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State Legislatures are Torching Democracy

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State Legislatures are Torching Democracy

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Even in moderate places like Ohio, gerrymandering has let unchecked Republicans pass extremist laws that could never make it through Congress.

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As the Supreme Court anticipated when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the battle over abortion rights is now being waged state by state. Nowhere is the fight more intense than in Ohio, which has long been considered a national bellwether. The state helped secure the Presidential victories of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, then went for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Its residents tend to be politically moderate, and polls consistently show that a majority of Ohio voters support legal access to abortion, particularly for victims of rape and incest. Yet, as the recent ordeal of a pregnant ten-year-old rape victim has illustrated, Ohio's state legislature has become radically out of synch with its constituents. In June, the state's General Assembly instituted an abortion ban so extreme that the girl was forced to travel to Indiana to terminate her pregnancy. In early July, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana obstetrician who treated the child, told me that she had a message for Ohio's legislature: "This is your fault!"

Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state's transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, "The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It's really troubling." When he was governor, he recalled, the two parties worked reasonably well together, but politics in Ohio "has changed." The story is similar in several other states with reputations for being moderate, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: their legislatures have also begun proposing laws so far to the right that they could never be passed in the U.S. Congress.

Ohio's law prohibits abortion after six weeks-or even earlier, if doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity-unless the mother is at risk of death or serious permanent injury. Dr. Bernard noted that the bill's opponents had warned about the proposed restrictions' potential effect on underage rape victims. "It was literally a hypothetical that was discussed," she told me. Indeed, at a hearing on April 27th, a Democrat in the Ohio House, Richard Brown, declared that if a thirteen-year-old girl "was raped by a serial rapist . . . this bill would require this thirteen-year-old to carry this felon's fetus."

The bill's chief sponsor, State Representative Jean Schmidt, is an archconservative Republican who represents a district east of Cincinnati. At the hearing, she responded to Brown by arguing that the birth of a rapist's baby would be "an opportunity." She explained, "If a baby is created, it is a human life. . . . It is a shame that it happens. But there's an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she's going to do to help that life be a productive human being." The rapist's offspring, she suggested, could grow up to "cure cancer." Her remarks were deemed so outlandish that they were denounced everywhere from the Guardian to the New York Post.

According to David Niven, a political-science professor at the University of Cincinnati, a 2020 survey indicated that less than fourteen per cent of Ohioans support banning all abortions without exceptions for rape and incest. And a 2019 Quinnipiac University poll showed that only thirty-nine per cent of Ohio voters supported the kind of "heartbeat" law that the legislature passed. But the Democrats in the Ohio legislature had no way to mount resistance: since 2012, the Republicans have had a veto-proof super-majority in both chambers. The Democratic state representative Beth Liston, a pediatrician and an internist in Ohio, who voted against the bill, told me, "Doctors are going to be afraid of providing ordinary care. Women are going to die."

In a referendum on August 2nd, Kansas voters strongly rejected an abortion ban, indicating that even voters in deep-red states-when given the chance to express themselves-oppose radical curtailments of reproductive rights. Yet Ohio voters have had no such recourse, and the General Assembly is poised to pass even more repressive restrictions on abortion when it returns from a summer recess. State Representative Gary Click-a pastor at the Fremont Baptist Temple and a Republican who serves the Sandusky area-has proposed a "Personhood Act," which would prohibit any interference with embryonic development from the moment of conception, unless the mother's life is endangered. If the bill passes, it could outlaw many kinds of contraception, not to mention various practices commonly used during in-vitro fertilization. In an e-mail, Click told me that "the ultimate question that needs to be answered" is "When does life begin?" He added, "I believe the answer to that question is self-evident." Click is a graduate of an unaccredited Christian school in Michigan, Midwestern Baptist College, whose Web site says that "civil government is of divine appointment" and must be obeyed "except in things opposed to 'the will of our Lord Jesus Christ.' "

Click acknowledged that the story of the ten-year-old rape victim is discomfiting, adding that "we all have a visceral reaction" to such a scenario, "regardless of one's political leaning." But the news had not made him question his position; rather, he questioned the girl's story, calling it "suspicious," and noting that the incident "fit too neatly" with the pro-choice agenda. (According to law-enforcement authorities, a twenty-seven-year-old Ohio man confessed to twice raping the girl when she was nine. He has since pleaded not guilty.) Click also echoed an argument made by Ohio's Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, who claimed that the ten-year-old-"if she exists"-would have qualified for the new statute's medical-emergency exception. This assertion, however, has been disputed by various doctors, including State Representative Liston. "I don't know the child's health condition," she acknowledged to me. "But it's hard to say that simply because she is young she would meet the requirement of risk as defined by the new law." Mortality rates are generally higher for pregnant girls who are younger than fifteen, but, Liston said, "there's nothing in the law that states that age is a sufficient exception."

Click, who is a close ally of the Republican congressman Jim Jordan, is one of Ohio's most extreme legislators, but he's hardly out of place among the General Assembly's increasingly radical Republican majority. Niven, the University of Cincinnati professor, told me that, according to one study, the laws being passed by Ohio's statehouse place it to the right of the deeply conservative legislature in South Carolina. How did this happen, given that most Ohio voters are not ultra-conservatives? "It's all about gerrymandering," Niven told me. The legislative-district maps in Ohio have been deliberately drawn so that many Republicans effectively cannot lose, all but insuring that the Party has a veto-proof super-majority. As a result, the only contests most Republican incumbents need worry about are the primaries-and, because hard-core partisans dominate the vote in those contests, the sole threat most Republican incumbents face is the possibility of being outflanked by a rival even farther to the right. The national press has devoted considerable attention to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, but state legislative districts have received much less scrutiny, even though they are every bit as skewed, and in some states far more so. "Ohio is about the second most gerrymandered statehouse in the country," Niven told me. "It doesn't have a voter base to support a total abortion ban, yet that's a likely outcome." He concluded, "Ohio has become the Hindenburg of democracy."

Three days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, I went to a luncheonette in Columbus, Ohio, to meet with David Pepper, an election-law professor, a novelist, a onetime Cincinnati city councilman, and a former chairman of the state's Democratic Party. Pepper, who is fifty-one, looked boyish and preppy in a polo shirt. He had recently become a small phenomenon on Twitter, having posted videos in which he delivered impassioned short lectures, punctuated with frantic scribbles on a whiteboard, about the growing crisis of democracy in America's state legislatures. When he attended Yale Law School, in the nineties, his geniality and Buckeye boosterism had led his classmates to name him the Most Likely to Be President of the Cincinnati Board of Tourism, but he spoke to me with an almost desperate alarmism.

Last year, Pepper wrote a book, "Laboratories of Autocracy," whose title offers a grim spin on a famous statement, attributed to the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, calling America's state legislatures "laboratories of democracy." The subtitle of Pepper's book, "A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines," is a bit more hopeful. He is determined to get the Democratic political establishment to stop lavishing almost all its money and attention on U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races (say, the current Senate race in Ohio between Tim Ryan and J. D. Vance) and to focus more energy on what he sees as a greater emergency: the collapse of representative democracy in one statehouse after another.

Pepper understands that few Americans share his obsession. "No one knows anything about statehouses," he said. "They can't even name their state representatives. And it's getting worse every year, since the local media's dying and the statehouse bureaus are being hollowed out." Columbus has an unusually strong press corps, but it is an exception. And it is precisely because so few Americans pay attention to state politics that the legislatures have become ideal arenas for manipulation by extremists and special interests-who often work in tandem. "I'm banging my head against the wall," Pepper told me. With a nod to the political consultant James Carville, he added, "My God, Democrats, don't you see it? It's the statehouse, stupid! That's where the attack is happening!"

Pepper scoffed at recent claims, made by conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the state legislatures are more suited than the judiciary to adjudicate the divisive issue of abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, Brett Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in which he argued that the Court was merely restoring "the people's authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government." Pepper said of Kavanaugh's concurrence, "It's so disingenuous-total gaslighting. Many statehouses no longer have representative democracy. Because they've been gerrymandered, they don't reflect the will of the people."

With Trump, he believes, the situation became a lot worse-the former President "made people a little more willing to be lawless, and he gave oxygen to white supremacy." But Pepper thinks that "people make a huge mistake when they equate the attack on democracy entirely with him." In his view, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, who have portrayed Trump as a singular aberration are failing to see that "the Republican attack on democracy preceded him"-and that "if Trump was locked up tomorrow it would continue."

The shift began, Pepper believes, with the shock of Obama's 2008 victory. The election of the country's first Black President provoked a racial and cultural backlash, and many Republican officials panicked that their party, which was overwhelmingly white, was facing a demographic demise. Swept out of power in Washington, the Republican Party's smartest operatives decided to exploit the only opening they could find: the possibility of capturing state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. They knew that, in 2011, many congressional and local legislative districts would be redrawn based on data from the 2010 census-a process that occurs only once a decade. If Republicans reshaped enough districts, they could hugely advantage conservative candidates, even if many of the Party's policies were unpopular.

In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Citizens United decision, which allowed dark money to flood American politics. Donors, many undisclosed, soon funnelled thirty million dollars into the Republicans' redistricting project, called redmap, and the result was an astonishing success: the Party picked up nearly seven hundred legislative seats, and won the power to redraw the maps for four times as many districts as the Democrats.

Gerrymandering the shapes of districts to create safe seats is an old trick that has been used by both sides in American politics. I recently spoke with Jonathan Jakubowski, the chairman of the Republican Party in Wood County, Ohio, and the author of "Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul," and he emphasized that, in the nineteen-eighties, it was the Democrats who gerrymandered the state's districts. "We're all equal-opportunity offenders," he said. But the redmap project-powered by advances in digital mapping and by billionaire donors such as the fossil-fuel magnates Charles and David Koch-took electoral distortion to a new level. And Ohio, which had become one of the most fiercely fought battleground states in Presidential politics, was subjected to an especially tortured dissection.

The journalist David Daley tells the story of redmap in his 2016 book, "Ratf **ked." By 2012, he writes, the Republicans' plan had already begun to pay off handsomely: even though Obama was reëlected in Ohio that year, by three percentage points, and Sherrod Brown, a progressive Democrat, was easily reëlected to the Senate, Republicans had a resounding triumph in the state legislature. They won a 60-39 super-majority in the House.

The Ohio statehouse has grown only more lopsided in the past decade. Currently, the Republican members have a 64-35 advantage in the House and a 25-8 advantage in the Senate. This veto-proof majority makes the Republican leaders of both chambers arguably the most powerful officeholders in the state-and they proved it when they undermined Governor Mike DeWine's initial public-health-minded approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. DeWine is a Republican, yet he was a leader in imposing such emergency health orders as mask mandates and the closing of schools and businesses. Ohio voters had widely supported these measures. But anti-vaccine and anti-mask extremists in the statehouse passed a law stripping the Governor and his health director of the authority to issue such orders. (One Republican lawmaker, a doctor, suggested that "the colored population" was more vulnerable to COVID-19 because "they do not wash their hands as well as other groups." The lawmaker was subsequently named the chairman of the Ohio Senate's health committee.) Since the legislature's rebellion, DeWine-once regarded as a centrist conservative-has increasingly capitulated to his party's radical base, on public-health policy and much else. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Governor said that "we disagree with that sentiment.") Daley told me that the redmap campaign "took a state that was slightly red and gave it a hue more like Elizabeth Taylor's lipstick," adding, "The upshot has been some of the most far-right, noxious, pay-for-play politics we've seen over the last decade. That's what gerrymandering enables. When voters lose the ability to throw the rascals out, the rascals do whatever they please."

Matt Huffman, the influential president of the Ohio Senate, recently said as much himself. Speaking in May to the Columbus Dispatch about the Republicans' super-majority, he said, "We can kind of do what we want."

For Pepper, the state's transformation has been crushing. He has watched the reputation of Ohio's public-school system slide as Republicans have siphoned off public funding to support failing, politically connected charter schools. In 2010, Education Week ranked the state's schooling as the fifth best in the country; in 2021, U.S. News & World Report ranked it thirty-first. Last year, F.B.I. agents told USA Today that public-corruption cases in Ohio were the most egregious in the country. In the past five years, the state has had five speakers of the House, because two were forced out as a result of the biggest bribery scandals in Ohio's history. Larry Householder, who was removed from office in July, 2020, is scheduled to be tried on federal racketeering charges this coming January.

This wasn't the path that Pepper had foreseen for his state. A native of Cincinnati, he grew up in a relatively apolitical, upwardly mobile household: his father climbed the ranks at one of Ohio's largest companies, Procter & Gamble, ultimately becoming its chairman. After Pepper graduated from Yale Law School, he returned to Cincinnati and clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones, a Black federal judge, who ignited in him an interest in public service. In 2001, Pepper ran for the city council, and to everyone's surprise he won, partly owing to a catchy slogan: "Just Add Pepper." After two terms in office, he moved up to the county commission, eventually presiding over it, and in 2010 he was recruited by the state's Democratic governor, Strickland, to run for auditor, a statewide office. At the time, the auditor was one of five state officials on a commission overseeing the redistricting process, and could therefore act as an effective curb against gerrymandering. On the campaign trail, Pepper recalls, "I was running around, talking about gerrymandering, and no one knew what the hell I was talking about." Meanwhile, his opponent was getting a torrent of suspicious contributions from people who worked for out-of-state energy companies-many of which, Pepper deduced, had ties to the controversial coal baron Bob Murray, the chief executive officer of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based company. Such donations initially made little sense to Pepper-the auditor's role had nothing to do with coal mines-until he discovered that redmap had targeted his state, and that his candidacy stood in the project's way. He lost the race. In 2014, he made a second bid for statewide office, running this time for Ohio attorney general. Again, he was defeated. In 2015, he became the chairman of the state's Democratic Party, a position that he stepped down from at the end of 2020.

Pepper had become consumed by the problem of gerrymandering, but the subject drew only blank stares from Democratic Party officials. To counter this apathy, he told me, he decided "to write a novel about gerrymandering-which, of course, is a horrible idea." In the book, "The People's House," a Russian oligarch modelled on Vladimir Putin rigs an American election after figuring out that, thanks to gerrymandering, he needs only to flip a few dozen swing districts. The book appeared in the summer of 2016, when Putin's clandestine efforts on behalf of Trump were making headlines; Politico called the book "the thriller that predicted the Russia scandal." Pepper was pleased about the media attention, but he was disappointed that more people didn't focus on the novel's message: "how bad gerrymandering is." With evident frustration, he told me that media and political insiders prefer "to talk about politics in terms of personalities."

A recent study by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonpartisan nonprofit, documents how deeply right-wing extremism has infiltrated U.S. statehouses. Of the 7,383 people who served in state legislatures in the 2021-22 session, eight hundred and seventy-five had joined far-right Facebook groups. (All but three were Republicans.) The study describes the fringe beliefs that many of these members shared, including "the idea that Christians constitute a core of the American citizenry and/or that government and public policies should be reshaped to reflect that." A group promoting this view, the Ohio Christian Alliance, counts eleven Ohio state legislators among its Facebook members, including Gary Click. Last year, the organization helped block a bill, the Ohio Fairness Act, that would have barred housing and employment discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

State Representative Casey Weinstein, a second-term Democrat from a suburban swing district between Akron and Cleveland, and one of the General Assembly's two Jewish members, told me that he's recently become "really concerned" about a new level of extremism. On January 23, 2022, a protest outside his house shattered a peaceful Sunday afternoon with his wife and young children. Some thirty vehicles blocked the entrance to his driveway; one had a flag bearing the message " Kneel for the Cross." Weinstein told me, "I thought it was a Trump group, but it turned out to be a church, Liberty Valley, near Macedonia, Ohio. Some of these churches are militant, and some are basically militias operating under the guise of religion. They're weaponizing religion into a power grab." He went on, "So, I'm the Jew, and they came to my house to try to intimidate me and my family. That's what's happening, and where this is going."

Weinstein became further alarmed this past March, when Republicans in the statehouse pushed legislation prohibiting public-school teachers from teaching "divisive concepts." The bill, aimed at censoring class discussions of critical race theory-which was never part of the Ohio public-school curriculum to begin with-threatened teachers with suspension unless they neutrally instructed students about "both sides of a political or ideological belief." When Morgan Trau, an enterprising statehouse reporter for a television station in Cleveland, pressed one of the bill's co-sponsors, Sarah Fowler Arthur, for details, the lawmaker provoked an uproar by offering the Holocaust as an example of a topic that required a "both sides" approach. "You should talk about these atrocities that have happened in history, but you also do have an obligation to point out the value that each individual brings to the table," Fowler Arthur said, adding that students should consider the Holocaust "from the perspective of a German soldier." As Fowler Arthur went on, she seemed to misunderstand both the scope and the nature of the Holocaust, referring to it as an event in which "hundreds of thousands," rather than six million, Jews were killed, and suggesting that victims were murdered "for having a different color of skin." Weinstein and other Jewish leaders in Ohio vociferously denounced what came to be known as the Both Sides of the Holocaust Bill. "That was enough for me," Weinstein told me. "What unique value did the German Nazis bring to the table?" He noted that Fowler Arthur, who sits on the Ohio House's Primary and Secondary Education Committee, "was homeschooled her entire life, has never set foot in a public school, and elected not to go to college." Weinstein added, "There's nothing wrong with that, until she starts censoring what can and cannot be taught in public schools." (Fowler Arthur declined to comment.)

The real intent behind attacking public-school curricula, Weinstein believes, was to "fire up the Republican base" about the teaching of slavery, the Civil War, and the civil-rights movement-in other words, to get out the conservative vote by inflaming the racial grievances of white Ohioans. The "divisive concepts" bill championed by Fowler Arthur opposes teaching any reading of American history suggesting that "the United States and its institutions are systemically racist."

Pepper noted that the efforts to control the curriculum in Ohio are "very similar to the meltdown in democracy in other places." Like Russia's attempts to censor what is taught to students about Ukraine, he said, the legislation promoted by Fowler Arthur represents an attempt to put forth a sanitized view of history-in this case, "to ban teaching parts of our history that cast a bad light on white America." Pepper asked me, "If this was happening in another country, what would you say? You'd say, 'Oh, my gosh-your democracy is under attack!' Well, it's happening in Columbus." Indeed, he warned, it's happening in state capitols across the country.

Ohio Republicans put the "divisive concepts" bill on hold after the idea of teaching neutrally about the Holocaust provoked national condemnation. But Ohio's General Assembly otherwise proceeded at a breakneck pace this past spring-debating a bill enabling the inspection of the genitals of transgender student athletes, and passing a raft of legislation about guns. Many of these new laws were so extreme that they inspired fierce protests from Ohio residents.

A 2018 poll conducted by Baldwin Wallace University, in Berea, Ohio, showed that Ohioans, by clear majorities ranging from sixty-one to seventy-five per cent, wanted the state legislature to enact new gun-control laws: banning high-powered semi-automatic rifles, including the AR-15; banning extended ammunition magazines; banning bump stocks that, in effect, make semi-automatic rifles automatic; enacting a mandatory waiting period for gun purchases; raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles from eighteen to twenty-one. But no such measures were passed. Instead, the state legislature has turned Ohio into a so-called "stand your ground" state, where it is legal for residents to kill a trespasser without first attempting to de-escalate the situation. Lawmakers also passed a bill that allows Ohioans aged twenty-one or older to carry concealed handguns virtually anywhere, without first obtaining a permit or undergoing a background check and firearms training. In response to the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Ohio General Assembly rushed through a law that enables any school board to arm teachers and other staff-including cafeteria workers and bus drivers-after only minimal gun training. The legislation was written by a lawmaker who owns a business in tactical-firearms training, and the lawmaker's business partner gave testimony in the Ohio Senate in support of the bill, which specified that armed school personnel needed only twenty-four hours of firearms training. (Law-enforcement officers in Ohio must undergo some seven hundred hours of training.) The bill was so extreme that it was denounced in hearings by more than three hundred and fifty speakers-including representatives of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and of the state's largest police organization, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio.

In an interview, Michael Weinman, the head of government affairs for the Ohio chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents some twenty-four thousand law-enforcement officers, described the new gun laws as "dangerous" and "insane." Thanks to the legislation, he explained, "anyone can come into Ohio and carry a concealed firearm," and need not mention having the gun if stopped by law enforcement. Weinman pointed out that the law about arming school employees contains no provision requiring that lethal weapons be locked safely, adding, "Can you imagine a kindergarten student sitting down to be read to, and there's a gun in the kid's face?" He noted that, other than teachers, most employees of a school "haven't been taught how to discipline people-and most school shooters are students." Melissa Cropper, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told me, "It's unbelievable. The more guns you have in schools, the more accidents and deaths can happen, especially with such minimal training." She added, "We are every bit as bad as Texas and Florida when it comes to these laws. We are becoming more and more extreme."

Weinman said that the rightward turn on guns in Ohio has been driven, in no small part, by "very aggressive gun groups," some of which profit from extremism by stoking fear. This helps to sell memberships and to expand valuable mailing lists. "These groups are very confrontational," Weinman said. He recently testified in the Ohio General Assembly against loosening state gun laws; afterward, he told me, Chris Dorr, the head of a particularly militant group called Ohio Gun Owners, chased him out of the room and down a hallway, demanding that he be fired. In an online post, Dorr, who maintains that the National Rifle Association is too soft in its defense of gun rights, posted a closeup shot of Weinman with the caption " remember this face," adding in another post that Weinman is "the most aggressive gun-rights hater in Ohio." Dorr and his two brothers, Ben and Aaron, operate affiliated gun groups around the country, which share the slogan "No Compromise." During the pandemic, the Dorrs' groups expanded into other vehemently anti-government causes, and helped lead anti-mask and anti-vax protests. Niven, the political scientist, said that the Dorrs "cultivate relationships with the hardest-right members of the state legislature, and can get their bills heard." Ninety per cent of Ohio voters favor universal background checks for people trying to buy guns, Niven noted, "but the Democrats can't get a hearing."

Teresa Fedor, a Democratic state senator who has served in the General Assembly for twenty-two years, described Ohio's new gun and abortion laws as the worst legislation that she has ever witnessed being passed. She told me, "It feels like Gilead"-the fictional theocracy in Margaret Atwood's novel "The Handmaid's Tale." Fedor added, "We've got state-mandated pregnancies, even of a ten-year-old."

The issue is personal to her. Fedor, a grandmother, is a former teacher; in her twenties, when she was serving in the military, she was raped. She had an abortion. Fedor was a divorced single mother at the time, trying to earn a teaching degree. "I thought my life was going to be over," she said. "But abortion was accessible, and it was a way back. To me, that choice meant I'd be able to have a future. I feel like I made it to the other side, and have the life I dreamed of as a little girl, because I had that choice." Without the freedom to have an abortion, she said, "I wouldn't be a state senator today."

In 2015, during a floor debate over abortion policy, Fedor testified about her experience. As she was speaking, she was enraged to notice that another lawmaker, who opposed her view, was chuckling. She said that Republicans who serve in districts that have been engineered to be impervious to voters are "just not listening to the public, period-there's no need to." Many of the most extreme bills, Fedor believes, have been written not by the legislators themselves but by local and national right-wing pressure groups, which can raise dark money and turn out primary voters in force. Nationally, the most influential such group is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that essentially outsources the drafting of laws to self-interested businesses. In Ohio, Fedor told me, it is often extreme religious groups that exert undue influence. She then noted that one such organization is about to have "an office right across from the statehouse chamber."

Facing Ohio's Greek Revival statehouse is a vacant six-story building that is slated to become the new headquarters of the Center for Christian Virtue, a once obscure nonprofit that an anti-pornography advocate founded four decades ago, in the basement of a Cincinnati church. In 2015 and 2016, the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center classified the organization as a hate group, citing homophobic statements on its Web site that described "homosexual behavior" as "unhealthy and destructive to the individual" and "to society as a whole." The group subsequently deleted the offending statements, and, according to the Columbus Dispatch, it has recently evolved into "the state's premier lobbying force on Christian conservative issues." In the past five years, its full-time staff has expanded from two to thirteen, and its annual budget has risen from four hundred thousand dollars to $1.2 million. The group's president, Aaron Baer, told me that the new headquarters-the group bought the building for $1.25 million last year, and plans to spend an additional $3.75 million renovating it-is very much meant to send a signal. "The message is that we're going to be in this for the long haul," Baer said. "We're going to have a voice on the direction of the state-and the nation, God willing."

The center already commands unusual influence. E-mails obtained by a watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, show that Baer has been in regular contact with Governor DeWine's office about an array of policies. The center's board of directors includes two of the state's biggest Republican donors, one of whom, the corporate lobbyist David Myhal, previously served as DeWine's chief fund-raiser. A third director, Tom Minnery, who has served as the center's board chair, is a chairman emeritus of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful national legal organization that was created as the religious right's answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. And, until earlier this year, a fourth director at the center was Seth Morgan, who is currently the vice-chairman of the A.D.F.

The most recently available I.R.S. records show that the center and the A.D.F. share several funding sources-notably, the huge, opaque National Christian Foundation-and have amplified each other's messages. In April, the center celebrated the A.D.F.'s legal defense of an Ohio college professor who refused to use a student's preferred pronouns. In addition, the center works in concert with about a hundred and thirty Catholic and evangelical schools, twenty-two hundred churches, and what it calls a Christian Chamber of Commerce of aligned businesses. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist specializing in state government who teaches at the University of Washington, told me that the center illustrates what political scientists are calling the "nationalization of local politics."

The Center for Christian Virtue appears to be the true sponsor of some of Ohio's most extreme right-wing bills. Gary Click, the Sandusky-area pastor serving in the Ohio House, acknowledged to me that the group had prompted him to introduce a bill opposing gender-affirming care for transgender youths, regardless of parental consent. The center, in essence, handed Click the wording for the legislation. Click confirmed to me that the center "is very proactive on Cap Square"-the Ohio capitol-adding, "All legislators are aware of their presence." Click's transgender bill isn't yet law, but a related bill, also promoted by the center, has passed in the Ohio House. It stipulates that any student on a girls' sports team participating in interscholastic conferences must have been born with female genitals. The legislation also calls for genital inspections. Niven observed that "many anti-trans sports bills were percolating" in Republican-ruled statehouses, but "leave it to Ohio to pass a provision for mandatory genital inspection if anyone questions their gender." He went on, "That's gerrymandering. You can't say 'Show me your daughter' and stay in office unless you have unlosable districts."

In a phone interview, Baer told me that his mother and father, who divorced, were Jewish Democrats. But his father converted to Christianity, and became a Baptist pastor. After a rocky adolescence, Baer himself converted to a more conservative form of evangelical Christianity. He told me that the only "real hope for our nation is in Jesus, but we need safeguards in the law." He described gender-confirming health care for transgender patients as "mutilation." Baer believes that the Supreme Court should overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage, and he opposes the use of surrogate pregnancy, which he called "renting a womb," because it "permanently separates the children from their biological mothers." He supports the Personhood Act-State Representative Click's proposal to ban abortions at conception. As for Ohio's much publicized ten-year-old rape victim, Baer told me that the girl would have been better off having her rapist's baby and raising it, too, because a "child will always do best with the biological mother."

"Even if the mother is in grade school?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

Baer is untroubled by the notion that gerrymandering has enabled minority rule. "I think the polls that matter are the polls of the folks turning out to vote," he said.

The vast majority of Ohio residents clearly want legislative districts that are drawn more fairly. By 2015, the state's gerrymandering problem had become so notorious that seventy-one per cent of Ohioans voted to pass an amendment to the state constitution demanding reforms. As a result, the Ohio constitution now requires that districts be shaped so that the makeup of the General Assembly is proportional to the political makeup of the state. In 2018, an even larger bipartisan majority-seventy-five per cent of Ohio voters-passed a similar resolution for the state's congressional districts.

Though these reforms were democratically enacted, the voters' will has thus far been ignored. Allison Russo, the minority leader in the House, who is one of two Democratic members of the seven-person redistricting commission, told me, "I was optimistic at the beginning." But, she explained, the Republican members drafted a new districting map in secret, and earlier this year they presented it to her and the other Democrat just hours before a deadline. The proposed districts were nowhere near proportional to the state's political makeup. The Democrats argued that the Republicans had flagrantly violated the reforms that had been written into the state constitution.

This past spring, an extraordinary series of legal fights were playing out. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map-and then struck down four more, after the Republican majority on the redistricting commission continued submitting maps that defied the spirit of the court's orders. The chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was herself a Republican. Russo told me, "If norms were being obeyed, we would expect that there would have been an effort to follow the first Ohio Supreme Court decision. But that simply didn't happen."

The Republicans' antics lasted so long that they basically ran out the clock. Election deadlines were looming, and the makeup of Ohio's districts still hadn't been settled. "They contrived a crisis," Russo told me. At that point, a group allied with the Republicans, Ohio Right to Life, urged a federal court to intervene, on the ground that the delay was imperilling the fair administration of upcoming elections. The decision was made by a panel of three federal judges-two of whom had been appointed by Trump. Over the strenuous objection of the third judge, the two Trump judges ruled in the group's favor, allowing the 2022 elections to proceed with a map so rigged that Ohio's top judicial body had rejected it as unconstitutional.

On Twitter, Bill Seitz, the majority leader of the Ohio House, jeered at his Democratic opponents: "Too bad so sad. We win again." He continued, "Now I know it's been a tough night for all you libs. Pour yourself a glass of warm milk and you will sleep better. The game is over and you lost."

Ohio Democrats, including David Pepper, are outraged. "The most corrupt state in the country was told more than five times that it was violating the law, and then the federal court said it was O.K.," he told me. "If you add up all the abnormalities, it's a case study-we're seeing the disintegration of the rule of law in Ohio. They intentionally created an illegal map, and are laughing about it."

Russo likens the Republicans' stunning contempt for the Ohio Supreme Court to the January 6th insurrection: "People are saying, 'Where is the accountability when you disregard the rule of law and attack democracy?' Because that's what's happening in the statehouses, and Ohio is a perfect example."

Pepper has resorted to giving nightly Zoom lectures to small groups of Democratic activists and donors from across the country, in the hope of opening their eyes to what's happening at the ground level in the statehouses. Meanwhile, he recently co-founded a group called Blue Ohio to fund even seemingly doomed races in deep-red local districts. Even if these Democratic candidates lose in 2022, he says, they will at least be making arguments that voters in many districts would never otherwise hear. "You can't just abandon half the country to extremism," he warns.

As Pepper sees it, Republicans understand clearly that, "if it were a level playing field, their positions would be too unpopular to win." But "this is not a democracy to them anymore."

He told me, "There are two sides in America, but they're fighting different battles. The blue side thinks their views are largely popular and democracy is relatively stable-and that they just need better outcomes in federal elections. The focus is on winning swing states in national elections. The other side, though, knows that our democracy isn't stable-that it can be subverted through the statehouses. Blue America needs to reshape everything it does for that much deeper battle. It's not about one cycle. It's a long game." ♦

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State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy

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Even in moderate places like Ohio, gerrymandering has let unchecked Republicans pass extremist laws that could never make it through Congress. As the Supreme Court anticipated when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the battle over abortion rights is now being waged state by state.

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2022 - What Giving Circle Dollars Can Do.pdf

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Need to prevent a supermajority to safeguard Governor Cooper’s ability to veto radical rightwing policies

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Need to prevent a supermajority to safeguard Governor Cooper’s ability to veto radical rightwing policies

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What’s At Stake in the North Carolina Midterm Elections

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What’s At Stake in the North Carolina Midterm Elections

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(TNS) - With three months to Election Day, Democrats and Republicans are revving up for the home stretch of their midterm campaigns.

Historically, the political party that's in the White House is the biggest indicator of election results. Midterm elections often reflect what the voters think of the current presidential administration.

In North Carolina, there are two major issues at play this year: the economy and abortion. But a range of other factors will also affect election results in this politically purple state.

While North Carolina's U.S. Senate race between Democrat Cheri Beasley and Republican Ted Budd is drawing the most attention, the 2022 election will also determine control of the state legislature. North Carolina's General Assembly has a Republican majority, and Gov. Roy Cooper - whose term runs through 2024 - is a Democrat.

Democrats and Republicans are counting on voter motivation to deliver wins for their respective parties.

National Influence on State Politics

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, said "the biggest factors are the immovable ones." Because it's President Joe Biden's first midterm, Democrats are going to lose seats, he said.

"The Republicans are going to gain seats. For Democrats, it's about blunting the force of the headwinds coming against them," Cooper said.

"Issues like abortion might do that," he added, but "it's not going be a game changer. We're not going to have a Democratic majority in the legislature."

If Republicans gain enough seats for a supermajority, they could change abortion law in the state, which currently comprises an unenforced ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Democratic Sen. Natalie Murdock sees the issue as a "huge rallying cry" for voters. But whether abortion, or inflation, will be enough to drive voter turnout is yet to be determined.

GOP Confidence and Downballot Races

Republican state legislative leaders - including Senate leader Phil Berger of Eden and House Speaker Tim Moore of Kings Mountain - are confident they'll maintain a majority and regain their veto-proof supermajority, which they haven't had since 2018.

In June, Berger told reporters that what he sees as the Biden Administration's failures have created opportunities for Republicans in federal and state races.

"That's one of those things where what I like to say is we probably have the wind at our backs in terms of elections," Berger said.

He thinks Republicans can win more than 30 seats in the Senate. That's the number they need for a supermajority.

On the House side, Moore said his confidence is driven by what's happening at the federal level.

"There's things that you can do to sort of rise above and stand out as a legislative candidate or on a state issue, but elections these days I think are driven so much by what's going on with the national mood and what's going on there," he said in late July. "...Inflation's real. These pocketbook issues are real, and I think the voters are going to hold Biden and the Democrats responsible for that."

While Democrats want to make abortion an election issue, Moore said, Republicans are "focused on really running this state the way it should be done, really trying to run it like a business."

In July, Gov. Roy Cooper signed into law the Republican-written state budget that included raises for state employees and teachers that were well below the rate of inflation. Even with a $6 billion revenue surplus the legislature set aside significant funds for savings, anticipating a recession on the horizon.

One issue that enough Republicans and Democrats support in North Carolina, regardless of 2022 results, is expanding Medicaid to give more residents access to health care. It could happen before or after the midterm elections, even as soon as later this month. But the House and Senate have been at an impasse since mid-July.

Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist for the governor and others, said that "if Republicans are smart, they would take Medicaid expansion off the table" by reaching a deal before the November election. If they don't, Jackson said, Democrats will hang that issue around their necks during campaign season.

Jackson said midterm elections are about motivation, and the side that wins has the most motivated voters.

"For most of the last year, the voters most motivated and angry were Republicans," Jackson said, because their party has been out of power. But the Supreme Court decision tossing abortion laws back to the states has motivated Democratic voters.

Before the court decision, Democrats were about 10 percent less motivated than Republicans, Jackson said. But that has changed.

If former President Donald Trump announces he's going to run again, that will also motivate more Democrats to vote, according to Jackson. And Democrats are counting on Beasley's historic candidacy as an African American woman to drive voter support.

2022 vs. 2020

Not much changed in the makeup of North Carolina's statewide political power after the 2020 elections. Cooper was reelected, as were the Republican leaders of the General Assembly.

Democrats lost a few seats in the legislature, but still maintained enough to prevent a Republican supermajority.

Jackson said Democrats didn't have an aggressive ground game in 2020 because of COVID-19, but now they are organized and knocking on doors. Republicans, who were credited with a better ground game last round, have also increased their fundraising.

Chris Cooper, the politics professor, said some of the Democrats' strategy is regaining ground they lost in rural North Carolina. But he sees that as more likely to happen in 2032, not 2022.

Murdock - a Durham Democrat active in state Democratic Party leadership, who worked on voter outreach for the Biden-Harris campaign - said that Democrats have ramped up their field presence. She and fellow Senate Democrat Jay Chaudhuri both pointed to groups like the New Rural Project that work to drive voter registration and turnout.

"I definitely think with the ground game we're starting much earlier," Murdock said, out knocking on doors this summer. In her own district up for election, which now includes Chatham County, she has been canvassing since late spring.

Chaudhuri, the Senate Democratic whip, said Democrats are putting resources in areas that matter most to them, including Wake County, which includes his district, and Mecklenburg, New Hanover and Cumberland counties.

"I think the idea of a red wave is overstated," Chaudhuri told The News & Observer. "I think what we're seeing as we get closer to the November election is Democrats are coming home because of the January 6 hearings and seeing independents break away because of the (Supreme Court abortion) decision. I think we have a real opportunity to hold on to our senator numbers, and keep Gov. Cooper's veto," he said.

Chaudhuri said that inflation and gas prices are also real issues for voters, but a counterpoint is North Carolina's economic growth and job production.

"Gas prices are coming down, that's helpful. Inflation is heading in the right direction," Murdock said in a recent interview. "I think all of that is going to come together."

Although Roy Cooper is chair of the Democratic Governors Association and helping Beasley campaign, Jackson said, the governor is "laser-like focused on the General Assembly. His top priority is the General Assembly."

Chaudhuri said that Democrats will be talking to voters about the need to invest in public education, that Democrats can take credit for job growth in North Carolina and that "we don't want to be Texas, Florida or Georgia when it comes to protecting a woman's right to choose."

Known Unknowns

Another factor at play this election is the rise of unaffiliated voters. They blew past Democrats as the largest voting group before the May primary.

While unaffiliated voters generally follow the voting trends of the district they're in, their votes aren't guaranteed for one of the two major parties.

Stephen Wiley, director of the state Republican House Caucus, said that during a recession, voters are going to punish the people in national power. House Republicans are starting to send out political advertising in the mail, with more to come.

Voters are most concerned about the economy, Wiley said, including inflation and gas prices.

"I just filled up for $3.99 (a gallon) on Peace Street, and that's supposed to be good news?" he said.

Wiley doesn't think abortion will be as big a factor in the election as Democrats expect. He said "things are going to change" between now and Election Day on Nov. 8.

"I didn't have 'FBI raids (Trump's home at) Mar-a-Lago on Monday night' on my Bingo card, personally," Wiley said. "...We just don't know. We don't know. It just comes down to the national mood, and history is not kind to parties of the president when there's a recession. That's our number one issue and it'll stay our number one issue."

For legislative races, Wiley said its about persuading existing voters to finish filling out their ballots, meaning all the downballot races. He said House Republicans are confident about maintaining a majority and see a "strong pathway to supermajority."

"The economy. That's it. That's the whole thing. People don't like that their life is more expensive," he said.

©2022 The Charlotte Observer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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What's At Stake in the North Carolina Midterm Elections

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(TNS) - With three months to Election Day, Democrats and Republicans are revving up for the home stretch of their midterm campaigns. Historically, the political party that's in the White House is the biggest indicator of election results. Midterm elections often reflect what the voters think of the current presidential administration.

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Goal: protect the bipartisan coalition in the House that provides a critical buffer against rightwing policies driven by a radical governor

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Goal: protect the bipartisan coalition in the House that provides a critical buffer against rightwing policies driven by a radical governor

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Just a few hundred votes could determine control of both chambers in 2022, the thinnest margins in a century!

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Just a few hundred votes could determine control of both chambers in 2022, the thinnest margins in a century!

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In 2018, The States Project helped flip the State Senate & in 2020, we helped expand the majority focused on improving lives

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In 2018, The States Project helped flip the State Senate & in 2020, we helped expand the majority focused on improving lives

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The current majority in the House is vulnerable under new maps

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The current majority in the House is vulnerable under new maps

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“There’s a Way to Outmaneuver the Supreme Court, and Maine Has Found It,” - through the state legislature!

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“There’s a Way to Outmaneuver the Supreme Court, and Maine Has Found It,” - through the state legislature!

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The Maine State House in Augusta. Credit... Craig Dilger for The New York Times

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Mr. Tang is a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a former law clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

What a week so far for conservatives. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down a Maine law that prohibited religious private schools from receiving taxpayer dollars. On Thursday, it invalidated a New York State gun safety law limiting the public carry of firearms. And on Friday, it overturned Roe v. Wade. The outcome in these caseswas not surprising. The court has ruled in favor of religious litigants in an overwhelming number of cases; the gun case's outcome was clear from the oral argument before the justices in November; and the court's draft abortion decision was leaked in May.

What is surprising is how little the 6-to-3 decision in the Maine case, Carson v. Makin, will matter practically. And the reason offers a glimpse of hope for those who worry about a future dominated by the court's conservative supermajority - including the many Americans troubled by the court's decision in the gun case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Let's start with the Carson case. Anticipating this week's decision, Maine lawmakers enacted a crucial amendment to the state's anti-discrimination law last year in order to counteract the expected ruling. The revised law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and it applies to every private school that chooses to accept public funds, without regard to religious affiliation.

The impact was significant: The two religious schools at issue in the Carson case, Bangor Christian Schools and Temple Academy, said that they would decline state funds if, as Maine's new law requires, accepting such funds would require them to change how they operate or alter their "admissions standards" to admit L.G.B.T.Q. students.

The legislative fix made by Maine lawmakers offers a model for lawmakers elsewhere who are alarmed by the court's aggressive swing to the right. Maine's example shows that those on the losing end of a case can often outmaneuver the court and avoid the consequences of a ruling.

By enacting its law, Maine was able to assure its taxpayers that they will not be complicit in discriminating against L.G.B.T.Q. students, because private schools that discriminate will be ineligible for public funds. The law will limit church-state entanglement, assuming other religious schools decline funding for the same reasons as the schools in Carson. And although nondiscriminatory private schools can still receive public funds, Maine can eliminate that program at any point - a fact the court conceded. (Whether it should is a closer question that ought to turn on the program's impact on educational equity.)

Other states should follow Maine's lead. A handful of blue states - including Illinois, Maryland, Nevada and Vermont - provide vouchers or similar tax-credit scholarships to low-income students to enroll in private schools. None of them, however, enacted a statute prohibiting funds-receiving private schools from discriminating against L.G.B.T.Q. students. Legislation that would do so is pending in Maryland's legislature, the General Assembly. Lawmakers there should quickly enact it. Other states should also prohibit such discrimination.

And lawmakers troubled by the court's gun safety decision and worried about the looming ruling on abortion should also take a page from Maine's playbook.

Now that the court has struck down New York's limits on who may carry guns in public, state lawmakers there and in other states should pass new laws to deter gun violence. Justice Clarence Thomas's majority opinion made clear that the constitutionality of restrictions is historically " settled" in "sensitive places" such as legislatures, courtrooms and polling locations, and that "modern regulations" may "prohibit" the carry of firearms in "new" places. Given that, states should enact an expansive list of so-called sensitive places where guns may not be carried. Though Justice Thomas did not specify which those might be, during oral arguments in November, several justices pondered that they might include public transportation, crowded venues, university campuses and places where alcohol is served.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in a concurrence joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, moreover, that while states may not impose restrictions that prevent " ordinary, law abiding citizens " from carrying a gun to defend themselves, states can still enact rigorous requirements for a public carry permit, such as stringent background and mental health records checks and completion of regular training courses.

Another promising reform for states to consider would be to require gun owners to possess firearm liability insurance. Not only would such a requirement ensure that victims of gun violence can recover for their losses and " provide financial incentives for responsible arms carrying," but it also draws strong historical support from a host of 19th century "surety laws" recognized in the court's opinion.

And on Friday, the court eliminated the right to abortion. Because of the sweeping nature of the court's decision, there are some limits on what pro-choice states can do alone. But at a minimum, lawmakers should act vigorously to ensure that abortion providers are able to serve out-of-state patients unable to obtain care in their home states. Connecticut and New York have already passed such laws; others should follow suit.

As Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan noted in their dissent, "it is women who cannot afford" to travel to other states "who will suffer the most."

To protect these patients, lawmakers must act at the national level. So the Biden administration should argue that Food and Drug Administration rules permitting the use of mifepristone to terminate a pregnancy override contrary state laws. Promisingly, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a statement on Friday advancing precisely this approach. Congress should also continue working to enact the Women's Health Protection Act to enshrine a right to abortion as a matter of federal law, even though the filibuster remains an obstacle.

Last fall, Justice Sotomayor, for whom I clerked in 2013-14, predicted that there would be "a lot of disappointment in the law" in the current court term. Now we see why. For understandable reasons, some critics of the current court have girded for a battle to expand the number of justices. Maine has shown another promising path. Sometimes, the best way to protect against overreaching by the conservative court is through good old-fashioned lawmaking.

Aaron Tang (@AaronTangLaw) is a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a former law clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

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Opinion | There's a Way to Outmaneuver the Supreme Court, and Maine Has Found It

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Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Read in app Mr. Tang is a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a former law clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

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"The tissue-thin Republican majorities in Arizona’s State Legislature — 31 to 29 in the House, 16 to 14 in the Senate — are the most precarious the G.O.P. has experienced in over a quarter-century as the ruling party."

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"The tissue-thin Republican majorities in Arizona’s State Legislature — 31 to 29 in the House, 16 to 14 in the Senate — are the most precarious the G.O.P. has experienced in over a quarter-century as the ruling party."

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A primary eve rally in Phoenix featuring onstage, from left, the former Trump official Richard Grenell, the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters. Credit... Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

First, it turned against the establishment. Now it has set its sights on democracy - the principles, the process and even the word itself.

A primary eve rally in Phoenix featuring onstage, from left, the former Trump official Richard Grenell, the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters. Credit... Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

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R​​ose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona's G.O.P., answered immediately when I asked her to name the first Republican leader she admired. "I grew up during the time that Joe McCarthy was doing his talking," Sperry, an energetic 81-year-old, said of the Wisconsin senator who in the 1950s infamously claimed Communists had infiltrated the federal government. "I was young, but I was listening. If he were here today, I would say, 'Get him in there as president!'"

Sperry is part of a grass-roots movement that has pushed her state's party far to the right in less than a decade. She had driven 37 miles the morning of July 16, from her home in the Northern Arizona town Cottonwood to the outskirts of Prescott, to attend the monthly meeting of a local conservative group called the Lions of Liberty, who, according to the group's website, "are determined to correct the course of our country, which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats and fake news." That dismal view of America today was echoed by nearly every other conservative voter and group I encountered across the state over the past year.

Arizona has become a bellwether for the rest of the nation, and not just because of its new status as a swing state and the first of these to be called for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It was and has continued to be the nexus of efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the 2020 election results. At the same time, party figures from Trump down to Rose Sperry have sought to blacklist every Arizona G.O.P. official who maintained that the election was fairly won - from Gov. Doug Ducey to Rusty Bowers, speaker of the state's House of Representatives. Such leaders have been condemned as RINOs, or Republicans in name only, today's equivalent of the McCarthy era's "fellow travelers."

Whether that viewpoint is politically viable in a swing state is another question. Arizona's two U.S. senators, Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, are both Democrats. The tissue-thin Republican majorities in Arizona's State Legislature - 31 to 29 in the House, 16 to 14 in the Senate - are the most precarious the G.O.P. has experienced in over a quarter-century as the ruling party. And, of course, Trump lost Arizona in 2020, in large part by alienating the college-educated suburbanites who have relocated to the Phoenix metropolitan area of Maricopa County in increasing numbers.

Arizona has thus become what the state's well-regarded pollster Mike Noble characterizes as "magenta, the lightest state of red." In the face of this shift, the state's G.O.P. has aggressively declined to moderate itself. Instead, it has endeavored to cast out some of its best-known political figures. Last year, it censured its sitting governor, Doug Ducey; its former U.S. senator Jeff Flake; and Cindy McCain, the widow of the U.S. senator and 2008 G.O.P. presidential nominee John McCain, arguably the state party's second-most-famous elected official, after Barry Goldwater.

In the weeks leading up to its Aug. 2 primary, and now as it turns toward the general election in November, Arizona has presented an American case study in how backlash to demographic and social change can cause a political party to turn on itself, even at its own electoral peril. "The fact that so much energy is being spent RINO-slaying and not beating Democrats is not a healthy place for our party to be in the long run," one political consultant who works in multiple Western states including Arizona (and who requested anonymity to not alienate current and potential clients) observed fretfully.

When I recently spoke by phone with the state G.O.P.'s chairwoman, Kelli Ward, and shared this consultant's concern, she offered a defiant laugh. "That's the same argument that they've been making again and again and again, decade after decade," Ward told me. "And they deliver us these spineless weaklings who cave in like rusty lawn chairs at the snap of a Democrat's finger. I'm sick of it, and the people are sick of it." A day after we spoke, Ward announced on Twitter that party officials had voted to censure yet another of their own: Bowers, the sitting House speaker, one of the few state Republican leaders who had remained steadfast in publicly saying that Trump lost Arizona fair and square, and had recently testified to the Jan. 6 House committee that vengeful opponents had driven a van through his neighborhood with a video screen calling him a pedophile. Bowers, Ward proclaimed in her tweet, "is no longer a Republican in good standing & we call on Republicans to replace him at the ballot box in the August primary." (Bowers was defeated.)

What is different now is the use of "democracy" as a kind of shorthand and even a slur for Democrats themselves, for the left and all the positions espoused by the left, for hordes of would-be but surely unqualified or even illegal voters who are fundamentally anti-American and must be opposed and stopped at all costs. That anti-democracy and anti-"democracy" sentiment, repeatedly voiced over the course of my travels through Arizona, is distinct from anything I have encountered in over two decades of covering conservative politics.

It's the failure to reinstall a legitimately defeated president, under the misguided belief that victory was stolen from him, that seems to have ushered in the view among Arizona Republicans - and many more across the nation - that democracy itself was at fault and had been weaponized by the political left, or the "enemies from within," as McCarthy once put it. As it happened, Rose Sperry wasn't the first person to invoke the Wisconsin senator at the Lions of Liberty event. "I had a weird dream last night about Joseph McCarthy," said one of the morning's featured speakers, Jim Arroyo, the head of Arizona's biggest chapter of the Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group made up largely of current and former members of the armed forces and law enforcement. McCarthy, he said, "was not only right - he understated the seriousness of it."

Arroyo's eschatological rhetoric was echoed by the down-ballot Republican candidates who spoke to the group. One of them was Selina Bliss, a precinct committeewoman and nursing teacher at Yavapai College who was running for a State House seat. (On Aug. 2, she was defeated by the G.O.P. incumbent, Quang Nguyen, who earlier this year authored legislation, later signed into law, requiring that Arizona high school students receive anti-Communist civics instruction.) Bliss reminded her friends and neighbors that they belonged to a thriving activist movement: "We Republicans, we conservatives, we're the grass roots, we come from the bottom up."

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But after the seeming paean to political participation, she took a turn. "I want to address something that's bugging me for a long time," Bliss said. "And that's the history and the sacredness of our Constitution and what our founding fathers meant." She then said: "We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word 'democracy.' When I hear the word 'democracy,' I think of the democracy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That's not us."

It once would have been jarring to hear a candidate for state legislative office ignore the usual parochial issues - property taxes, water access, state funding for universities - and instead repudiate the very idea of democracy in America. But Bliss's view was hardly out of place here. Sperry, the activist sitting in the audience, had posted on Facebook a few months before: "Please strike the word democracy from your vocabulary! WE ARE A REPUBLIC!!!"

The Republican activities across Arizona before its primary could have been mistaken, at first glance, for a collective celebration of democracy rather than a threat to it. Rows of yard signs, nearly all of them for G.O.P. candidates, stretched along highways from Maricopa County to the northern conservative strongholds of Mohave and Yavapai Counties. Candidate meet-and-greets, held in coffee shops and strip malls and V.F.W. halls, were hosted by activist groups like the Granite Mountain Republican Women and United Patriots AZ. Among the candidates, the closest thing to an entrenched party war horse was two six-term congressmen from the 2010 Tea Party class, Paul Gosar and David Schweikert, each of whom were now, because of redistricting, having to sell themselves to voters in newly drawn but still red districts. (Both incumbents won.) Otherwise, the field was replete with political novices, suggestive of what Selina Bliss, at the Lions of Liberty meeting, referred to as a seeming "bottom up" democratization of the Republican Party.

But most of the G.O.P. candidates seemed to share Bliss's fears of majority rule as well as a desire to inflict harsh punishment on those they perceive as threats, deviants and un-American. Possibly the most notorious Arizona Republican to appear on the primary ballot was State Senator Wendy Rogers. She was censured in March by her fellow state senators for telling a white-nationalist group, referring to state and federal officials who had enacted Covid vaccine mandates, "If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it'll make an example of these traitors who betrayed our country."

Yet Rogers would go on to win her primary, easily defeating a fellow G.O.P. state senator, Kelly Townsend, whose communications with Trump lawyers have been subpoenaed by the F.B.I., presumably for information she might have about the plot by Trump allies to replace Arizona's legitimate electors with fake ones. No moderate herself, Townsend recently vowed that vigilantes at primary polling stations would monitor voters they deemed suspicious: "We're going to have people parked out there watching you, and they're going to follow you to your car and get your license plate."

The leading name in this new Republican wave is that of Lake, the gubernatorial candidate, who was a well-known personality on Phoenix's Fox affiliate for over two decades. At a Trump rally in Arizona I attended in January, she called for the arrest of illegal border-crossers and also of Dr. Anthony Fauci for unspecified Covid-related offenses, as well as unspecified conspirators "in that corrupt, shady, shoddy election of 2020." To this litany of suspected criminals, Lake has also added teachers. "Put cameras in the classroom," she told the Arizona conservative talk-radio host Garret Lewis last November, arguing that parents should have access to video evidence of "something being taught in the classroom" that they might deem objectionable.

Lake neatly if hyperbolically described the Arizona G.O.P.'s us-versus-them outlook on Twitter in June: "They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens. They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let's bring back the basics: God, Guns & Glory." On her campaign website, Lake describes the media - her former profession - as "corrupt" and "the enemy of the people." A campaign video displays her bashing televisions to bits with a sledgehammer and a baseball bat. At a rally the night before the primary, she directed her audience to turn around and "show these bastards" - referring to the camera crews positioned on a riser - their disapproval, which they proceeded to do with loud jeers.

Lake has said she decided to leave journalism in 2021 because of disenchantment with the news media's liberal bias. In fact, Lake herself donated to Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. A decade later, Lake's preference had changed. She visited the White House in June 2019 to do a story for the local Fox affiliate on Stephanie Grisham, who years before served as the press secretary for the Arizona House Majority Caucus and who had just been named communications director for the first lady, Melania Trump. "What got me was how much of a fangirl for Donald Trump she was," Grisham told me. "When she got there, she was absolutely gushing about him. I remember thinking, Even for Fox, this is a bit much."

Trump endorsed Lake last September, a few hours after she wrote on Twitter that the likeness of the former president should be chiseled into Mount Rushmore. Trump also endorsed Blake Masters, now the Arizona Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly. Masters, the 36-year-old former C.O.O. of Peter Thiel's venture capital firm, embraces the "great replacement" conspiracy theory. "If you say as a candidate, 'Obviously, the Democrats, they hope to just change the demographics of our country, they hope to import an entirely new electorate,' they call you a bigot," he told Rob Hephner, who goes by Birdman, on the "Patriot Edition" podcast in April. Such views are in alignment with those of Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, who gave Masters his "forceful endorsement." (Masters rejected the endorsement.) The campaign yard signs for Masters that I saw festooning Arizona's highways bore pledges like "Blake Masters Will Prosecute Fauci" and "Blake Masters Won't Ask Your Pronouns."

Trump's interest in Arizona officeseekers like Masters and Lake is anything but casual. For nearly two years running, he has repeatedly cited both his continuing desire to overturn the 2020 presidential election and Arizona's centrality to that effort. At a rally in Prescott Valley on July 22, Trump spoke glowingly of the G.O.P. state chairwoman, Kelli Ward - "she's winning so much." Ward has championed the State Senate's election audit of Maricopa County, calling it "America's Audit." (Arizona election officials had already conducted a succession of recounts and audits before this one by an outfit called Cyber Ninjas, headed by a conservative election denier named Doug Logan, which found in the end that Biden had won 99 more votes and Trump 261 fewer than originally recorded.)

The most telling among Trump's Arizona endorsements is that of the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, whom Trump has described in an official statement as "a true warrior" who took an "incredibly powerful stance on the Massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam." Indeed, Finchem, as a state representative, was one of Arizona's first public officials to baselessly claim that the state's voting machines had been corrupted in Biden's favor. At a candidate forum I attended in mid-July, Finchem disclosed to the audience that he had charged $5,000 to his personal American Express card to rent out a Phoenix hotel conference room where, on Nov. 30, 2020, he and Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani staged a multihour presentation to Finchem's fellow state legislators of supposed fraud in Arizona, even as state officials were certifying the election for Biden a few miles away. As secretary of state, Finchem would be Arizona's top election official during a potential rematch of Trump and Biden in 2024 and could work to invalidate the results, which the current secretary of state, the Democrat Katie Hobbs, now running for governor, refused to do in 2020.

The enmeshment of Finchem and other Arizona Republicans in the tumultuous final weeks of Trump's presidency is remarkable in its depth and complexity. On Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, Representative Paul Gosar conceived the first protest of the results anywhere in the United States, marching to the Maricopa County recorder's office in Phoenix, where the ballots were still being tallied. Joining Trump's lawyer Sidney Powell in a postelection lawsuit seeking to invalidate Arizona's results, on the factually unsupported grounds that "old-fashioned 19th-century ballot stuffing" had occurred there, was the Phoenix lawyer Alexander Kolodin, who on primary night won a seat in the State Legislature (no Democrat will oppose him in the general election). As the flurry of Arizona lawsuits failed one by one, the state's G.O.P. chairwoman, Ward - who had also filed an unsuccessful election lawsuit - maintained a weekslong pressure campaign against the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to throw out the results, saying in one ominous text message (among many that were obtained by The Arizona Republic), "I know you don't want to be remembered as the guy who led the charge to certify a fraudulent election."

Two weeks after the Nov. 30 election-fraud hearing convened by Finchem and Giuliani, while state officials were certifying the Arizona results, the official state G.O.P. Twitter account posted a video of Ward and 10 other Republicans signing documents falsely proclaiming themselves to be the state's electors and declaring the election results illegitimate. Among the phony electors were three Republicans who would later appear on the 2022 primary ballot: the U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon and the State Senate candidates Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman. (Lamon was defeated by Masters; Kern and Hoffman won.) This fake-elector scheme had been in the works for over a month and involved Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who in emails obtained by The Washington Post urged two Arizona lawmakers, Speaker Rusty Bowers and State Representative Shawnna Bolick, to "take action to ensure that a clean slate of electors is chosen."

When that maneuver also failed to bear fruit, several Arizona Republicans joined with Trump in attempting a final desperate postelection measure. On Dec. 21, 2020, Gosar and his fellow Arizona congressman Andy Biggs, then the head of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, were among a group of G.O.P. House members who met with Trump in the White House to discuss actions including calling on Vice President Mike Pence to decertify the election results unilaterally. Two weeks later, on Jan. 5, 2021, 16 Arizona legislators - Bolick, Kern and Finchem among them - signed a letter to Pence that was also signed by Republican legislators in four other contested states, urging him to delay certifying the election results for 10 days. Pence refused to do so, and on Jan. 6, Kern and Finchem were among the Arizonans who descended on the Capitol. Finchem photographed the riotous mob and posted it on Twitter with the caption, "What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud."

As a result of their involvement in Trump's efforts to steal back the presidency, Finchem, Ward, Biggs and other Arizona Republicans have been issued subpoenas by the Jan. 6 committee. (Though Ward taunted Democrats last year for their resistance to the State Senate audit in Arizona - "What are they hiding?" she demanded at the time - she has since sued to block the committee from obtaining her cellphone records.) Back home in Arizona, however, they have faced no reprisals within their party. Far from it: Their willingness to assist Trump in overturning the 2020 election was rewarded across the boards on primary night.

"We are a Wild West state," Lake proudly declared to a cheering audience at the Trump rally I attended in January. She was saluting her state's undomesticated spirit and distinguishing it from what she termed the "socialist garbage" prevalent in California. Much like Texans, residents of the last contiguous state to enter the Union have long evinced a certain pride in their nearly uninhabitable territory, insofar as doing so confers a toughness that their effete neighbors to the west may lack. Lake was no doubt also nodding to the worrisome demographic reality that some 60,000 Californians relocated to Arizona in 2020. What some activists on the right derisively refer to as the looming "Californication" of Arizona - high taxes, increased gun restrictions and liberalization of social values - ranks high on the list of existential anxieties among the state's conservatives. "They don't win with their ideas," Lake said of progressives to her supporters the night before the primary, "because their ideas are what sunk California."

Roughly 39 percent of Arizona's land is federally owned. The local hostility to government control, combined with the sense of rough-hewn independence fostered by its desert climate, has meant that conservatism in Arizona has long possessed an extremist underbelly. One former longtime state G.O.P. operative brought up the congressional district long represented by Gosar, which includes most of Mohave and Yavapai Counties, two of the two most conservative in Arizona. (The home page for the Mohave County G.O.P. contains the banner headline, "Protecting Our Republic ... One Voter at a Time." The Yavapai County G.O.P.'s website includes links to the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's podcast as well as to the Gateway Pundit website, which has been banned on Twitter and demonetized by Google for promoting ludicrous conspiracy theories.) "These are the ranchers of the West," the former operative told me. "They literally will meet you with a gun at their door if you try to say hello. It makes canvassing very difficult." This person noted that Kingman, a town in Mohave County, was where Timothy McVeigh spent several months discussing with fellow extremists his plans to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As the former operative told me, "This is the part of the country where they believe Timothy McVeigh was right."

Other political observers in Arizona point to Gov. Evan Mecham, elected in 1986 and impeached and removed from office only 15 months into his term (for obstruction of justice and misusing public funds to prop up his ailing auto dealership), as an early sign of a far-right base that Trump would later exploit. Mecham, who rescinded the state holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while blaming America's high divorce rate on women's entering the labor force, vowed to his death that his political career had been undone by a vast conspiracy.

The bridge between Mecham and Trump would prove to be Joe Arpaio, who took office as Maricopa County sheriff in 1993, five years after Mecham's removal, and stepped down in 2017 after losing his latest re-election bid. Styling himself as "America's toughest sheriff," Arpaio achieved notoriety for his barbaric attitude toward county inmates before later refashioning himself as Arizona's foremost proponent of strict border-enforcement measures and, later still, as a pioneer of the "birther" conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. Arpaio became an early spokesman for candidate Trump, who as president would pardon Arpaio after he was found guilty of contempt of court. Arpaio, now 90, was also on the ballot for the Aug. 2 primary, barely losing a campaign to be mayor of Fountain Hills, an affluent town in Maricopa County with a population of some 24,000.

Of course, Arizona's dominant modern-day political figures - the Democrats Carl Hayden and Morris Udall, the Republicans Goldwater and McCain - have shaped the state and its national standing in ways that Arpaio and Mecham never could. But it's also the case that McCain, the state's most powerful Republican for the past quarter-century, commanded as much distrust as he did allegiance from the grass roots. Conservative Christians in Arizona did not readily forgive McCain for denouncing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance" during his first presidential run in 2000. McCain's partnership with the Democrat Ted Kennedy to reform the nation's immigration system in 2006 further alienated his conservative constituents. Another grudge was the senator's opposition to a 2014 Arizona bill that would permit businesses to deny service to gay customers on religious grounds, insisting that in Arizona, "We welcome all people of all persuasions."

That year, despite McCain's status as a war hero, the Arizona G.O.P. censured him "for his continued disservice to our state and nation," in essence accusing its best-known Republican - and the 2008 G.O.P. presidential candidate - of being a RINO. Following the censure, several McCain associates set up a political action committee called Arizona Grassroots Action and aggressively filled vacant precinct committee seats with loyalists, who in turn voted for like-minded party chairs.

Neglia began to catalog the means by which the party establishment maintained the upper hand: how, in 2015, they brought in busloads of McCain supporters to a party meeting so that the senator would not be greeted entirely by boos; how, in 2016, they invoked an obscure rule to shut down an "Endorse Anyone but McCain" resolution. "That's when I started studying to become a parliamentarian," Neglia told me. "Now I've got the RINOs running scared, because every meeting I go to, they see me, and they know they can't get away with anything anymore."

A former Maricopa County G.O.P. chairwoman, Rae Chornenky, ruefully described to me how Neglia turned the tables at the state party meeting in January 2019. "We were deciding who the next state chairman would be, and Neglia threw a bomb in the middle of it," she said. "He insisted on a roll-call vote, so that people would have to say out loud who they voted for. In politics, you don't always want to have to do that. It's because of that procedure that many people feel she was able to eke out her win."

"She" was Kelli Ward, an osteopathic physician, Tea Party activist and state senator who unsuccessfully challenged McCain in the 2016 Senate primary and subsequently failed to win a Senate primary in 2018. (Ward would later suggest in one of her books that her loss to McCain may have been due to fraud.) "McCain was like a Mafia don," Ward told me, "whose henchmen were willing to take out people who wouldn't kiss his ring. That's why it's so painful now for his cronies, because they're used to being rewarded for their loyalty, just like in the mob. And we are seeing a resurgence or a surge of populist grass-roots people who understand how our country was founded and are tired of that kind of machinery controlling the Republican Party."

Ward's evocation of mobster fealty in McCain's circle might strike some as ironic, given her unyielding fidelity to Donald Trump, whom she first met at Mar-a-Lago in December 2017, tweeting seven months later, "Every day I thank God for @realDonaldTrump & the amazing job he is doing to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain both here at home & across the world." In February, Ward self-published a book about the State Senate audit titled "Justified: The Story of America's Audit" and dedicated it "to President Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States of America, who should still be president today." Though the audit failed to achieve the objective of demonstrating fraud, the taxpayer-funded exercise counted as a huge win for Ward's party organization, which raised over a million dollars during the time of the audit, far more than it did the previous year. As the G.O.P. consultant who works in Western states told me, "The audit was a tremendous windfall for the party, it was good business, the small dollar donations went through the roof."

Ward now sits atop the state G.O.P. hierarchy, which has made her an object of carping from the grass roots, who wonder whether she is drifting away from their ideals. "Even she will violate the rules that we have," Neglia told me, and he then went on to describe how Ward defied "Robert's Rules of Order" in abruptly shutting down a party meeting this past January just as Neglia was trying to argue for a transparency measure. Still, Neglia remains an ally of Ward's - "She's definitely not a RINO," he said - and now shares with her the view that widespread fraud tainted the 2020 election.

"So I was in the movie '2000 Mules,' and I've been on that issue nonstop," said Charlie Kirk as he stood before a gathering of fellow Republicans at a restaurant in the Maricopa County town Goodyear on a Thursday night in July. Kirk, 28, is the leader of the Phoenix-based conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, arguably the nation's most high-profile Trump-adjacent activist group. He was there to raise campaign funds on behalf of his Turning Point lieutenant Austin Smith, who was running in a State House primary, which he would go on to win on Aug. 2. (Smith, in his brief stump speech that night, paid tribute to Trump announcing his presidential bid in 2015 as "a guy with golden hair coming down a golden escalator to save our country.") But after a few perfunctory words of support for Smith, Kirk - an accomplished orator who combines earnestness, comic timing and doomful soothsaying in one smooth and youthful package - proceeded to describe, unhinged from the fact-based world, how America in general and Arizona in particular rested on a knife edge of anarchy.

"We've taught our kids to hate themselves, hate the country and believe there is no God," Kirk told the audience. "And we wonder why our country's falling apart." Kirk told the crowd he knew who was responsible: the Democrats. "They want 7,000 illegals across the border to come into our country every day. They want C.R.T. They want this graphic transgenderism in our schools." As with Kari Lake's good-versus-evil formulation, Kirk went on to describe the stakes in zero-sum terms: "There's no compromise when you want to teach 8-year-olds transgender sexual education. I'm sorry, there's no bargaining. There's no compromise here. I'm just going to have to get more votes than you, and we're going to have to defeat you."

Kirk helped start Turning Point USA in 2012. His organization did not take long to become one of the nation's leading promoters of political disinformation. During the 2016 presidential election, a study conducted for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found, memes created by Kirk's group were amplified by the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency as part of Russia's effort to aid Trump's candidacy. Two years later, according to an investigation by The Guardian, Kirk's organization contracted an Arizona digital marketing firm, Rally Forge, to promote deceptive messages on Facebook with the apparent objective of persuading some Democratic voters to peel away and side with Green Party candidates, as was the case in 2016, when Jill Stein's vote totals in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin exceeded Trump's margin of victory in those three swing states.

'In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy. I've been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out?'

In 2020, The Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action (an affiliate of Turning Point USA) commissioned Rally Forge to churn out disinformation about Covid and election security, using a Phoenix-based campaign likened to a troll farm that included teenagers as employees. That same year, Rally Forge's chief executive, Jake Hoffman, was banned from Twitter. He was also elected to Arizona's Legislature and was among the group of Arizona Republicans who, with Kelli Ward, proclaimed themselves to be electors in seeking to overturn Trump's defeat. Hoffman is now vice-chairman of the state's House Committee on Government and Elections and on primary night became a G.O.P. nominee for the State Senate.

The effect of disinformation on the growing extremism of Arizona's conservative activist community was described to me by a former state Republican operative who asked not to be named so that he could speak candidly about a trend he found to be disturbing. He told me that he frequently received emails from several of the state's conservative precinct committeepersons. "I've never known a group of people, many of whom I genuinely liked, to be so misinformed," the former operative told me. "I wish I could send you a file of memes that I've seen from them over the years. They're lies or half-truths designed to incite rage. So, what ends up happening is you start to get all these clustered groups that start to spread disinformation, but they're also the same people that are the root source of power in Arizona's political system, which is the local precinct committee."

At the event held in Prescott by the Lions of Liberty, I asked Rose Sperry, the G.O.P. state committeewoman, which information outlet she most trusted. She immediately replied, "OAN" - One America News, the Trump-touting network that provided daily coverage of "America's Audit" in Arizona even as one of its show hosts, Christina Bobb, was helping to raise funds for and directly coordinate the operation between the Trump team and state officials.

One guest on OAN's heavy rotation over the past year has been the secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, who appeared on a broadcast last September to discuss the State Senate audit of the 2020 election, accompanied by a chyron that read, "Exposing the Crime of the Century." In July, I drove to Fountain Hills, where Finchem was speaking at a candidate forum hosted by the Republican Women of the Hills. Finchem sidled up to the microphone with a pistol conspicuously strapped to his right hip. After describing his work history in law enforcement, the private sector and Arizona politics, he then offered a different sort of qualification. With a grin, Finchem said, "The Atlantic put out a piece yesterday: I'm the most dangerous person to democracy in America."

The article Finchem was referring to did not designate him "the most dangerous person" - but rather as one of "dozens" of election-denying candidates who "present the most significant threat to American democracy in decades." Regardless, the notion of Arizona's G.O.P. secretary of state front-runner as a threat to democracy was received rapturously. Several women in the audience yelled out "Whooo!" and applauded.

Throughout Arizona's2022 political season, the proactive denigration of democracy among Republicans became a chorus that was impossible to ignore in meetings, speeches and rallies across the state. "By the way," Charlie Kirk made a point of saying at the fund-raiser in Goodyear, "we don't have a democracy. OK? Just to fact check. We're a republic." At a gathering in Mesa that I attended in July, held by the conservative group United Patriots AZ, the evening's host, Jeffrey Crane, asked the audience, "Are we a democracy?" They responded loudly: "Nooooo! Republic!"

In each case, the very notion of democracy was raised not so much to win a scholarly point but rather to shine a spotlight on it as an offending object. When I mentioned this emerging antagonism to McCain's longtime state director, Bettina Nava, she was genuinely stunned. Reflecting on her former boss's brand of conservatism, Nava told me: "At the root of it all was his deep belief in the experiment of democracy. When I was his state director, we met with everybody. And there were times when it was perfectly friendly and others where it was contentious. But he never shied away from it, because disagreement didn't equal hate." Nava feared for the Republican Party she once served. "In my lifetime, I never imagined this attack on democracy," she said. "I've been asking myself: Will this movement die out with Trump? Or are we the ones that will die out? Are we the Whigs?"

Nava was describing a democracy reliant on a notion of comity that was no longer in evidence. As McCain's grip on Arizona waned, Arizona conservatives began gradually to part ways with his beloved democratic experiment. That experiment had worked in the past, so long as the democratic principles in question redounded to the benefit of the state's ruling conservative base. Arizona Republican legislators led the way three decades ago in championing early voting, and Republican voters overwhelmingly chose to cast their ballots by mail, at least until the 2020 election. But by Primary Day in August, many Arizona Republicans had come to view such conveniences, against all evidence, as a trap laid by a wily leftist conspiracy bent on engineering Democratic victories.

One of them, a woman named Sandy Jenocovich, led me to a nearby booth they had set up. It included leaflets for the conservative candidates they favored, as well as free copies of the Constitution, "in case anybody wants one, not that the Democrats go by it, because they certainly don't," she snorted. I asked Jenocovich about the hostility toward democracy I had heard voiced throughout Arizona. Nodding, she replied: "Well to me, what a democracy is, is like 51 percent of the people can decide that they want my property, and they can take it. Where a constitutional republic is: No, you can't do that." The three precinct committeepersons agreed that Republicans needed to "take it back" in 2022, lest critical race theory become embedded in school curriculums and children be urged to change their gender on a whim.

That evening, at Lake's election-watch party in Scottsdale, the ebullient gathering - many of the attendees young and wearing date-night attire - grew restive as her opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, held onto a commanding lead for several hours. Having been told for the past two years that early voting was rife with corruption, Lake's supporters had mostly cast their ballots on Primary Day, and the totals were slow to come in. The candidate finally emerged onstage at close to 11 to assure the crowd that Primary Day's voters were breaking her way - adding, "There is no path to victory for my opponent."

Then Lake's speech took a conspiratorial turn. "This is how they do it. They want to try to take you down in this movement. They don't want you to celebrate."

It wasn't clear who "they" were in Lake's scenario. By that point, there were news reports of widespread problems in Republican-dominated Pinal County, just to the south of Maricopa County. A miscalculation by election officials there had resulted in a shortage of ballots in several precincts, with some 750 voters being turned away (though most if not all were given the opportunity to vote later that day). "What in the hell is going on?" Lake exclaimed. To many in the audience, the question itself was enough and did not require an answer. Any glitch or ambiguity on voting day would be sufficient to dispute any future election results that did not emphatically produce the outcome desired by the ascendant reactionary right.

"Everything is suspect right now."

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently "To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq," which was excerpted in the magazine. Peter van Agtmael is a Magnum photographer. His latest book, "Sorry for the War," is about the American disconnect with war.

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The Arizona Republican Party's Anti-Democracy Experiment

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First, it turned against the establishment. Now it has set its sights on democracy - the principles, the process and even the word itself. A primary eve rally in Phoenix featuring onstage, from left, the former Trump official Richard Grenell, the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the state attorney general candidate Abraham Hamadeh and the U.S.

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In 2020, just over 2,000 votes flipping across 3 districts would have shifted the balance of power to a new majority in the Michigan House

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In 2020, just over 2,000 votes flipping across 3 districts would have shifted the balance of power to a new majority in the Michigan House

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The majorities are held by just 2 seats in the Michigan House and 3 seats in the Senate

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The majorities are held by just 2 seats in the Michigan House and 3 seats in the Senate

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Minnesota has a Democratic governor, a State House majority committed to improving lives that lost 5 seats in 2020, and a rightwing Senate where we only need 3 seats for a new majority

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Minnesota has a Democratic governor, a State House majority committed to improving lives that lost 5 seats in 2020, and a rightwing Senate where we only need 3 seats for a new majority

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Out of all the endorsements we received in 2020, The States Project was the most significant and impactful. TSP significantly assisted with increasing our name recognition in the district and in amplifying our message to voters."

The Opportunity

When Republican and Democratic state lawmakers broke a rightwing trifecta by reinstating the Alaska House bipartisan coalition, it was to protect Alaskans from the worst of Governor Dunleavy's radical policies. In 2020, after several Republican coalition lawmakers lost their primaries to rightwing candidates, The States Project worked in the state to elect lawmakers that could preserve it. Our goal in Alaska in 2022 is the same as in 2020: protect the bipartisan coalition in the House, the most critical buffer against rightwing policies driven by a radical governor.

The Stakes

Holding every one of the bipartisan coalition seats this November will be critical to protecting Alaskans from Governor Dunleavy's rightwing agenda:

Coalition bills to protect the freedom to vote failed during the last legislative session. But in Alaska's recent mail-only primary election, thousands of ballots were rejected, in some cases, almost a 20 percent rejection rate. Voters from rural communities, Indigenous Alaskans, and visually impaired voters were the most impacted.

Most Alaskans do not support the proposal for Pebble Mine, an open-pit gold and copper mine that could harm one of the world's most important wild salmon fisheries, impacting over 14,000 jobs in Alaska's $1.5 billion fishing industry. Despite the deep economic toll this could have on Alaskans, the Governor is still championing this unpopular initiative. The bipartisan coalition could help stop it.

With Roe v. Wade overturned, access to reproductive health in Alaska is in the crosshairs of the radical rightwing. While abortion is legal in the state, Governor Dunleavy plans to introduce a constitutional amendment to end abortion access next session that would need the approval of two-thirds of the lawmakers in the House to be passed.

The Landscape

The stakes are high. A number of incumbents are not running for reelection, and the newest maps provide either the coalition or their opponents with a path to win the majority. The bipartisan coalition holds the majority by just one seat - just one flip could shift power in the House and create a radical trifecta in the state.

to help us defend democracy in states like Alaska!

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Out of all the endorsements we received in 2020, The States Project was the most significant and impactful. TSP significantly assisted with increasing our name recognition in the district and in amplifying our message to voters."

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​​I'm an engineer, I'm a mother, I'm an immigrant. When I first ran for office I didn't know anything about politics. To have The States Project invest in me, believe in me early, made such a difference. It helped lift up my voice.

The Opportunity

The majorities are held by just two seats in the Michigan House and three seats in the Senate. And in 2022, after working electorally in the state for the past two cycles, we believe that momentum is on our side. The States Project sees an opportunity to flip both the House and Senate in Michigan.

The Stakes

Following the blueprint of other swing states that went for President Biden, Michigan's legislative majorities advanced dozens of anti-voter bills in the 2021 session, and more are expected in 2022. So far, Governor Whitmer vetoed anti-voter bills that came to her desk including:

Banning the use of drop boxes on election day, giving constituents less time to vote.

Criminalizing election officials for public communications about voting by mail or locations of ballot drop boxes.

Enabling state lawmakers to withhold federal election funds, even if the state is unable to fully fund the election.

However, the rightwing is arguing that Governor Whitmer's veto could be circumvented this year if 8% of voters in the last gubernatorial election sign petitions supporting radical rightwing policies. With enough signatures collected, a simple majority vote would be enough for any initiative to become law in the state.

Last year, rightwing campaigns were successful in using this loophole to circumvent common-sense public health rules to fight the pandemic. In 2022, narrow special interests are backing three major initiatives: more anti-voter laws, attacks on quality public education, and limits on the ability to fight public health issues.

The Landscape

In 2020, just over 2,000 votes flipping across 3 districts would have shifted the balance of power to a new majority in the Michigan House.

President Biden won Michigan by flipping many traditionally Republican areas that are also trending Democratic in state legislative elections.

In both the Michigan House and Senate, new state legislative district lines have created a much clearer path to the majority than in 2020.

In May, TSP endorsee Carol Glanville, flipped HD 74 in a Michigan House Special Election; now, ending rightwing control of the Michigan House is just two seats away.

The States Project has built the relationships, infrastructure, and campaign experience in the state to help flip districts and build governing power. The opportunity to work electorally in both chambers to achieve the goal of a trifecta is within reach - and we're already hitting the ground early for the best possible chance of success.

Senate Endorsees

House Endorsees

to defend democracy in states like Michigan now!

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​​I'm an engineer, I'm a mother, I'm an immigrant. When I first ran for office I didn't know anything about politics. To have The States Project invest in me, believe in me early, made such a difference. It helped lift up my voice.

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"The urgency of today demands more of us than waiting. These are unprecedented times that call for new and better politics. I am committed to a bold, just vision that includes all Minnesotans. We are in this together."

The Opportunity

Minnesota has a Democratic governor, a State House majority committed to improving lives that lost five seats in 2020, and a rightwing Senate where we only need three seats for a new majority. In what would be The States Project's first election in Minnesota, there's an opportunity to flip a chamber, but we also need to avoid losing the state altogether by keeping control of the House in the 2022 midterms.

The Stakes

If Roe v. Wade is overturned in the Supreme Court this year, a number of states around Minnesota could outlaw abortion immediately. This means that women from bordering states like Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota would need to travel to Minnesota to have an abortion.

It also means that overturning abortion in the state could become a priority for Minnesota's rightwing, which championed a range of other radical policies in 2021 like:

Ending same-day voter registration in Minnesota which would have prevented more than 259,000 Minnesotans from voting in the 2020 election.

Criminalizing peaceful protests and preventing activists who are arrested at protests from accessing student loans and other public programs.

Restricting reproductive rights to ban doctors in the state from performing an abortion.

The chances of these bills becoming law are slim right now, but so are the margins in both chambers in Minnesota.

The Landscape

In 2020,

If the rightwing in Minnesota had flipped just 184 votes, they could have broken control of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

Similarly, if the rightwing had flipped just 1,526 votes in 2020 State Senate races, they would have won the chamber.

Minnesota's new maps provide both parties with a chance to win the legislature, and, given the margins for both chambers in the 2020 election, rightwing majorities in both Minnesota chambers are possibilities this November. Running effective campaigns in the state could be the difference between a trifecta or a rightwing shift in the balance of power.

to help elect majority-making candidates in states like Minnesota!

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"The urgency of today demands more of us than waiting. These are unprecedented times that call for new and better politics. I am committed to a bold, just vision that includes all Minnesotans. We are in this together."

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Preventing a supermajority protects an important electoral vote & keeps the worst rightwing bills from becoming law, including a six-week abortion ban

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Preventing a supermajority protects an important electoral vote & keeps the worst rightwing bills from becoming law, including a six-week abortion ban

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The minority is only one seat away from losing its power

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The minority is only one seat away from losing its power

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Nebraska State Senator Tony Vargas, Nebraska LD-7

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Need to defend the current state legislative majority, who has been getting great things done!

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Need to defend the current state legislative majority, who has been getting great things done!

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Only state with a majority of women lawmakers in both chambers

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Only state with a majority of women lawmakers in both chambers

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Our majority has expanded protections for pregnant workers, paid sick leave, and access to safe abortions, but we can't take our governing power for granted in the mid-terms. We've got to fight to protect it and the people we serve."

THE OPPORTUNITY

Defending state legislative majorities that are working to improve lives this year means protecting the popular vote, the integrity of the electoral college, and, ultimately, the presidency in 2024.

In 2022, we'll be working in Nevada - the only state with a majority of women lawmakers in both chambers - to defend the current state legislative majority. Historically, the midterms are very challenging for the party in power, and in a bad national environment, there is always the risk of losing a chamber.

THE STAKES

While many states have introduced or enacted voting laws aimed at preventing voting over the past couple of years, Nevada's majority has actually passed laws aimed at protecting or increasing voters' ability to cast a ballot. Due in part to the emergency voting accommodations like vote-by-mail in 2020, Indigenous voters in Nevada increased by 25 percent; the largest turnout increase among all demographics. Since then, many of those emergency accommodations have become Nevada law.

Nevada became only the sixth state to adopt a permanent vote-by-mail system. The law now requires every registered voter to receive a mail-in ballot before a primary or general election.

A new law also establishes a minimum number of polling locations for both primary and general elections and both early voting and election day. Ballot drop boxes also must be made available at every location.

The deadline to request a polling place on an Indigenous reservation was also expanded for primary and general elections.

In Nevada, lawmakers also passed a policy to protect clean water from contaminants. The new policy also requires Indigenous tribes to be notified of pollutants that could impact their water quality.

State lawmakers have also taken steps to address learning loss among children as a result of the pandemic. School boards can submit plans to the superintendent that include in-person summer school with free transportation and meals for all students.

THE LANDSCAPE

This year, the entire Nevada Assembly and half of the Senate are up for election. To maintain chamber control the majority can only afford to lose one seat in the Senate and four in the Assembly.

Despite the low threshold for control, the tipping point in the Senate is a Biden +12 seat. In the Assembly, it's a Biden +10 seat.

to help defend democracy in states like Nevada now!

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Our majority has expanded protections for pregnant workers, paid sick leave, and access to safe abortions, but we can't take our governing power for granted in the mid-terms. We've got to fight to protect it and the people we serve."

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The radical right won majorities in both chambers in 2020, but there are clear opportunities to retake both chambers in 2022

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The radical right won majorities in both chambers in 2020, but there are clear opportunities to retake both chambers in 2022

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THE OPPORTUNITY

Our goal in New Hampshire is to end unchecked rightwing control of at least one chamber to prevent a rightwing trifecta by 2024. This will also block rightwing policies that harm New Hampshirites from becoming law and protect the Granite State's four electoral votes from being stolen in the next presidential election.

THE STAKES

The radical right won majorities in both chambers in 2020, but that did not stop them from questioning rightful, valid election results. In New Hampshire, Trump's Big Lie has been used to advance anti-voter policies in the state:

Governor Sununu signed a new policy into law that could cause significant delays in the vote count, and directly impact election administrators' ability to send mail-in ballots to overseas voters, including the military service members, in a timely manner.

A bill to implement counting ballots by hand instead of by voter machines was also introduced in the legislature. New Hampshire election officials have spoken out about delays and costs of hand counting millions of election ballots; one town administrator noted that to hand count every ballot, she would need to increase her staff by 175 percent.

These rightwing bills are designed to decrease voters' confidence in our election systems, which could be catastrophic in this critical battleground state. The delays and chaos they could cause in the next presidential election could create an opportunity for rightwing majorities in New Hampshire to ignore the will of their voters and appoint electors for their own choice of president.

THE LANDSCAPE

Under New Hampshire's newest maps, there are clear opportunities to retake both chambers in 2022:

The Senate is evenly split between 12 Trump and 12 Biden seats, so there is an opportunity here to break rightwing control of this chamber.

Under these maps, the House is very competitive: 221 of the 400 State House seats would have gone for Joe Biden.

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THE OPPORTUNITY Our goal in New Hampshire is to end unchecked rightwing control of at least one chamber to prevent a rightwing trifecta by 2024. This will also block rightwing policies that harm New Hampshirites from becoming law and protect the Granite State's four electoral votes from being stolen in the next presidential election.

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12 seats away from a majority in the House of Representatives

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12 seats away from a majority in the House of Representatives

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Current rightwing majority is trying to use their power in both chambers to create new maps to ensure that they keep their power

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Current rightwing majority is trying to use their power in both chambers to create new maps to ensure that they keep their power

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Through The States Project, and through contributions to The States Project, you will be empowering me and my colleagues to really be able to flip the Pennsylvania State House, and protect reproductive health and liberty in Pennsylvania."

The Opportunity

With all of the State House up for election this year, Pennsylvania is twelve seats away from a majority in the House of Representatives. Under the new maps, The States Project's electoral work is focused on gaining ground to defend against a rightwing play to use key state legislatures to steal the presidency in 2024.

The Stakes

Instead of advancing policy to improve lives, Pennsylvania's radical rightwing majority prioritized securing its own power during the 2021 legislative session:

They passed policies to dismantle women's right to choose.

They passed an anti-voter bill that would have made it harder for Pennsylvanians, particularly Black voters, to vote by restricting ballot drop-off locations and limiting the time where they could register.

The rightwing majority is trying to use their power in both chambers to stack the decks by trying to create new maps to ensure that they keep their power:

In 2021, the House majority proposed gerrymandering the state supreme court by proposing districts that would favor electing rightwing justices. Rightwing control of the court would mean control over redistricting state legislative districts as well, another attempt by the majority to secure their power.

Unhappy with the maps enacted by the state's redistricting commission and upheld by the state court, in early 2022 the majority took their case to the Supreme Court. They were seeking the authority to bypass the governor and state courts to implement their own maps, and to give themselves the ultimate authority over federal elections. If they had been successful, the implications would have been grave; giving every state with a rightwing majority complete control over elections. Thankfully, they were unsuccessful in this attempt but the court left open the possibility they would use this far-right doctrine in the future.

The Landscape

In 2020, TSP endorsees won two House seats, flipping one that a Democrat had never before won, and holding an open seat that President Biden carried by less than one percent.

There were six narrow losses where TSP endorsees lost by less than 5%.

Pennsylvania's new House maps have 103 seats that Biden won compared to 100 seats that Trump won.

With the work TSP has already undertaken in the state to build momentum, a fairer map has put the House within striking distance this year, and even more so by 2024.

House Endorsees

to improve lives in states like Pennsylvania now!

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Through The States Project, and through contributions to The States Project, you will be empowering me and my colleagues to really be able to flip the Pennsylvania State House, and protect reproductive health and liberty in Pennsylvania." The Opportunity With all of the State House up for election this year, Pennsylvania is twelve seats away from a majority in the House of Representatives.

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I wouldn't be sitting here if it had not been for Giving Circles. The power of grassroots organizing and grassroots giving is transformational.

North Carolina State Representative Ricky Hurtado

The Opportunity

In 2018, The States Project helped to break the supermajority in the North Carolina House and we're proud to have helped to prevent supermajorities in both the House and Senate in 2020.

In 2022, we're headed back to North Carolina to prevent a supermajority and safeguard Governor Cooper's veto ability to protect North Carolinians from radical rightwing policies.

The Stakes

North Carolina's rightwing majorities are among the most extreme in the country. Over the past couple of years Governor Cooper's pen has been a critical defense against their radical agenda from becoming law in the state:

Preventing mail-in ballots from being counted if received after Election Day. Vote by mail has become increasingly important in the wake of COVID-19; more than 1,000,000 voters in North Carolina cast absentee ballots in 2020. If enacted this bill could prevent thousands of ballots from being counted in future elections.

Attacking body autonomy and the doctor-patient relationship. In a clear assault on fundamental human rights the Legislature passed an abortion law that would infringe on the privacy between a doctor and their patient.

The Landscape

In both chambers Republicans can win supermajorities by flipping seats that only narrowly went to Biden, gaining the governing power to bypass Governor Cooper with their rightwing agenda. We need to stop them.

to help us lay the groundwork for change in states like North Carolina now!

TSP endorsees Representatives Brian Farkas and Ricky Hurtado flipped two districts in the House to keep the supermajority out of reach of the radical right by just three seats.

Incumbent TSP endorsed Representatives Rachel Hunt, Brandon Lofton, Wesley Harris, Kandie Smith, James Gailliard, Terence Everitt, Julie von Haefen, and Ashton Clemmons were re-elected to Raleigh by margins as narrow as 5%.

In the Senate, TSP endorsees clean air advocate Senator DeAndrea Salvador and nonprofit leader Senator Sarah Crawford also flipped their seats. They added a seat for the minority and prevented a supermajority in the Senate by just two seats.

TSP endorsees lost by narrow margins. All but one of our candidates for the State House came within about six percentage points of winning their seats.

In TSP's first election in North Carolina, we helped to break the supermajority in the House of Representatives to help provide Governor Roy Cooper with an effective veto.

The House minority gained 9 seats as 12 TSP-endorsees were elected to the chamber .

North Carolina IN THE NEWS

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I wouldn't be sitting here if it had not been for Giving Circles. The power of grassroots organizing and grassroots giving is transformational. North Carolina State Representative Ricky Hurtado The Opportunity In 2018, The States Project helped to break the supermajority in the North Carolina House and we're proud to have helped to prevent supermajorities in both the House and Senate in 2020.

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Hour-long video about the current landscape in Arizona and what to expect as we head into Election Day

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Hour-long video about the current landscape in Arizona and what to expect as we head into Election Day