her again with his gun when she did not have any. He opened fire, spraying bullets around the room. Liudmyla expected to die. She thought of her family.
"I said goodbye to my children, my grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, I never thought I would stay alive."
He did not leave, she says, until 05:20 the next morning, telling her that if she reported what had happened to the Russians, he would come back to kill her. She stayed with neighbours, explaining away her injuries by pretending that she had fallen into the cellar.
On the phone, the strain in Luidmyla's voice told her daughter Olha that something terrible had happened. She pressed her mother, and in the end it was a relief for Luidmyla not to have to hide the attack.
Four days after the rape, she joined other Ukrainians who managed to get to a local town, still occupied by the Russians but away from her attacker, and from there managed to cross the front line to re-join her daughter and family.
In the kitchen of her borrowed house, sitting next to Olha, who is also a widow, Liudmyla Mymrykova explained why she wanted to talk about her ordeal. It was the only time in an interview that lasted around an hour that her eyes filled with tears. In her hand she held a bullet that, she said, the man had dropped before he left her house.
"I want to shout to the whole world to stop all this, to stop this bloody war as soon as possible. I want Russians to know how their husbands, their sons, their parents are torturing Ukrainians. How are we guilty? We are hardworking, peaceful people. We don't disturb anyone."
I asked Liudmyla how she kept going when she had been through hell.
"How do I stay strong? The love of my land, and my native village, and my people. We're peaceful and hardworking in our village and supported each other during the occupation. They shared the last piece of bread. A lot of people were starving. We ground wheat seeds that had sprouted in a coffee grinder and baked cakes, because there was nothing to eat.
"This was a horror, this was simply a horror," she said.
"Putin and the Russians will never be forgiven until the end of their world… for what they did to the Ukrainians. There will be no forgiveness."
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Truckers supportive of President Jair Bolsonaro block a highway to protest his runoff election loss to former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Embu das Artes on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Nov. 1. (photo: Andre Penner/AP)
At one point, more than 300 roads were partly or totally blocked, leading the country’s top election authority to demand that the Federal Highway Police use “all necessary measures” to unblock the highways. That authority, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, threatened the head of the police with imprisonment and fines of nearly $20,000 if he did not comply by midnight Tuesday.
On Tuesday morning, Moraes said the Federal Highway Police was not responding and authorized state police to step in, beyond their jurisdiction, and authorized fines for truckers.
The highway police, who have strong ties to Bolsonaro, set up checkpoints on election day in areas heavily populated by supporters of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, delaying voters in some cases by hours. However, the union representing the road police issued a statement Tuesday squarely blaming the incumbent’s refusal to recognize the results for the protests.
“The posture of the current president of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro, in maintaining silence and not recognizing the results of the polls has made it difficult to pacify the country, encouraging some of his followers to adopt blockade actions on Brazilian roads,” the union said.
Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court declared Lula the winner of the Sunday vote; he’s due to take office in January. The country is now on edge as it waits to see whether the Trumpian Bolsonaro accepts the result. The president and his supporters spent months sowing unfounded doubts about the integrity of the election system, laying the groundwork to claim fraud in the event of a loss.
Lula is the latest in a string of leftists across Latin America to claim the presidential sash. He was quickly congratulated Sunday by world leaders including President Biden. He spoke with Biden and met with Argentine President Alberto Fernández on Monday.
Bolsonaro’s intentions now have been the subject of conflicting reports. On Tuesday, he sought a meeting with the members of Brazil’s Supreme Court, but the judges refused to meet with him until he recognizes the results, the UOL outlet reported.
The highway police announced Tuesday that 421 blockades had gone up by Monday night, though security forces had managed to clear 200 locations. By Tuesday afternoon, there were still at least 267 active blockades. The actions affected highways, bus stations and airports; at least 25 flights were canceled. Brazilian media reported that a United Airlines flight from Chicago to São Paulo returned to the United States because access to the international airport was blocked.
The protests have also caused shortages of fuel in some parts of the country. In the northern state of Santa Catarina, authorities said 95 percent of the gas stations in Joinville, the capital, were out of fuel Tuesday after three days of trucker protests. Long lines at gas stations were seen in various cities across the country, and local media reported citizens’ complaints over a sharp rise in fuel prices in the state of Florianopolis.
Observers described the situation as increasingly worrying, but not yet as critical as the truckers’ strike that paralyzed the country in 2018. It had the potential to explode, however, as far-left groups announced that they would potentially move to confront Bolsonaro supporters blocking roads if the police forces wouldn’t.
“We hope the police welcome us in the same way they have the bolsonaristas,” the Homeless Workers Movement, a left-wing group, said in a statement.
On the main highway from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, traffic was blocked in nine stretches and remained partially blocked in two others at 11 a.m. However, officials in São Paulo state said they expected to unblock all major roads in the state by this afternoon. Road access to Guarulhos International Airport, the main airlink in South America’s largest city, had already been cleared.
Observers said the police response appeared to vary from state to state, with forces — including federal and local police — being more aggressive in some and more passive in others.
The protests had echoes of this year’s Freedom Convoy, which paralyzed the Canadian capital for weeks. Robert Muggah, co-founder of Rio-based Igarapé Institute, a think tank monitoring the protests, described them as “headless” and without “a centralized leadership.”
“We don’t see a coherent strategy that unifies them,” Muggah said. “What we do see are small groupings of militant Bolsonaro supporters intent on disrupting and destabilizing the election results, who are highly motivated and, I think, are waiting to hear from their leader on what they believe: which is that the election was stolen from them.”
He added, “It’s not a large-scale movement yet. I think that the risk right now is that it grows.”
Images on social media showed hundreds of large trucks and cars parked and crammed together across a highway in Maraba, a city in Sao Paulo state, as smoke billowed from what seemed like burning tires.
Despite legal actions and state police moving in to clear the protests, Bolsonaro supporters were using the Telegram app to call for further national protests in the country’s largest cities Wednesday, and urging people to block highways and streets
“There is no doubt there was fraud,” one missive on social media read. “Brazil will not cave to the system’s frauds and in the next days you will be part of history!”
Some supporters, however, were waiting for their leader, who remains silent more than 36 hours after the election, to give them marching orders.
“I really hope Bolsonaro makes a statement, the truckers and the people who are out on the streets need munition, and an incentive,” one woman wrote.
Others urged people to join in and bring food and water to the truck drivers.
Sao Paulo governor Rodrigo Garcia urged people not to join the roadblocks Tuesday and to “respect the election results” or face large fines. He authorized police to use force to remove demonstrators from roadways.
Several other governors followed his lead, including Claudio Castro in Rio de Janeiro state, who asked Brazilians to “respect the law.”
There was evidence of a more forceful police response unfolding in some areas. In Rio de Janeiro, images on social media showed police officers in riot gear and municipal guards pepper-spraying several protesters standing in the middle of the highway trying to block cars from passing through. The protesters, some wrapped in the Brazilian flag, fell back. One officer in a black mask pepper-sprayed a woman who was holding a sign standing in front of a car. She fell to the ground covering her face, while other protesters recorded and shouted at him.
Rio’s Mayor Eduardo Paes retweeted the video, praising the officer’s actions.
“We respect the law here, we won’t tolerate riots!” he wrote.
According to local media reports, a shipment with more than 500,000 eggs used for production of H3N2 influenza vaccines has been stopped in Sao Paulo state due to the roadblocks. According to the Butantan Institute, a major research center which produces vaccines for the Ministry of Health, the delays could cause the loss of 1.5 million vaccines, O Globo reported.
The demonstrations have been organized in part via Telegram groups. Bolsonaro supporters in these groups were asking Tuesday for donations of money, water and food and encouraging people to join roadblocks. Some of the Telegram groups have more than 35,000 members.
Lawmakers close to Bolsonaro urged the truckers to maintain the protests. They included Carla Zambelli, who pointed a gun at an unarmed Black man after a political argument in São Paulo on Saturday. She recorded a video that spread quickly in the groups asking people to be calm while standing by the president.
On Monday, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the president’s eldest son, was the first in his inner circle to speak publicly after the result was announced. He told his supporters to raise their heads and not to give up on Brazil. Then he tweeted: “Dad, I’m with you come what may!
Another son, Jair Renan Bolsonaro, posted a story on Instagram defending his father: “The devil saw me with my head down and smiled, but only until I said amen. You will see that your son does not run from the fight! I carry Bolsonaro in my name!”
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A poll worker handles ballots for midterm elections in Maricopa County, Arizona on 25 October. (photo: Getty)
Voting rights groups, federal lawsuits and the Justice Department are sounding the alarm over a surge of voter suppression campaigns in closely watched states, Alex Woodwardreports
In Michigan, a far-right group launched “Operation Overwatch” to monitor the polls and hunt down perceived election crimes. A press release announcing the campaign warned voters “we are watching” 10 times.
And in Pennsylvania, right-wing conspiracy theorists who continue to doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election are among thousands of people joining the ranks of poll observers this year, a multi-million dollar recruitment campaign backed by the Republican National Committee.
The latest calls to action join an army of election observers – fuelled by bogus claims of widespread election fraud and Donald Trump’s ongoing false narrative that the presidency was stolen from him – preparing for Election Day and its aftermath, and aiming to do what Trump and his allies failed to do in 2020.
More than 40 per cent of voters are now worried about threats of violence or intimidation at the ballot box this year, according to polling from Reuters.
The same survey found that 67 per cent of voters are worried about post-election violence.
An elections task force at the US Department of Justice also found that all three states are hotbeds for threats against election workers.
Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers have advanced dozens of bills to hand control of elections to GOP-dominated state legislatures, while a growing “grassroots” movement among Republican-aligned groups and right-wing activists has urged supporters to embed themselves into election administration at the local level.
“We’re seeing similar types of threats today” compared to the lead up to 2020 elections, according to Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, speaking to the US Conference of Mayors on 23 October.
But threats to 2022 elections are coming from a “very ground-up, localized effort,” she said.
“Focus on county over country. Capture your local county, then several of them, then maybe your state,” said Ms McCord, quoting from a post on right-wing social network Gab.
“We’ve seen a GOP candidate in Idaho have an effigy hung in his yard,” she said. “We’ve seen a Democratic candidate in eastern Washington be shot with a BB gun while putting up signs. … These are very localized efforts. They’re very threatening, and they continue to grow.”
‘Things are getting worse’
An anonymous group named “Ben Sent Us” recently sent threatening letters to Democratic officials in Arizona with a warning: “We are watching you.”
“They will be locating your homes, your social media profiles and pictures and posting them online,” according to the letter. Judges complicit in what the group perceived as election fraud “will be considered a traitor and dealt with accordingly, as will you,” the letter reads.
Ben Sent Us is mentioned several times in two federal lawsuits from Arizona groups, alleging masked and armed “vigilantes” and other far-right activists are baselessly accusing voters of committing fraud and photographing them and their vehicles in an effort to stop them from casting their ballots.
According to a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters on 25 October, the defendants spent months “actively planning, coordinating, and recruiting for widespread campaigns to surveil, intimidate, and harass Arizona voters at ballot drop boxes, baselessly accuse them – directly or indirectly – of committing voter fraud, and spread false information about legally valid forms of voting.”
Another lawsuit from Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and voting rights organisation Voto Latino warns that “voters will be subjected to intimidation, threats, and perhaps even force or physical harm at the hands of vigilante drop box watchers” without a court’s intervention.
“Things are getting worse,” according to the complaint.
Right-wing groups Lions of Liberty and the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, an Arizona offshoot of the far-right anti-government militia group the Oath Keepers, have organised “Operation: Dropbox” to assemble “volunteers and co-conspirators in the surveillance of drop boxes in Arizona and the monitoring and recording of drop box voters,” according to the lawsuit from the League of Women Voters.
Jim Arroyo, the former vice president of Arizona’s chapter of the Oath Keepers, has encouraged volunteers to wear their Oath Keepers gear while monitoring drop boxes, according to the complaint.
“Your shirts and hats are what tell the world you’re not ashamed to be an Oath Keeper, or afraid of the government just because of that crap that happened on [6 January, 2021], which was completely staged,” he told the group, according to the lawsuit.
Several members of the Oath Keepers face charges of seditious conspiracy against the government for their roles in the Capitol attack.
Clean Elections USA and its founder Melody Jennings are named in both lawsuits, which accuse defendants of violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which prohibits “conspir[ing] to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner.”
In a recent interview with Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast, which has repeatedly amplified baseless election conspiracy theories, Ms Jennings said her group has “people ready to go in 18 states to go out in shifts and guard these boxes.”
“We’ve got people out there, on the ground and doing the work,” she said.
Clean Elections USA’s website says its mission is to “legally deter people from committing voter fraud” by watching drop box locations.
“We are looking for true patriots to take a stand and watch the drop boxes,” according to the group’s website. “We want to gather video (and live witness evidence) of any ballot tampering that takes place in real time.”
The group seeks volunteers to stake out drop-box locations and “take notes/video of any suspicious activity within what the laws of your state permit”.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has referred at least six incidents of alleged voter intimidation to federal law enforcement within the last week alone. Early voting in the state began on 12 October.
“Anyone attempting to interfere with that right should be reported,” the state’s top election official said in a statement.
The US Attorney’s office in Arizona is considering “several federal felony charges from alleged criminal activity” in the state.
“We have a long history of civil dialogue and civic engagement here in Arizona, and we will vigorously safeguard all Arizonans’ rights to freely and lawfully cast their ballot during the election,” according to a statement on 26 October.
Conspiracy theorists and far-right activists have conflated voters using drop boxes with “mules” illegally hoarding ballots, or believe all forms of voting with absentee or mail-in ballots are ripe for fraud or illegitimate, echoing baseless claims from Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2,000 Mules.
Arizona law allows caregivers to deposit several absentee ballots at a time to people to whom they provide care, including people in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and similar residences.
Mark Finchem, a prominent election denier who has refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, is the Republican candidate running for Arizona’s secretary of state.
In a post on Twitter on 24 October, he appeared to support the Clean Elections USA effort.
“I think voters should hold mules and fraudsters accountable by recording them,” he wrote. “If they are doing they [sic] right thing, they have nothing to fear.”
Mr Finchem’s Democratic opponent Adrian Fontes suggested that armed demonstrators harassing voters at drop boxes could end up getting someone killed.
“To the thugs terrorizing people at dropboxes with masks, with weapons: You’re not Batman. You’re not heroes,” he said in a statement. “You’re anti-American bullies who are breaking the law and intimidating voters based on a lie.”
‘The exhaustion is real’
On his podcast, Bannon said right-wing poll watchers and vote challengers will “challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it.”
“We don’t care if you don’t like it,” he said “We don’t care if you’re going to run around and light your hair on fire. That’s the way this is going to roll.”
Partisan poll watchers have been a feature of American democracy for decades, but there is a growing movement to install far-right activists tied to a “Stop the Steal” campaign that was central to the Capitol riot and local efforts to challenge election outcomes.
During a training session with election-denying Pennsylvania group Audit the Vote PA, an official with the Republican National Committee told participants that the group filled 6,000 poll watcher positions in the state this year, compared to 1,000 in 2020, according to Reuters.
Michigan Grassroots Alliance, supported by an array of conspiracy theorists including Mike Lindell and Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, announced its own poll-watching campaign: “Operation Overwatch.”
“Now that we know how the integrity of the 2020 election was subverted, individuals and organizations dedicated to election integrity will now be proactive in their efforts to ensure lawful elections,” according to a statement from the group.
The Election Integrity Network, which has held election observer training sessions across the US, is funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Washington group with ties to the former president.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is listed as its “senior partner”. Mr Trump’s political action committee Save America gave the group $1m last year, according to campaign finance records.
Election officials and voting rights organisations have repeatedly warned that false claims of fraud and election-related misinformation deliberately casting doubt on the nation’s electoral process risk undermining confidence in elections and could pose a grave threat to American democracy.
In the aftermath of 2020 elections, Mr Trump’s legal team amplifies baseless claims that machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems had compromised millions of votes and manipulated the outcome, among several unsubstantiated conspiracy theories surrounding the company.
Dominion employees and their families were “put into danger” with the spread of false claims against them, the company’s CEO John Poulos told CBS News.
“Their lives have been upended and all because of lies,” he said. “It was a very clear calculation that they knew they were lies. And they were repeating them and endorsing them.”
Dominion has filed eight lawsuits seeking more than $10bn in damages against Fox News and other networks and personalities who have amplified lies about the company.
The proliferation of election conspiracy theories and disinformation has also made election work unsustainable for hundreds of workers, opening a vacuum for right-wing activists that could ignite election chaos.
One in six election workers have been threatened because of their job, according to a 2022 survey from the Brennan Center for Justice, revealing the “damaging” and “sustained” attacks against people who help run the nation’s elections and put the business of “election administration and our democratic system in serious danger.”
More than half of poll respondents reported harassment on social media, on the phone, or while on the job.
One in five workers said they might quit before 2024. Among those who said they plan to leave their jobs before 2024 elections, one-third cited political attacks against a process that they know is fair and honest as one of central reasons for leaving.
Election officials have left their jobs in 50 out of 67 counties in Pennsylvania because of threats, harassment and intimidation against them and their families.
“The exhaustion is real for election officials,” the Brennan Center’s Lawrence Norden told The New York Times.“The partisanship and polarization around elections – and election officials themselves – is a strain and a threat to our elections.”
Federal law enforcement agencies have reviewed hundreds of threats nationwide against people involved with elections. Nearly 60 per cent of threats observed by election workers were in states that experienced election challenges from Mr Trump and GOP allies, according to a report from a Justice Department task force.
A staff report from the House Oversight Committee in August found that “bad actors are undermining faith in our democracy by spreading lies about elections for their own partisan and financial gain,” according to committee chair Carolyn Maloney.
The report includes several graphic examples of the threats to election workers.
After his home address was leaked, one election official in Texas received threats telling him that he would be hunted down, according to the report. Another message threatened to “hang him when convicted for fraud and let his lifeless body hang in public until maggots drip out of his mouth.”
State and local officials across the US have issued advisories to warn voters of threats of intimidation at the polls, and to ensure voters will be protected when they cast their ballots.
The Justice Department also has launched an Election Day programme to combat “complaints of voting rights concerns, threats of violence to election officials or staff and election fraud.”
“Every citizen must be able to vote without interference or discrimination and to have that vote counted in a fair and free election,” according to a statement from Ohio’s First Assistant United States Attorney Michelle M Baeppler. “Election officials and staff must be able to serve without being subject to unlawful threats of violence.”
ALSO SEE: Trump Organization:
Criminal Tax Fraud Trial Begins in New York
Lawyers for Trump’s companies blasted the prosecution’s top witness, while admitting he’s still drawing a paycheck.
Lawyers for the Trump Organization came out swinging in the trial’s opening arguments Monday against the elderly financier who loyally served Trump’s family business for some five decades, rose to become its chief financial officer, and then admitted to tax crimes in August and agreed to testify against the company in its criminal tax fraud case.
Yet the Trump Organization’s bizarre and seemingly contradictory position on Weisselberg—that he’s a greedy felon who also deserves to keep drawing a company paycheck—underscores the key question about the prosecution’s supposed star witness in this trial: Whose side is Trump’s money man really on?
Weisselberg refused to cooperate in the broader investigations into Trump individually but now faces deadly-serious criminal jeopardy if he fails to assist the prosecutors battling Trump’s company in this trial. The judge warned Weisselberg that he could add more than a decade to Weisselberg’s five-month sentence if the financier lies to protect Trump on the stand. Weisselberg won’t be sentenced until after the trial ends.
This dynamic puts Weisselberg in a dangerous situation with mixed incentives: a financial incentive that aligns with Trump’s company, but also a legal imperative to help prosecutors nail that same company for alleged crimes. The forthcoming trial may now turn on how Weisselberg navigates that situation when he testifies in the coming weeks.
Weisselberg, 75, pleaded guilty to 15 felonies in August after prosecutors accused him and Trump’s company of channeling off-the-books benefits to senior executives to avoid taxes. For Weisselberg, those payments covered his luxury apartment, multiple Mercedes Benzes, a New York City parking space, and private school tuition for his grandchildren. Two Trump Organization entities—the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corp.—are now on criminal trial for their part in the same scheme.
‘Greed and cheating’
Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger promised Weisselberg will reveal the “inside story” of what really went down inside Trump’s company.
“This case is about greed and cheating—cheating on taxes,” Hoffinger told the jury on Monday. “The Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation paid their already highly-paid executives even more by helping them cheat on taxes.”
Lawyers for the companies likewise came out blasting Trump’s former CFO for the one thing that everyone in the courtroom seemed to be able to agree about: Weisselberg’s greed.
“Allen Weisselberg is a man who has fallen to his greed!,” Trump corporate lawyer Michael Van Der Veen thundered to the jury. “Greed made him cheat on his taxes, hide his deeds from his employer, and betray a trust built over nearly 50 years!”
But Trump’s lawyers also told the jury that Weisselberg’s claims could not be trusted.
Weisselberg would tell the jury things that “simply make no sense,” said Susan Necheles, a lawyer for the Trump Corporation.
Weisselberg had lived a life of luxury while working for Trump, and only agreed to cooperate under threat of a lengthy prison sentence, she said.
“Once he was arrested, he realized he was in danger of losing all of it and being sentenced to jail for years,” Necheles said. “So Allen Weisselberg made a deal with the prosecutors.”
Lawyers for Trump’s company argued Monday that Weisselberg committed tax crimes for his own benefit, rather than for the benefit of the company.
Weisselberg has been put on a leave of absence from his position as Chief Financial Officer and is now receiving less from the company than his previous $1 million-per-year income, Van Der Veen told the jury. The company decided to keep paying him in order to let him support his family, he said.
“He still gets some pay,” Van Der Veen admitted, after denouncing Weisselberg as a greedy criminal.
Weisselberg’s decision
Weisselberg isn’t the only witness for the prosecution still drawing a paycheck from Trump’s family business.
The prosecution’s first witness was Weisselberg’s longtime deputy Jeff McConney, Trump Org senior vice president and controller. McConney admitted under oath on Monday that he earned roughly $450,000 from the company last year, and that the company is also paying his lawyer bills in this trial.
In a contentious moment of the trial, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass attempted to designate McConney a hostile witness, in a move that would have allowed the prosecution to ask him leading questions. Judge Juan Merchan denied the request on the grounds that McConney hadn’t refused to answer any questions yet.
The criminal fate of Trump’s company likely now rests on what the jury makes of these Trumpworld insiders. Weisselberg’s fate, meanwhile, may now lie in whether lawyers for Trump’s company can persuade the jury not to believe ] Weisselberg, without also convincing the judge to tear up his plea deal for lying.
Weisselberg agreed to testify at this trial in exchange for a much-reduced sentence of five months, versus the 15 years he might have received if he had refused to testify and gone to trial.
Weisselberg’s refusal to fully cooperate with prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office is one reason why Trump himself was not personally charged in this case.
Yet the names of Trump family members were bandied about the courtroom rapidly during opening arguments and the questioning of McConney—raising clues about how the trial may reveal details of how Trump ran his company and what he and his family members knew about the firm’s alleged crimes.
Hoffinger, the prosecutor, told the jury that Trump personally signed the tuition checks for Weisselberg’s grandchildren’s private school, but later stopped signing them after he won the presidency due to concerns about the enhanced scrutiny that he and his business would face.
Trump has not been accused of any crimes, and neither has any of his adult children (Don Jr., Eric, or Ivanka). The former president has blasted the case as part of an unfounded witch hunt led by his Democratic enemies. The charges against Weisselberg and Trump’s company were brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat.
Trump corporate defense attorney Necheles insisted to the jury that Trump had no knowledge that Weisselberg had criminally reduced the size of his personal income checks in ways that also cut his payroll taxes.
“Donald Trump didn’t know that Allen Weisselberg was cheating on Allen Weisselberg’s personal tax returns,” Necheles told the jury. “The evidence will be crystal clear on that.”
Weisselberg agreed to spend five months in New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex in exchange for his guilty plea. If that deal holds, and with good behavior, he may spend only 100 days behind bars.
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Protesters in Tehran come face to face with the anti-riot forces. (photo: Twitter)
The country’s judiciary says those marching against the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini will be tried
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he was shocked by the number of innocent protesters who were being illegally and violently arrested. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has already announced that she is to ask the European Union to sanction the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.
Canada meanwhile announced a fourth round of sanctions against senior Iranian officials and its law enforcement agents, which Canada accuses of participating in the suppression and arrest of unarmed protesters.
Ukraine has meanwhile formally asked for Iran’s football team to be banned from the World Cup starting next month in the wake of Iranian-manufactured drones being used by Russia to hit civilian and infrastructure targets inside Ukraine.
For the first time Iran has acknowledged there was a danger that it might find itself excluded from the World Cup, a move that would be a devastating blow to a country that adores football. The Iranian president, Ibrahim Raisi, said he would be contacting Qatar, the hosts of the tournament.
Ukraine said Iran – due to play England on 21 November – “is guilty of systematic violations of human rights, which probably violates the Fifa Charter”.
The Shakhtar Donetsk CEO Sergei Palkin called for Iran to be replaced by Ukraine at this year’s tournament. “While the Iranian leadership will have fun watching their national team play at the World Cup, Ukrainians will be killed by Iranian drones and Iranian missiles,” he said on Twitter.
The latest signs of external support for the Iranian protests led by women and students came as sit-ins continued in universities and more than 500 civilian journalists put their names to an internal petition demanding that reporters who helped break the story of Mahsa Amini be released from detention.
In a sign of the justice being handed out, Mohammad Ghobadlo, a protester who was arrested on the charge of “corruption on earth” after participating in an anti-government rally, was sentenced to death after just one hearing, his mother said on Monday.
“My son is only 22 years old and he is also ill. They deprived him of having a lawyer and do not allow lawyers to enter the court,” Ghobadlo’s mother said in a clip published online.
“They interrogated him without having access to a lawyer, and sentenced him to death after only one hearing. Is this Islamic justice? In which court of law do they sentence people to death after just one hearing? They are going to execute him soon. I ask people to help,” she added in the video.
Security services have unleashed a fierce crackdown on the mainly peaceful protests, in which at least 253 people have been killed, including 34 Iranians under 18, according to one human rights organisation. Several thousand people have been arrested, many of whom were taken to special IRGC detention centres.
The Iranian elite nevertheless remains divided between those who want to treat the protests solely as the product of a well-laid foreign conspiracy best brought to a halt by repression, and those who say the disturbances, now in their sixth week, reveal deep problems in Iranian society, including an untrusted and muzzled official media that leaves young Iranians dependent on western satellite channels.
The former foreign minister Javad Zarif appeared to side with those calling for talks, saying opponents of dialogue, regardless of their disguise or slogan, seemed to prefer violence.
The main state news agency IRNA reported that 1,000 detained protesters had played a “central role” in the unrest. Each is due to be tried alone for “subversive actions”, including assaulting security guards, setting fire to public property and other charges.
“Those who intend to confront and subvert the regime are dependent on foreigners and will be punished according to legal standards,” said Iran’s judiciary chief, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, indicating that some protesters would be charged with collaborating with foreign governments.
Ejei claimed that prosecutors sought to differentiate between angry Iranians – who merely sought to vent their grievances on the streets – and those who wanted to take down the Islamic Republic. “Even among the agitators, it should be clarified as to who had the intention of confronting the system and overthrowing it,” he said.
Iran’s government is also having to confront the fallout from a round of trials, funerals and 40th day commemorations as the death toll mounts. Apart from the two journalists arrested, attention focused on Monday on Hassan Ronagi, Hossein Ronagi’s brother, who said that after 41 days, his parents were finally allowed to meet Hossein in prison. He says Hossein was still on hunger strike and “was not well”. Ronagi was dragged into a police car soon after the protests started.
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Construction workers build a system of walls and flood gates to protect New York City from rising sea levels. (photo: Ed Jones/AFP)
Two major climate initiatives in New York and California, and many more to watch at the local level.
There are fewer climate measures on ballots this time around, but the ones that are up for a vote these midterms are big, mainly New York’s Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 and California Proposition 30, which aims to fund zero-emissions vehicles and wildfire prevention. A smaller $50 million environment and recreation bond measure in Rhode Island would fund municipal climate resiliency.
“It’s unusual for there not to be more [state-level] environmental ballot initiatives,” said Nick Abraham, state communications director at the League of Conservation Voters, “but hopefully it’s a sign of progress.”
If passed, the initiatives in New York and California would marshal billions of dollars for new climate action in two of the U.S.’s most populous states. They would also serve as models for other parts of the country looking to develop their own strategies.
As voters prepare to head to the polls November 8, we’re breaking down these major ballot measures — and others — that have the potential to significantly advance climate progress in the U.S.:
New York: The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act of 2022
New York passed its first environmental bond act in 1910, borrowing money to establish a network of state parks. Since then, voters in the state have approved 10 ballot measures to fund environmental projects, from improving wastewater infrastructure to addressing the impacts of pollution on public health. The 2022 Bond Act would be the first one in over 25 years — and the largest in state history.
The measure got its start in 2020, when former Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed the “Restore Mother Nature Bond Act,” which would have allowed the state comptroller to sell up to $3 billion in state bonds to revitalize fish and wildlife habitat, expand renewable energy, and protect the state from floods. Cuomo withdrew the act over economic concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s back for the 2022 midterms, this time with a new, more sober name and an amendment by Governor Kathy Hochul to increase the amount to $4.2 billion.
The stakes:
The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Bond Act would fund environmental projects in four major areas: At least $1.1 billion would go to ecosystem restoration and reducing flood risk, including coastal rehabilitation and voluntary buyout programs, in a state where hurricane frequency and severity is only expected to increase. Up to $650 million would fund land conservation and recreation, including farmland preservation. Up to $1.5 billion would go to climate change mitigation, including funding for zero-emission school buses and strategies to reduce urban heat. And at least another $650 million would go to water quality improvements and climate resilient infrastructure.
The measure would also require that 35 percent of the funds be spent in “disadvantaged communities,” currently defined by a state Climate Justice Working Group using variables like high exposure to flooding, extreme heat, and pollution, and socio-economic factors like race, ethnicity, and income. An economic impact analysis of the act found that it could create or support 84,000 jobs statewide.
Its chances of passing:
With such a wide span of initiatives supported by the proposition, and investments right in people’s backyards, campaigners say it’s likely that this bill will pass. A broad coalition of environmental groups, labor unions, farmers, land trusts, and government organizations have come together in favor of the ballot measure, raising over seven figures. The biggest donors are The Nature Conservancy and Scenic Hudson.
“New Yorkers will vote yes on this one,” said Julie Tighe, president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. “We just need to make sure they know it’s there.”
While the New York State Conservative Party has opposed the measure, there’s no organized opposition, which bodes well for the future of climate funding in New York State.
California: Proposition 30
California originally had two climate ballot initiatives this year, but a measure to reduce single-use plastics was withdrawn at the last minute after stakeholders negotiated a bill achieving many of the same goals. Now all that’s left is Proposition 30, which would raise taxes for California’s wealthiest residents to fund EV adoption and wildfire fighting. The measure has found unlikely bedfellows: some of the same labor unions that clashed with rideshare companies in 2020 over a proposition to classify drivers as contractors with limited benefits have now teamed up with Lyft in support of Prop 30.
The stakes:
The proposition would increase the income tax for people making over $2 million a year by 1.75 percent for a 20-year period (or until three years after statewide emissions drop to 80 percent of 1990 levels.) The money generated — an estimated $3.5 to $5 billion a year — would go to three areas:
A zero-emissions vehicle infrastructure fund would receive 35 percent to build charging stations, and another 45 percent would go to rebates and other incentives for electric vehicle purchases, with at least half of all EV-related money being spent in low-income communities. The last 20 percent would go to a fund for wildfire prevention and suppression, with a priority on hiring and training new state wildland firefighters.
Its chances of passing:
Proposition 30 is the standout contested measure on the California ballot, and while so far the majority of voters support it, it’s uncertain how the final tally will shake out.
A string of environmental, labor, and public health organizations including the American Lung Association, the Union of Concerned Scientists, firefighter groups, electrician unions, and even actress and environmentalist Jane Fonda have supported the proposition. They argue that it would help reduce air pollution from wildfires and gas-powered cars, and that the wealthiest individuals in the state should pay. The California Democratic Party endorsed the initiative, as did the controversial rideshare company Lyft.
In September, Governor Gavin Newsom paced around in a television ad telling Californians, “I gotta warn ya” about Proposition 30. He called it “[Lyft’s]’s sinister scheme to grab a huge taxpayer funded subsidy.” Rideshare companies, by law, will have to log 90 percent of their miles in electric vehicles by 2030 to meet California’s Clean Miles Standard. Lyft has spent over $45 million to support the proposition so far, although Prop 30 supporters point out that revenue from the tax would go to the same electric vehicle programs that Newsom funds with his own budget. Plus the EV incentives would go to Lyft drivers to buy cars, not directly to the company itself.
Newsom’s break with his own party to come out against the measure gave a boost to opponents, including the state Republican Party, the Chamber of Commerce, three large timber companies that make money on wildfire salvage, and the California Teachers Association, which would like to see more money go to schools. Besides calling it a Lyft tax grab, opponents argue that with the state’s recent $10 billion investment in EV goals and a budget surplus of over $90 billion, California doesn’t need to raise taxes. Newsom has expressed concerns that the proposition would destabilize California’s tax revenue, which relies heavily on high-income earners. But a report released in early October shows the measure could help the state make major strides towards meeting its climate goals while supporting middle- and low-income residents.
The No on Proposition 30 committee has raised around $15 million in contributions, mostly from wealthy individuals who would be most likely to pay the new tax. On the other side, the Yes on 30 coalition is a broad and powerful one; although support has been slowly slipping in the polls over the past few months, an early October poll from the University of California, Berkeley found 49 percent of voters support the measure, 37 percent oppose, and 14 percent are still undecided.
Other ballot measures to watch:
In Rhode Island, voters will be deciding on Question 3, a $50 million environment and recreation bond measure that would fund small business energy loans, watershed and forest restoration, and land acquisition. The bulk of the money, $16 million, however, would go to municipal climate resilience, helping communities improve coastal habitats and floodplains and strengthen infrastructure.
In most states, bonds that create public debt have to be brought before voters. Rhode Islanders haven’t rejected a bond measure since 2006, and have approved 29 since then. With no formal opposition, and a supporting coalition that includes political leaders, the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank, and various conservation groups, this one is likely to pass.
While there aren’t many state climate ballot initiatives to watch this year, local ballots are a different story. No organization tracks all environmental initiatives at the county and city level, but the Trust for Public Land’s LandVote Database lists 58 land conservation and park measures on local ballots across the U.S. That number does not include initiatives to reduce emissions or adapt to climate change without a land-based component.
In Cochise and Graham counties in Arizona, Wilcox Basin residents will vote on new restrictions on large groundwater wells; a yes vote would mark a new precedent of a rural community restricting its own water use and successfully regulating large-scale farms. In Denver, voters will revisit a landmark 2020 initiative to increase sales taxes by .25 percent to fund climate action; they’ll also weigh in on a requirement for all buildings and food waste producers to provide recycling and composting. A local tax measure in Los Angeles would generate $227 million annually to prioritize the creation of parks and recreation spaces in areas lacking access to greenspace. In Illinois, a proposed county tax increase on the ballot would be used to establish forest preserves in Chicago’s southeastern suburbs.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. “This year we’re seeing a lot more equity initiatives,” said Andy Orellana, associate communications director at the Trust for Public Land. While there will still be a need to ensure funds are spent equitably and correctly, Orellana sees it as a hopeful sign of progress.
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