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Where You Eat, Shop, Have Fun Might Determine What Political Ads You See on Social Media

Democrats exclude people who eat at Cracker Barrel, a chain of restaurants with a Southern country theme. Republicans filter out voters who shop at Whole Foods Market, a supermarket chain with a focus on natural and organic foods.

These are two examples of how political campaigns are using people’s eating, shopping and entertainment preferences in hopes of reaching the online audience that’s most receptive to their political message, according to an Axios analysis of political ad data at Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram.

Axios says it analyzed more than 93,000 targeting inputs for paid political ads on Facebook and Instagram.

It found that Democrats were more likely to target fans of National Public Radio, a publicly and privately funded nonprofit media organization with a stated goal of creating a more informed public; Spanish-language outlets like Univision; and people with a general interest in journalism. Republicans, by contrast, were less likely to target potential voters based on their media preferences.

The GOP was more likely to zero in on fans of the reality TV show “Duck Dynasty,” about a family that makes products for duck hunters and is known for their long beards and conservative, evangelical Christian views. Republicans also targeted fans of popular country music singers and Southern celebrity chef Paula Deen. Democrats focused more on fans of singer Lady Gaga and music genres like salsa and hip hop.

In addition to Whole Foods, Republicans also nixed people who shop at Trader Joe’s, a grocery chain known for unique and eclectic offerings at reasonable prices, opting instead to target fans of Chick-fil-A, a popular fast-food restaurant whose chief executive officer has made statements opposing same-sex marriage in the past.

“We used to actually be able to get even more narrow and be able to target people by race or by partisanship, and so that has all been taken away, so these interest targets are now just a proxy for what has previously been done,” says Megan Clasen, a digital marketing consultant who worked on both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns.

“It has more risks when you’re running a persuasion campaign. When you’re making assumptions about how people’s interests impact their political views, you might be leaving people out who could potentially be with you, just because they shop at certain places or watch a certain show.”

Digital marketers had to get more creative with targeting last year, after public outcry prompted Meta to stop allowing advertisers to target their ads using factors such as people’s race, sexual orientation and political or religious views.

“Facebook had tons and tons of data on what people’s preferences and likes were. So, if people liked Republican pages or if they liked Democrat pages, if they liked Republican politicians, if they liked Democrat politicians, if they signed up for pro-life [anti-abortion] groups, or if they signed up for groups associated with pro-choice [pro-abortion rights], or Second Amendment [gun rights], or anti-tax groups,” says Tyler Brown, former director of digital strategy at the Republican National Committee (RNC). “So, Facebook also became a provider of what we would call third party data. And the value for advertisers was that it was extremely robust and thorough.”

Without that valuable Meta data, political operatives zeroed in on consumer preferences to reach certain parts of the electorate. While Republicans targeted people who shop at stores selling outdooring gear, Democrats focused on fans of Nordstrom, a luxury department store chain; Lululemon, a higher-end athleisure brand; and Zara, a retailer of inexpensive trendy clothes.

While the two major political parties often seem to be targeting two different Americas, there were some commonalities. For example, both targeted Walmart shoppers.

Clasen believes in casting a wider net when it comes to digital marketing.

“Oftentimes, when we’re trying to persuade people, we’re sort of talking to people who land in the middle — maybe they don’t really identify as super liberal or super conservative,” she says. “So, I think we have to be careful about using those types of inclusions or exclusions in our targeting when we’re trying to persuade broader groups of voters.”

Republicans were more likely than Democrats to focus on sports fans, including hunters and people who follow NASCAR auto racing. Democrats tended to exclude deer hunters and car racing fans from seeing their digital ads.

“They’re trying to be more targeting than running blanket ads, but there is some risk that they are losing people in the gaps,” Brown says. “NASCAR has a large supporter base. It’s very possible that many Democrats are supporters of NASCAR, but [digital ad consultants] are trying to make bets that, on the whole, they’re targeting more of their supporters. And they’re making the assumption that that is a better targeting method than simply targeting a geographic area.”

Both Brown and Clasen say this type of targeting can sow division on the internet, especially with Facebook’s algorithm already filtering posts so that people are seeing content that they’re most likely to engage with.

“That obviously is already creating a lot of polarization in social media environments,” Clasen says. “So it’s sort of contributing to that continued impact, if people are really only seeing things that they are likely to already agree with versus seeing different opinions that they aren’t used to being exposed to.”

Politicization of commercial brands is also leading to increased polarization in American society, Brown says.

“I think that we are seeing a divide take place, culturally, in terms of, not just the media we consume, but the brands we choose to support,” Brown says. “The reason that the American democracy experiment was so successful for so long, was that while people may have different policy preferences, they operated from the same shared sense of values and worldview … And I think that as those people are separating themselves into different camps, that even those values and worlds and perspectives are coming into question and are being undercut.”
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US Election Terms Explained

Ballot measures

Apart from national, statewide and local races, many states have measures on the ballot, which are issues or questions that voters are asked to decide. Topics of this year’s ballot measures include marijuana, voting-related policies and abortion, the latter of which is appearing on ballots in six states. The increase in abortion-related measures follows this year’s Supreme Court decision overturning a national right to an abortion, which gave states the final power to set most abortion laws.

Call a winner

News outlets often “call” a winner before every ballot is counted and before officials announce final results. This is because it often takes days or weeks before all votes are counted in many districts and, often, partial results are enough to mathematically determine a winner. However, when a race is close, news agencies usually wait to call a winner until final results are given. The Associated Press, which calls races throughout the United States, says it “does not make projections and will only declare a winner when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap.”

Competitive races

Competitive races are heavily followed because both the Democratic and Republican candidates are seen as having a legitimate chance of winning. Most races are not considered competitive. According to Reuters, 43 House races out of the chamber’s 435 seats up for election – or about 10% — are considered competitive this year.

Democrats

Democrats make up the Democratic Party, one of the two main parties in the United States. Currently, Democrats control the presidency and both houses of Congress. However, the party’s hold on Congress is slim with an eight-seat majority in the House of Representatives and control in the equally divided Senate resulting only because Vice President Kalama Harris can break a tie.

Early voting

Many U.S. states allow citizens to cast ballots in person at a polling station prior to the election. Some states allow anyone to do this (called no-excuse early voting), while other states allow it only for those with a valid reason, such as old age or disability. Forty-six states permit some form of no-excuse early voting, according to the election website Ballopedia.

Election Day

By law, general elections in the United States take place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. This year Election Day is Nov. 8.

Exit polls

Exit polls are surveys of voters usually taken as they leave, or exit, their polling places. They can be used to project the winner in races where the margin between candidates is large. They are also used to collect demographic data about voters and gain insights into voters’ motivations, information which is not captured at the ballot box.

Legislative branch

The legislative branch of the U.S. government refers to the U.S. Congress, which is made up of two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate. It makes laws that govern the country. The other two branches of the U.S. government are the executive branch — which includes the presidency and most federal agencies and is responsible for carrying out the laws — and the judicial branch, which evaluates laws. A similar three-part structure is found in U.S. state governments.

Midterms

Elections that take place two years after a presidential vote, or halfway through a president’s term, are called “midterms.” They are often seen as a referendum on the sitting president’s policies because they are the first national vote after a presidential election.

Mail-in ballots/Absentee ballots

These are ballots that are usually mailed by voters to election offices in sealed envelopes. Some states allow voters to return their absentee or mail-in ballots in person to voting centers or municipal offices.

Mail-in voting

Every U.S. state allows at least some of its residents to vote by mail, according to the election website Ballopedia. Some states, like California, mail a ballot to every resident in the state, while others, like Texas, allow mail-in voting only for residents with a valid reason, such as old age or disability.

Redistricting

States redraw district lines every 10 years to take into account population changes. The process is meant to ensure that districts accurately represent the current population, but often become marred by politics with both Democrats and Republicans seeking to create districts that will benefit their party. The 2022 midterms will be the first national elections to occur since redistricting took place in 2020. Republicans are positioned to gain three to four House seats in 2022 due to redistricting alone, according to an analysis of data by Five Thirty Eight, a website that focuses on analysis of political opinion polls.

Representatives

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are called “representatives.” The House is one of two bodies in the U.S. Congress along with the Senate. Because all House members serve two-year terms, the entire House of Representatives — with its 435 seats — is up for election during the midterms. House members represent a portion of their state known as a congressional district, which averages nearly 750,000 people.

Republicans

Republicans make up the Republican Party, also called the GOP, one of the two main parties in the United States. Currently, Republicans are the party out of power, controlling neither the presidency nor a majority in either chamber in Congress. They are looking to win one or both houses of Congress during the midterms. Because of a historical tendency for the president’s party to lose seats in the House during midterms, Republicans are seen as the favorites to win at least one congressional chamber.

Senator

This is the title given to members of the U.S. Senate, one of two bodies in the U.S. Congress along with the House of Representatives. Because senators serve six-year terms, only about a third of the Senate – with its 100 seats — is up for election during the midterms. Each U.S. state has two senators that it sends to Washington.

Swing states

States where the two parties have similar levels of support are known as “swing states” because either party could easily win them. Swing states can shift over time and are also known as battleground states, toss-up states or purple states (the color resulting from a mix of the traditional Democratic color – blue — and the Republican color — red).

Turnout for midterms

Historically, the turnout — the number of people who vote in an election — is lower during midterms than in presidential election years. The average turnout in presidential elections between 1980 and 2018 was 56.7% of registered voters, while the midterm turnout for that same period was 40.5% according to data from the U.S. Election Project.

Voter fraud

Voter fraud has been a national topic of conversation since the 2020 presidential election when then-President Donald Trump alleged without evidence that the vote was tainted by fraud. Leading up to the vote, Trump also argued that mail-in balloting was less secure than in person votes, while Democratic leaders argued voting by mail was just as secure and would make it easier for people to vote. One result of that debate was that over the past two years, Democratic-controlled states, like Vermont, were more likely to increase access to voting by mail, while Republican-controlled states, like Texas, were more likely to restrict it. The integrity of the U.S. election system is likely to again be up for debate during this year’s midterms.
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US House Committee Gives Trump Until Next Week to Produce Documents

The House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump said Friday it had given the former president until next week to begin producing documents requested under a subpoena. 

The January 6 committee announced on October 21 that it had sent a subpoena to Trump requiring documents to be submitted by November 4 and for him to appear for deposition testimony beginning on or about November 14. 

“We have received correspondence from the former president and his counsel in connection with the Select Committee’s subpoena,” the House Select Committee’s chairperson, Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, and vice chairperson, Republican Representative Liz Cheney, said in a statement. 

“We have informed the former president’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for deposition testimony starting on November 14th,” the statement said. 

The committee’s seven Democrats and two Republicans are seeking a wide range of documents from Trump that would detail communications he may have had before January 6 and beyond with lawmakers and members of extremist groups, as well as associates and former aides. 

Additional documents and communications being sought relate to information detailing possible travel of people to the Capitol on January 6 and communications relating to efforts to encourage states to delay certifying election results or certify alternate slates of “electors” who would support naming Trump as the winner. 

Trump has accused the committee of waging unfair political attacks on him while refusing to investigate his charges of widespread election fraud. 

A spokesperson for the former president did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. 

Trump had not been expected to cooperate with the subpoena and could simply try to run out the clock. The committee’s mandate will likely end early next year if Republicans win a majority in the midterm elections on Tuesday. 

Thousands of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, seeking to prevent certification of the election result after Trump delivered a fiery speech featuring false claims that his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden was the result of fraud. 

Five people including a police officer died during or shortly after the riot, more than 140 police officers were injured, the Capitol suffered millions of dollars in damage and then-Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress and staff were sent running for their lives. 
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US Security Officials Warn Lone Actors Likely the Biggest Election Threat

U.S. officials charged with helping to secure the upcoming midterm elections fear the most dangerous and most likely threats may be difficult or impossible to detect in advance, and that the risk of violence will only escalate once the polls close.

The assessment, based on intelligence from multiple agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Counterterrorism Center, has been shared in recent weeks with state and local law enforcement agencies, lending increased urgency to their efforts to secure the vote.

Parts of the assessment also have been shared publicly, including by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which serves as the national lead on election security.

“You’ve got these horrible physical security concerns at an unprecedented level,” CISA Director Jen Easterly told a forum in Washington on Tuesday. “Threats of intimidation, of violence, of harassment against election officials, polling places, voters.”

The most plausible threat, according to a U.S. official who asked not to be quoted and spoke to VOA on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the intelligence, is from a so-called lone wolf — an individual who may or may not be associated with an extremist group and decides to act on his or her own.

Such individuals are likely to be driven by a belief that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was fraudulent as well as by other hot-button political issues, the official said.

Likely targets could range from election-related infrastructure, such as polling places and ballot drop boxes, to election workers, voters and even political candidates and events like Election Day rallies and watch parties, the official added, noting a decision on which target to go after could come down to ease of access.

But much of what has election security officials so concerned is that extra motivation for anyone leaning toward violence is easily accessible.

Misinformation campaign targets

This past week, CISA warned that U.S. adversaries are using misinformation and other influence operations to incite violence against election officials.

CISA officials and those with other U.S. agencies declined to share additional specifics. But some researchers have found reason to worry.

“The influence attempts … do not directly encourage people to undertake violent actions, but very likely lay the groundwork and allude to some physical action,” Brian Liston, a senior threat intelligence analyst for the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, told VOA by email.

Some of it can be tied to Russia’s infamous troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which has been reactivating accounts on social media platforms, especially those that cater to far-right audiences, and has set up a new website to promote allegations of voter fraud, he said.

“Headlines provided on the site recently say that ‘Democrats will use everything in their disposal to manipulate votes and counting,’ and … accuse Democrats of burning a mail truck in Georgia containing Republican ballots,” Liston said.

One image found by Recorded Future, posted by an IRA-linked account under the name Nora Berka, further fans the flames, claiming, “Yes, we are at war,” along with an image of former President Donald Trump holding a rifle.

The graphic further states, “Democrats are your sworn enemies.”

Recorded Future warns it is not just the troll farms.

“Russian state media and covert media sources are very likely intending to subtly lay the groundwork for some sort of physical action,” Liston said, pointing to headlines that talk about mobilizing to prevent voter fraud and secret armies.

Liston said Iran state-sponsored outlets, like the Tehran Times and Tasnim News Agency are also pushing violent undertones, noting a recent article [November 1] from the Tehran Times warning, “there are growing fears the country could slip into a civil war.”

Unlike Recorded Future, the Washington-based Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks official state actors and state-backed media, told VOA it has not seen information campaigns “specifically encouraging violence.”

But that does not mean that adversaries, such as Russia, would not welcome election-related violence.

“Their proven strategy is to amplify the most polarizing and extreme content to further divide the electorate,” the ASD’s Rachael Dean Wilson told VOA. “If their strategy incites or contributes to inciting violence, it would serve their ultimate goal of chaos.”

Graphika, a social media analytics firm, said it has seen a renewed effort by Russian actors to target far-right audiences in the U.S. but that the efforts have failed to make much of an impact and that the campaigns have not sought to glorify or encourage violence.

Requests for comment by VOA to the Russian embassy and to the Iranian Mission to the U.N. regarding the allegations by U.S. officials and by researchers were not immediately answered. Both have denied allegations of meddling in U.S. elections in the past.

Still, officials and researchers expect the online narratives, and the threat of violence, to persist and possibly worsen after the polls close.

The U.S. official who spoke to VOA about the intelligence assessments on the condition of anonymity, said prolonged certification processes and potential legal challenges could fuel existing grievances and spur potential attacks.

And while officials from multiple agencies admit the warnings may sound dire, they argue the events of the past several years, such as the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, warrant the high level of concern.

“We’ve seen the domestic terrorism threat grow for the last two years,” FBI Counterterrorism Division Assistant Director Robert Wells told a forum on homeland security late last month. “We’ve also seen the anti-government cases grow, obviously January 6. So, our case numbers have gone up.”

The number of reported threats against election workers also has jumped.

According to the FBI, there have been more than 1,000 reports since June 2021, leading to at least six arrests. And almost 60% of the reported threats came from seven states – Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin – all of which ran audits or saw considerable debate about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

And the threatening chatter has not slowed.

“What really concerns us, it is the threats to election workers. It’s calls for a second civil war, which we’re seeing in some of the [social media] platforms,” Washington, D.C., Homeland Security Emergency Management Agency Director Chris Rodriguez said last month, speaking alongside the FBI’s Wells.

“We need to make sure that we have the intelligence and information we need to keep our communities safe as the experience on January 6th really showed us,” he said.
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Asians Running for Office Encounter Hurdles in Reaching Asian Voters

Asians make up a quarter of the residents in the greater Houston area of the U.S. state of Texas. A few are elected officials or are running for office in the midterm elections. They share with VOA’s Elizabeth Lee their keys to political success and discuss the challenge of reaching Asian voters. Videographer and producer: Elizabeth Lee
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This Election Day, Millions of Americans Won’t Be Voting in English

This Election Day, more than 80 million Americans will have the option to vote in a language other than English, thanks to a federal provision that guarantees language assistance in the voting process for certain groups of people.

“The idea was to take groups that were historically excluded from the electoral process, and the mission was to make it more accessible for some of those groups,” says Gabe Osterhout, a research associate at the Idaho Policy Institute at Boise State University.

The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 focused primarily on the rights of African Americans in the South. The act was broadened in 1975 to include certain language minorities — Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Latinos and Asian Americans — to make voting more accessible.

“English voting materials or information functions essentially as a literacy test that precludes people who may be fully literate in their native language, or may not be literate in any language, but it functions as a barrier to the ability to participate,” says Jim Tucker, senior special counsel with the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Every five years, the U.S. Census Bureau determines which minority language groups must be accommodated with information in their primary language. That decision is based on whether more than 5% of eligible voters in an area speak limited English, or if there are more than 10,000 eligible voters in a jurisdiction with limited English proficiency.

Local elections officials are then required to offer voting materials, including ballots, in that second language.

In December 2021, Census listed the 331 jurisdictions that meet that threshold ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. It’s the largest number of jurisdictions ever covered by the federal provision, 68 more than in 2016.

Most of the covered jurisdictions are counties and municipalities, but three are states. California, Florida and Texas must provide Spanish-language voting materials in every statewide election, even though certain localities in those states are not required to provide bilingual ballots for their local contests.

More than 80 million voting-age citizens live in the areas where election officials are required to provide minority language assistance.

While the U.S. Justice Department tells the affected jurisdictions that they meet the guidelines and must provide language assistance, there is no built-in mechanism to enforce the rule.

“If we’re trying to understand its impact on turnout, well, we don’t really know who’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing among the counties that are covered,” Osterhout says. “And then on the flip side, there’s counties that aren’t covered, or cities or townships that aren’t covered, but might choose to offer these materials anyway.”

However, an analysis of registration and voting data from November 1996 and 2000 found evidence that “the language provisions of the Voting Rights Act have significant and positive effects on the voting rates of covered linguistic minorities.”

For example, professors Michael Jones-Correa and Israel Waismel-Manor found that voter turnout among Latinos was 11% higher in counties covered by the Voting Rights Act language requirements than in counties that did not provide materials and assistance in Spanish. They also found that voter registration among Latinos was 15% higher in counties that provided language assistance than those that did not.

“We’ve really seen substantial increases in participation by all the language minority groups that were covered, which there are four groups: American Indians, Alaska Natives, Latino or Spanish-speaking voters and Asian Americans who speak Asian languages since 1975, and a lot of that is directly attributable to the language provision for voting rights,” says Tucker, who is also the author of “The Battle Over Bilingual Ballots.”

He added that the language requirements do not put an increased financial burden on the covered counties.

“In many cases, there’s no additional costs,” he says, “but even where there is, it’s not a true unfunded federal mandate, because the federal government actually has provided funding to either offset, or in some cases, cover in its entirety whatever costs the jurisdiction might incur.”

The Voting Rights Act was initially supposed to expire by 1970, but it has been reauthorized five times with large, bipartisan majorities. It was last reauthorized in 2006 for 25 years.

“This is not a situation where it’s really a power grab by either party, because you just see such a diversity in terms of political views and who the candidates are that are supported, and political parties supported among the limited English proficient voters who get assistance,” Tucker says.

Mary Brennan, a professor of history at Texas State University, agrees that it’s a mistake to assume people who vote in different languages will vote a certain way.

“We make assumptions about how people of different languages are going to vote. We say, ‘Oh, these are immigrants, so they’re going to vote Democratic’. …We can’t assume what those people are going to do. People who voted in Spanish in Florida might be very conservative,” Brennan says. “I think it’s really dangerous to make assumptions about how people are voting just because they’re voting in a different language.”

And even if huge numbers of people don’t end up taking advantage of the opportunity to vote in their primary language, the effort isn’t wasted, in Osterhout’s view.

“Even if they don’t end up pursuing that right and don’t end up voting, there’s still value in recognizing that there’s a moral benefit to making voting more accessible,” he says.
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Rally Urges Voting Connected to Christianity

The founding of the United States dictates a separation between church and state. But some politicians and other leaders are promoting the idea of connecting them — giving Americans a country run with morals based on Christianity. VOA’s senior Washington correspondent Carolyn Presutti brings us the contentious debate.
Camera: Saqib Ul Islam and Mary Cieslak Video editor: Mary Cieslak
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Rally Urges US Midterm Voting Connected to Christianity

Laura Brown came more than 1,800 kilometers from Gulfport, Mississippi, to attend the ReAwaken America Tour in Manheim, Pennsylvania. She carried a shofar, a musical instrument used in Jewish religious ceremonies. But this was no Jewish event. She raised the long curved horn to her mouth, took a deep breath, and blew the ancient horn to signal a start to the second day of the Christian, mainly white, mainly Republican rally that is the bedrock of the Christian Nationalism movement in the United States.

About 5,000 people filled seats in a sports complex for two days of politically conservative speakers. Most preached a return of Christianity to the country by electing candidates who embrace Christian policies. Others railed against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, challenged the 2020 presidential election results, or defended the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol while promoting books, videos, podcasts and private health insurance. The main draw is retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was introduced as “America’s General” and treated like a movie star, signing autographs and his book, and introducing prominent speakers.

Flynn was forced to retire from the military in 2014. Three years later, he became national security adviser to President Donald Trump. Then he resigned after 22 days — the shortest term ever for a U.S. national security adviser — and ultimately pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, a crime that was pardoned by Trump.

‘Frightened by their own government’

With 43 sold-out rallies, Flynn told VOA what these crowds crave. “People are frightened by their own government,” he said. “They are looking to see what they can do.”

The speakers offer them one main idea: vote. And vote for godly Republicans. A fiery African American preacher took the stage in a blue suit with a white shirt, red tie and pocket scarf. Pastor Mark Burns, touted as “Donald Trump’s Pastor” brought the crowd to its feet as he said, “Are you ready to go to war for the Lord Jesus Christ? Shout ‘yeeeeeahhhhhhh!’ I’m here to declare war on every race-baited Democrat and every evil scheme that comes from the gates of hell.”

On President Joe Biden, “We got to get rid of him right now,” Burns said. “I’m a proud Christian nationalist. … Are there any other Christian nationalists here?” and he got a thunderous affirmative response.

By the time he was off the stage, he came to VOA’s camera soaked with sweat from his emotional, energetic address. “When people say you shouldn’t be preaching religion from your pulpit, that’s ridiculous,” he told us. “The Revolutionary War was led by pastors.”

Taking an oath to preach politics

A tall, soft-spoken white pastor with a full head of white hair took the stage. The Rev. Bill Cook of America’s Black Robe Regiment called all pastors to the front of the arena to take the “Gideon Pledge.” His wife joined him on stage and held a tall board with six elements. No. 2 was a promise to “preach a minimum of one election sermon prior to every election.” No. 4 was an oath to teach that “voting in every election for the most godly candidates is a sacred duty incumbent upon every person professing faith [in] Jesus Christ.”

Parts of the “Gideon Pledge” appear at odds with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution dictating a “separation of church and state.” Beyond that, churches are designated nonprofit groups that are exempt from taxes and are prohibited from engaging in political activity under that exemption.

Stephanie Robbins spent 10 years with the Internal Revenue Service, the agency responsible for collecting federal taxes, and is now with Harmon Curran, a nationally recognized law firm specializing in tax exemption and election activity.

Crossing the line on the pulpits

When VOA shared the Gideon Pledge with Robbins, she said it is going to “cross the line at some point” and explained why the law is in place. “It’s speech that the government has chosen not to subsidize,” said Robbins, since nonprofits already receive special benefits within the tax code. “That’s why it’s important that they don’t talk about it from the pulpit.”

Flynn told VOA he doesn’t interpret the First Amendment that way. “It means freedom of religion, not Christianity or Judaism, it’s freedom of conscience, to have freedom to believe what you want to believe,” he said.

Pastors argue they do not promote specific candidates. But by directing their congregations to vote for the Christian candidate, Robbins says, in some cases, that can identify one candidate.

Cook said, “The notion of separation as it is portrayed today” would have been actively fought by the nation’s founders because “the members of Congress understood that the church had really founded America, and the pastors were the founding fathers, and they would have started another revolution.”

When asked about the exclusion of other religions, Flynn said, “there’s all kinds of faiths out here” but he pointed out that Christianity is the “largest faith in the country.”

Surveys put Christians at about 64% of the U.S. population, but a Pew Research study shows that if current declines continue, Christians could fall below 50% in the next 50 years.

Another Pew study shows 45% of those surveyed think America should be a Christian nation.

But 77% do not think churches should endorse political candidates.

Meantime, a FiveThirtyEight survey shows 58% think the government should enforce the separation of church and state.

Christians against Christians

Within the offices of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, two women sat at a round table, with headphones on, microphones facing them and laptops open. “Welcome to Respecting Religion,” announced Executive Director Amanda Tyler as she began the weekly podcast with General Counsel Holly Hollman. Tyler called Christian nationalism “a virulent and potentially dangerous ideology … regardless of our religious identity,” and pointed to a Flynn quote of “one nation under God, one religion under God” as proof of him calling for a theocracy of one religion that’s enforced by the government. Tyler translated that to mean to “really belong in America, you have to be Christian, you have to be white, you have to espouse certain political views that can lead to danger for certain people because it creates second class citizens.”

Tyler and Hollman created the group “Christians Against Christian Nationalism” because of what they see as ReAwaken America rhetoric motivating people to political violence. The women have organized counter rallies in ReAwaken America tour cities.

A few days prior, a panel discussion at Georgetown University addressed “How White Christian Nationalism Threatens our Democracy.”

The Rev. Michael Curry, the top bishop in the Episcopal Church, told VOA, “In over 40 years as a pastor, as an ordained [pastor], I have never told folk how to vote because that’s not my job.”

So you aren’t tagged as QAnon

The ReAwaken America tour has also been criticized for being a magnet for extreme right-wing groups. When VOA was emailed tickets to attend the Pennsylvania event as media, the tickets said they were for the “Fresh Roasted Coffee Fest & Expo.” When asked about that, a tour official explained “that’s just so computer watchers don’t think you are QAnon.”

QAnon is a loosely organized right-wing political conspiracy group. A podcast popular with QAnon followers gave away tickets to the ReAwaken America event in Pennsylvania.
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Voters Concerned About Election Integrity in US Midterms  

Use of fake social media accounts by foreign and domestic actors seeking to rile up U.S. voters are among the many challenges in this year’s U.S. midterm elections. Michelle Quinn reports from Phoenix, Arizona. Producer: Michelle Quinn. Cameras: Levi Stallings, Michelle Quinn.
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How US Voting Laws Have Changed Since 2020

If you’re a registered voter in the Western U.S. state of Nevada, you’d have received a mail-in ballot this year, whether you asked for one or not.

That’s thanks to a new law that the state enacted last year as part of a broader effort to make it easier for people to vote.

But if you’re a voter in the Southwestern state of Texas, that option is not available to you. Indeed, a 2021 Texas law makes it a crime for election officials to automatically send mail-in ballots to voters.

The two laws epitomize the divergent paths that U.S. states have taken in the past two years as they’ve changed their election laws largely in response to the two consequential events of 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. presidential election.

While the U.S. has always had a Balkanized election system, the divide in voting procedures has widened as Democratic-led states have sought to expand voting access by codifying certain pandemic-era measures and adopting other rules, and Republican states have tightened rules in response to concerns about election integrity.

The Nevada legislature is controlled by Democrats, while in Texas Republicans are in charge.

“The result that we’re seeing is that we’re really seeing two different democracies develop in our country where a person’s ZIP code determines their level of ballot access, which is a growing trend,” said Liz Avore, a senior policy adviser at Voting Rights Lab, an organization that tracks election-related legislation.

Nearly every state has made some change to its voting laws over the past two years, according to the Voting Rights Lab.

But while more states have expanded voting access than have restricted it, “for folks in those states that are restricting voter access, it’s going to be more difficult for them to vote,” Avore said.

John Fortier, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said access to voting is not an issue.

“There are a lot of access options in many states,” Fortier said.

Even states that do not encourage voting by mail give that option to many voters, he said.

“Many people are choosing that,” Fortier said.

Changes in voting by mail

The growing divide in state voting procedures can best be seen in voting by mail, Avore said.

While 20 states have made it easier to vote by mail over the past two years, 11 others have made the practice more restrictive, according to a report by the Voting Rights Lab.

Of the 10 restrictive election laws enacted this year, half put new limits on vote by mail, ranging from stricter identification requirements to prohibitions against drop boxes, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Mail voting allows voters to cast ballots mailed to them by election officials. They can return their completed ballots by mail or use designated drop boxes.

Long popular with voters, mail voting saw a dramatic surge during the 2020 election, held during the coronavirus pandemic.

But then-President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized the practice, calling it unsafe and prone to fraud, and encouraged his supporters to vote in person instead.

While there is no evidence that mail voting is unsafe, many Republican lawmakers remain suspicious, and they’ve moved to tighten the rules.

Texas is one of several Republican-led states that have made it a crime for election officials to automatically send mail-in ballots or applications to all registered voters.

While in most states voters can vote by mail using basic identifying information such as their name and date of birth, other states such as Florida and Texas have required mail-in voters to provide a driver’s license or Social Security number.

Many U.S. states allow the use of drop boxes to return mail-in ballots. But while several states such as Virginia have expanded access to drop boxes over the past two years, others such as Georgia have reduced the number.

In 2020, Georgia election officials set up secure ballot drop boxes across the state for the first time, with voters using them to return 41% of mail-in ballots.

But this year, “Georgia limited the number of drop boxes each county could have,” said Spencer Overton, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and a law professor at George Washington University.

Voter registration and voter rolls

Other restrictive laws affect voter registration and the maintenance of voter rolls, according to the Voting Rights Lab.

Overton said voter registration is “one of the most significant barriers to participation.” Yet the U.S., unlike other major democracies, does not have automatic voter registration, he noted.

That has left each state to adopt its own system. Currently, 22 U.S. states have automatic voter registration. Delaware joined the list last year, but Arizona has moved to bar the method.

Other recently adopted restrictive laws threaten to purge eligible voters from the voter rolls, Overton said.

New laws in Arizona and South Carolina allow voters to be removed from registration lists if government databases show they’re not citizens. This can lead to “faulty purges,” the Brennan Center warns.

Election interference laws

In addition to restrictive voting laws, voting rights advocates have voiced concern over a proliferation of what the Brennan Center and the Voting Rights Lab call “election interference laws.” These are laws that affect the administration of elections rather than the voter experience, Avore said.

Election interference laws come in different forms. One type gives partisan actors such as county election commissioners and poll watchers a greater role in elections.

Another common form imposes criminal penalties on election administrators for failure to enforce new rules such as strict citizenship verification requirements.

The 2021 Texas election law allows poll watchers “to enter the vehicle being used by a voter with a disability to vote curbside,” according to the Voting Rights Lab.

At least seven states have enacted 12 election interference laws this year, according to the Brennan Center.

Republican supporters of these laws say they’re aimed at combating voter fraud. But voting rights groups say they increase the likelihood of political interference in elections.

“The election interference laws really open the opportunity for politicians to select the voters,” Overton said.

Early voting surges

Even as they’ve moved their separate ways in changing their election rules, most states, whether red or blue, have found common ground in one area: allowing early in-person voting.

Avore calls this “one of the bright spots” in new state election laws.

Missouri and South Carolina, both Republican-led states, have established a two-week, no-excuse early voting period.

“So, voters in those states will be able to cast their ballot in person early for the first time this election,” Avore said.

Even states that have otherwise tightened voting rules, including Texas and Georgia, have expanded early voting, according to Avore.

Today, 46 states and the District of Columbia allow early voting, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.

Despite warnings about restrictions on voting access, however, it is too early to know their full impact, according to election law experts.

During the Texas primary earlier this year, election officials rejected nearly 25,000 mail ballots that failed to comply with the state’s new law. That’s a rejection rate of more than 12%, up from 2% during the last midterm

But early voting figures suggest high voter enthusiasm, with Texas reporting 4.2 million, Florida 3.6 million and Georgia a record 2.09 million. All three states have been criticized for imposing restrictions on voting access.
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Colorado Voters to Decide on Legalizing Psychedelic Mushrooms

Among the ballot initiatives before U.S. voters on Nov. 8 is a measure that would permit the use of psychedelic mushrooms and other naturally occurring hallucinogens in the Western state of Colorado. Scott Stearns narrates this story by Svitlana Prystynska in Denver. Videographer: Vladimir Petruniv
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Midterm Elections Usually Favor the Opposition, But Will 2022 Buck History?

History suggests the Democratic Party’s narrow control of both houses of Congress — the Senate and House of Representatives — could end after the midterm elections in November.  

But the conservative Supreme Court ‘s unpopular decision to end the constitutional right to an abortion for women could be the catalyst that bucks history. 

“Historically, the president’s political party has almost always lost seats in Congress in the midterm elections,” says Mark Rozell, dean and professor of policy and government at George Mason University in Virginia. “So, if this were just a normal, ordinary midterm election year, we would expect the Republicans to make very significant gains, particularly given that not only the historical pattern favors the Republicans, but there’s a relatively unpopular Democratic president.” 

Midterm elections occur halfway through a president’s four-year term. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives — where members serve two-year terms — and 35 of 100 Senate seats are up for grabs. Across the country, seats in many state legislatures and about half of the nation’s governorships are also on the ballot. 

Buoyed by Democratic control of Congress, President Joe Biden has recorded a string of legislative victories and signed bills into law strengthening gun restrictions, overhauling America’s infrastructure, fighting climate change and limiting drug prices. The results of the midterms will impact his ability to continue implementing his agenda for the country over the second half of his term.  

“The majority [party in Congress] controls who gets appointed to what committees, and … they’re going to determine what things are going to come to the floor,” says Mary Brennan, professor of history and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Texas State University. “Assuming that the opposite party from the president’s party is in control, they can stall the president’s agenda.” 

Historical perspective 

Over the past century, the president’s party picked up seats in the midterms only three times. First, in 1934 during the Great Depression when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was commander in chief; in 1998 after the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and in 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks.  

“In each of those three cases, there was very strong support for the incumbent president: The Great Depression in 1934. The unpopularity of the Clinton impeachment that had been led by the Republicans. And then George W. Bush had stratospheric popularity in 2002 after the attack on 9/11,” Rozell says. “So, those are three really extraordinary circumstances. And in the past 100 years, in every other midterm election, the party in control of the White House lost seats, and usually a significant number.”

Voter turnout for the midterms is usually significantly lower than during presidential elections. Fifty-three percent of eligible voters voted in 2018, but that was the highest midterm turnout in four decades. In 2014, just 41.9% of eligible voters cast a ballot during the midterms, while 66.8% of eligible citizens voted in the 2020 presidential election.   

“The reason the midterms don’t usually go the way of the party that’s in power is because their supporters are satisfied, and so they stay home,” Brennan says. “And the people who are unhappy and riled up are the ones who turn out during the midterms.” 

What voters will weigh 

Republicans hope voters will punish Democrats for decades-high inflation, economic uncertainty, uncontrolled migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and other factors. Democrats hope their record of accomplishment in Washington and the continued prominence of former President Donald Trump in national headlines will energize their core supporters and drive them to the polls. 

Democrats also hope that public uproar over recent polarizing decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority will blunt any Republican momentum in the current election cycle. 

In June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a woman’s decades-long constitutional right to an abortion and leaving it up to individual states to decide whether to ban or allow the procedure. Polls show the ruling was broadly unpopular with many segments of the electorate, including independent voters who are often pivotal in close contests. 

But was that, along with other high court decisions weakening gun control and environmental regulation, enough to upend the midterms and mobilize complacent voters? 

“We do have some circumstances in this election cycle that are quite unusual that could drive voting decisions in a different-than-usual direction,” Rozell says. “These are the things that history can’t pick up… The Supreme Court’s abortion decision may be just that example this year. That may have changed the dynamics of a number of congressional races this year that are highly competitive in favor of Democrats, because the Supreme Court decision is highly unpopular throughout the nation.” 

Brennan says more mundane, hard-to-gauge factors will also come into play during midterm voting this November. 

“People tend to think it doesn’t make as much difference. It’s not a presidential election.  They haven’t seen all the campaigns. They don’t know,” she says. “It could also be something like the weather. It could be, ‘It’s raining. I can’t go out in this. It’s too hot. I can’t stand in the line.’ It could be, ‘I don’t have a ride to the polls, and are they going to close before I get off work?’”
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Biden Implores Voters to Save Democracy From Lies, Violence

After weeks of reassuring talk about America’s economy and inflation, President Joe Biden turned Wednesday night to a darker, more urgent message, warning in the final days ahead of midterm election voting that democracy itself is under threat from former President Donald Trump’s election-denying lies and the violence he said they inspire. 

Pointing in particular to the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, he said that Trump’s false claims about a stolen election have “fueled the dangerous rise of political violence and voter intimidation over the past two years.” 

Six days before the elections, Biden said, “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America, for governor, for Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state, who won’t commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re in.” 

“That is the path to chaos in America,” he said. “It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And, it is un-American.” 

The president, who has been focused on drawing an economic contrast between Democrats and the GOP, spotlighted “ultra-MAGA” Republicans — a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan — calling them a minority but the “driving force” of the Republican Party. 

Pointing to mounting concerns over political violence as well as threats of America’s long tradition of hard-fought but peaceful and accurate elections, he said these Republicans are “trying to succeed where they failed in 2020 to suppress the rights of voters and subvert the electoral system itself.” 

The speech came days after a man seeking to kidnap Pelosi severely injured her husband, Paul Pelosi, in their San Francisco home and as physical threats have rattled members of Congress and election workers. 

“There’s an alarming rise in the number of people in this country condoning political violence or simply remaining silent,” Biden said. “The silence is complicity.” 

Emphasizing that it will be the first federal election since the January 6, 2021, insurrection and Trump’s attempts to overturn the will of voters in the 2020 presidential election, Biden called on voters to reject candidates who have denied the results of the vote, which even Trump’s administration declared to be free of any widespread fraud or interference. 

Biden asked voters to “think long and hard about the moment we are in.” 

“In a typical year, we are not often faced with the question of whether the vote we cast will preserve democracy or put it at risk,” he said. “But we are this year.” 

Biden delivered his remarks from Washington’s Union Station, blocks from the U.S. Capitol, as more than 27 million Americans have already cast their ballots. 

Before Biden’s speech, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said he’d reviewed the attack on Pelosi’s husband and believed today’s political climate called for more resources and better security for members of Congress, after a massive increase in threats to lawmakers following January 6. He also made a rare call to stop the rancorous conspiracy talk that has swirled around the attack. 

“Our brave men and women are working around the clock to meet this urgent mission during this divisive time,” he said in a statement. “In the meantime, a significant change that will have an immediate impact will be for people across our country to lower the temperature on political rhetoric before it’s too late.” 
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Officials Fear Disinformation Could Spark US Election Violence

With just one week to go until the U.S. midterm elections, a key senior U.S. official is expressing concerns that misinformation, or influence operations by U.S. adversaries, could ignite violence at the polls.

For weeks, top officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security have said they have found no traces of specific or credible threats to the November 8 vote.

But increasingly officials have voiced fears about the heightened domestic political tensions that have gripped much of the country and about how that could play out on Election Day when mixed with false or misleading narratives, sometimes from foreign countries such as Russia, China and Iran.

“It’s a significant concern,” Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told a forum Tuesday in Washington. “You’ve got disinformation and misinformation, which can be used by foreign adversaries to sow discord among the American people to undermine confidence in the integrity of our elections and to incite violence against election officials.”

In addition,”you’ve got these horrible physical security concerns at an unprecedented level, threats of intimidation, of violence, of harassment against election officials, polling places, voters,” she said.

CISA, which serves as the lead risk management agency for election security, is not alone in its worries.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has repeatedly warned about the potential for violence during the midterm elections, saying as far back as June that the election could serve as a rallying point for domestic extremists bent on violence.

And senior U.S. law enforcement officials have likewise warned the number of threats against election workers and election officials has grown dramatically, with more than 1,000 reports since June 2021.

Of those, almost 60% have come from seven states, all of which saw the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election challenged by skeptics or audited because of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud.

“It is a very sad state of affairs when election officials are worried about their security,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a conference in Virginia last week. “We have reports of a number of election officials expressing concern.”

State and local officials have also reported seeing more calls for violence on social media, including threats against election officials and some calls for a civil war.

Watch related video by Anita Powell:

Officials with both DHS and CISA say they have responded by working closely with state and local officials who have the ultimate responsibility for running elections, sharing the latest threat intelligence and helping to coordinate with law enforcement officials.

CISA has also been holding classes for election workers on how to deescalate potential confrontations, going as far as to post a shortened version on YouTube.

Additionally, CISA and state election officials and organizations have sought to push back against potential influence operations designed to spread false and misleading information, promoting websites like CISA’s Rumor Control site, designed to debunk narratives aimed at creating confusion and doubt.

While senior U.S. officials have yet to draw a direct link between specific disinformation and specific cases of election-related violence, they say there is no doubt adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran have consistently pushed to increase political tensions within the U.S.

“We know our foreign adversaries are doing this,” FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Robert Wells said last week, pointing to Russia in particular.

“Russia likes to sit back and watch the United States kind of tear ourselves apart,” he said. “I think they like what they’re seeing but they will definitely take steps to fan the flames on social media.”

And officials worry about what will happen when those efforts are combined with a growing anti-government and anti-authority sentiment.

“Myriad conspiracy theories continue to proliferate, with various narratives associated with false claims about the [2020] election,” said DHS Assistant Secretary Samantha Vinograd, noting those claims “have a historical basis in cementing clear and credible violence.”

“We have also seen the window between aspirational rhetoric online, or seemingly aspirational rhetoric online, and action narrow significantly,” she said, speaking alongside the FBI’s Wells. “We are certainly very focused on what we consider to be an incredibly heightened threat environment.”
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Despite Huge Redistricting Advantage, Republicans Play it Safe

As the midterms approach, the Republican Party is facing a tougher than expected fight from the Democrats for control of the House of Representatives despite having had a rare opportunity to redraw the political map in their favor.

“People thought, ‘Well, Democrats are going to get shellacked in redistricting, and, you know, they more or less managed to fight to a draw,'” says Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. Though Republicans are still likely to win control of the House, he said.

Every 10 years, congressional districts are redrawn to reflect population changes and ensure that each House lawmaker represents roughly the same number of people. But how the new boundaries are drawn and the communities the new districts encompass can benefit one political party or the other.

State legislatures are often in charge of the process, meaning that the party that controls a state capital can bend redistricting to its advantage. That process is called gerrymandering.

In 2020, Republicans controlled the drawing of 187 of 435 congressional districts in the House of Representatives, while Democrats redrew 75. The rest were done by commissions or other bodies.

“The maps aren’t great. There’s not a lot of competition,” says Li, who focuses on redistricting, voting rights and elections. “They’re still skewed in a number of states — in particular, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Ohio — but, despite that, they [the maps] ended up in a kind of neutral place.”

So neutral that, while it remains unlikely that Democrats will keep their House majority next year due to factors not related to redistricting, it’s not out of the question, according to Li.

Lack of competition

The 2020 redistricting appears to have yielded fewer competitive districts than ever. Only about 60 are seen as truly up for grabs, with the rest viewed as “safe” for Democrats or Republicans.

“Over the last several decades, with each decennial redistricting process, we have seen fewer and fewer competitive districts. Now, some of that has to do with redistricting,” says Jennifer Victor, an associate professor of political science at George Mason University in Virginia. “A lot of that change in competitiveness also has to do with geographic sorting. People just choosing to vote with their feet and live in places where people are more like them.”

That’s a concern because democracies require some level of competitiveness, she says.

“The more and more Americans who live in places where they feel like their political identity doesn’t match the majority, or doesn’t match the trends in their area, the more disconnected they feel from their government, the more unrepresented they feel, and that can be one component of destabilization in a democracy,” Victor says.

Playing it safe

In the recently completed redistricting, Republicans appear to have opted to ensure safer districts, rather than aspire to control more districts. In fact, President Joe Biden would have won more districts under the new maps than he did under the old maps two years ago, Li says.

“What you want to do, if you’re trying to maximize seats, is spread your voters out among as many districts as possible so that you win a bunch of districts by like 52, 53, 54% – narrow wins,” Li says. “But that strategy almost backfired on Republicans last decade in states like Texas, because districts got more diverse, and key blocks of voters, particularly white suburban women, shifted toward Democrats.”

The result was that some of those districts got much more competitive than Republicans anticipated, and Democrats even won some of them.

“I still think Republicans are favored to win the House, but I think with these maps, if they win a majority, it’ll be a narrow majority,” Li says, “and Democrats have a chance to retake the majority in 2024, 2026, assuming that these maps remain unchanged.”

Among the biggest losers in redistricting are communities of color, he adds.

“Political discrimination is actually racial discrimination that comes at the expense of communities of color,” Li says. “Because we still have residential segregation, it’s easy to pack together or break apart communities of color, in order to change the partisan valence of maps.”

Cure for gerrymandering?

Another key reason both Demo­crats and Repub­lic­ans have realistic hopes of winning a majority in the House in coming years is the fairer maps drawn by nonpartisan commissions or courts rather than politicians looking to gain or consolidate power.

State legislatures have traditionally been responsible for redrawing boundaries for both state and congressional districts. Fourteen states now use commissions but only four of those — California, Arizona, Colorado and Michigan — use truly independent commissions to redraw congressional boundaries, and Li says they’ve all done a good job drawing representative districts.

“The U.S. is an outlier in the way that it draws its political districts. In almost every other modern democracy, a neutral body or neutral actor draws the maps, and the U.S. is an outlier in that it largely leaves control of drawing maps in the hands of people who benefit from the maps and partisan actors,” Li says. “There’s a lot of putting your thumb on the scale that occurs in the U.S. system which I think skews democracy in any number of ways.”

In addition to using independent commissions, Victor says gerrymandering could be stopped by eliminating districts and having regions represented by multiple members of Congress based on percentage of votes. In that scenario, states would have a multiple representation system rather than one member of Congress from every district.

“Not only does it fix the gerrymandering problem, it improves the sense of representation and political efficacy,” Victor says. “It would also create the incentives for third political parties to operate and actually have a real probability of winning in some places. And so we would see the United States slowly move towards multi-partyism, which would be a much better fit for our population than the two-party system that we have.”

The move could be made without amending the Constitution but the elected officials who currently hold power would have to sign onto changes that could potentially take their power away.

And even though legislative maps are supposed to only be redrawn each decade, this round of redistricting might be far from over.

“In America, we draw maps and then we fight about them in court,” Li says. “What has happened so far in redistricting may just be act one of a multi-act play and there could be a lot more fights over maps to come and a lot more redrawing of maps and a lot more litigation about maps down the road and the near- and even medium-term future.”
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Historic US Midterm Elections

A look at some of the more influential U.S. midterm elections of the past 150 years, all of which led to a change in the party that controlled the House.  
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Majority of Americans Want Supreme Court Reform, Here’s How it Could Work

Two-thirds of Americans want court reform in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned a half-century of abortion rights that were guaranteed under the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

“We’re in somewhat uncharted territory here,” says Carolyn Shapiro, professor of law at ITT Chicago-Kent College of Law. “For the first time in a very long time, maybe ever, there is increasing public appetite for making changes to the court, like adding seats and/or imposing term limits.”

Public approval of the U.S. Supreme Court hit a new low last month, with disapproval of the high court hitting its highest mark since Gallup started keeping track in 2000.

The pollster found that 53% of people disapprove of the job the Supreme Court is doing. Forty percent of people polled describe the court as being “about right” ideologically, while 37% say the court is “too conservative.”

The results of the Gallup poll, conducted September 1-17, come about a year after 58% of Americans said they approved of the Supreme Court, and a couple of months after the high court struck Roe down.

Shapiro, who is also co-director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States (ISCOTUS), a community of scholars who study the Supreme Court, says that in addition to the abortion decision, many Americans feel the current court, made up of six Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees, is not representative of the American people.

“That’s the case, even though the Republican presidential candidates have won the popular vote exactly once since 1988,” Shapiro says. “Donald Trump was president for four years and did not win a majority and got three nominations. President [Barack] Obama was president for eight years and had two majority popular votes and had two [Supreme Court] seats. That’s an argument in favor of term limits, because the idea of term limits is that … each president, in each term, would have the opportunity to appoint two justices.”

A Politico poll conducted in June found that 62% of respondents support term limits for justices, with 23% in opposition. Forty-five percent favor expanding the number of justices on the court, while 38% oppose the move. The Constitution gives Congress the authority to expand the Supreme Court, which lawmakers have done seven times in the past.

“Increasing the size of the court to change its policies is not unprecedented, but it hasn’t happened in more than 150 years,” says Lawrence Baum, a retired political science professor at The Ohio State University. “And there’s something to be said for leaving things as they are. But there’s also something to be said for giving the other branches the chance to address what they see as an imbalance.”

Fifty-three percent of people polled support balancing the court with equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans and independents, while 30% are against it.

“What we have is a real minority court in the sense of it not representing the vast majority of the way Americans have voted,” Shapiro says. “It is constitutional. I don’t want to suggest it’s illegitimate in that sense, but I think it’s deeply problematic for the court itself to be so disconnected from the democratic process.”

Both Shapiro and Baum support the idea of term limits for Supreme Court justices.

“It takes away this random element that causes some presidents who are luckier than others to have more opportunities to select members of the court,” Baum says. “It also reduces, somewhat, the chance that somebody will stay on the court beyond the time when they can be effective.”

Term limits could end the political gamesmanship in the U.S. Senate that prevented Obama from appointing a justice after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, while allowing Trump to successfully nominate Justice Amy Coney Barrett after the September 2020 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

“We won’t have strategic retirements where a nominee retires in order to get the particular president to give their particular president that nomination,” Shapiro says. “Eighteen-year term limits are the proposal I’m talking about. That would return the length of justices’ tenure to actually what it was for the first few hundred years.”

Last year, President Joe Biden appointed a panel of experts to explore possible Supreme Court reform. The commission recommended a new code of ethics and more court transparency but stopped short of endorsing term limits or expanding the court.

Even without high court reform, Baum says there are ways of reducing the impact of unpopular Supreme Court rulings.

“Supreme Court decisions often leave a lot of room for people to respond in different ways. Think about the Dobbs abortion decision. As it stands now, it gives states very broad freedoms as to what abortion policies to adopt,” Baum says.

“And so, states that are using Dobbs as a basis for basically prohibiting abortion are complying. States that decide they’re going to protect abortion even if the Supreme Court doesn’t, they’re complying also. And so states can often do a great deal that they want to do within the bounds of a Supreme Court decision.”
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US Politicians Condemn Political Violence Ahead of Tense Midterm Vote

Political violence has cast a pall over the U.S. midterm vote, with poll workers expecting high emotions at election venues and a recent, violent home invasion targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. President Joe Biden and other top politicians have condemned the attack, which badly wounded Pelosi’s husband, Paul, and they are calling for an end to political violence as the election looms on Nov. 8. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Washington.
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As Midterms Near, Political Ads Seize on Voters’ Fears about Crime

Crime statistics are notoriously hard to interpret. They’re often incomplete, out of date and ambiguous. But that hasn’t stopped candidates running in the midterms this year from cherry-picking data to score political points.

Take a Republican attack ad against Josh Riley, a Democrat running for a competitive congressional seat in upstate New York. The ad, sponsored by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, cites a New York Post article about “violent crime surging in New York.”

But the June 22 article is about rising violent crime in New York City — and five other U.S. cities — not New York state. The sprawling congressional district where Riley is running is located north of New York City and extends as far as the town of Preble, 363 kilometers north of Manhattan. Excluding New York City, state data show violent crime dropped by 13.1% from 2012 to 2021, the most recent period for which data is available.

This is not the only Republican ad that selectively highlights data to exploit voters’ fears about rising crime rates.

With crime emerging as a major concern among voters this election cycle, Republican candidates have reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars on ads blaming Democratic policies for rising violence in the country.

For their part, Democratic candidates have responded by touting their own law enforcement endorsements, sometimes featuring police officers in their ads, while accusing Republicans of fearmongering and “race-baiting.”

To critics, the fear-tinged ads on the air across the country recall an infamous episode of American politics from the 1980s.

In 1988, an ad in support of Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush’s presidential run accused his Democratic rival, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, of allowing “first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.”

Showcased in the commercial was Willie Horton, an African American convicted of murder who during a weekend furlough stabbed a Maryland man and raped his girlfriend.

The ad, though it was pulled amid accusations of racist fearmongering, was credited with helping Bush get elected.

In the decades since, “Willie Horton” has become an epithet for racially charged ads designed to scare voters with exaggerated claims about violent crime.

Republican candidates and committees have dismissed such accusations during the current election cycle.

Spokespersons for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, both of which fund ads for Republican candidates, did not respond to requests for comment.

While it is true that violent crime has been generally trending higher since the mid-2010s after a decades-long decline, the picture is far more complicated than the political ads suggest.

What the data show is that there was a substantial increase in homicides and gun assaults during the pandemic, but the surge appears to be leveling off, according to the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice.

The biggest increase came in 2020, when homicides surged by nearly 30%, marking the largest annual rise on record, the FBI reported last year.

But not all crime increased, noted Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and chair of its violent crime working group.

“There wasn’t a surge in property crime, and there wasn’t a surge in drug crime,” Abt said.

While there is a debate among criminologists over whether the spike in homicides and shootings in 2020 was an aberration, there are indications that the trend is slowing.

The FBI’s most recent crime data, released earlier this month, are incomplete and almost a year old. But they show that homicides rose by 4.3% in 2021, while overall violent crime actually decreased by 1%.

Moreover, crime trends seen during the pandemic seem to have reversed themselves this year.

During the first half of 2022, homicides decreased by an average of 2% in 29 major U.S. cities, while burglaries, larcenies and car thefts were all up, according to a July report by the Council on Criminal Justice.

The overall decline in homicides seems to have extended into the second half of 2022. Police data from 99 cities compiled by consulting firm AH Datalytics show that homicides are down in twice as many metropolitan areas as they are up so far this year. On average, the 99 cities show a year-to-date decline of 5%.

Notably, homicides are down in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, America’s three largest cities. But whether homicides are up or down, there is a perception among voters that violence is spiraling out of control and that their elected leaders aren’t doing enough to combat it.

In a recent Politico poll, more than two-thirds of voters said crime was a big problem in the United States, while 60% said it would play a major role in whom they vote for.

With homicides at 25-year highs, voters have reason to be concerned, said Justin Nix, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

“There are 23- to 24-year-olds walking around right now who’ve never seen the homicide rate this high in their lifetime,” Nix said.

However, Nix said, voters’ perceptions of crime don’t always reflect data.

“Americans’ perception of the crime and disorder problem don’t always match up with the objective data. For example, they might tell you crime went up in the last year when the data show that it went down,” he said.

Nix said politicians, and not just Republicans, “manipulate” crime data in a variety of ways.

One common tactic, according to Nix: selectively choose the comparison period.

In Wisconsin, an ad attacking Republican Senator Ron Johnson’s Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes, cites a report by a conservative think tank to inform voters that “violent crime [is] up across Wisconsin.” .

But the Feb. 8, 2022, report by the MacIver Institute is focused on the spike in violent crime in 2020 when Wisconsin saw a 62% increase in murders.

Data from the Wisconsin Department of Justice show that homicides rose by 5% last year. The data show that not all crime went up in Wisconsin last year, with both robbery and aggravated assault numbers down. Crime data for 2022 are not available on the department’s website.

The MacIver Institute and the Wisconsin Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.

Selective Democrats

Republican candidates are not the only ones to highlight selective crime data to win over voters. Joe Cunningham, a Democrat running for governor of South Carolina, cites a June 2021 TV report to tell voters that “crime is at an all-time high” in his state.

And an ad by California Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell cites a report ranking Bakersfield, California, the seat of Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s congressional district, as “the top 10 most dangerous city in America.”

But crime is highly localized in America. Even in “the most dangerous cities,” there are neighborhoods that are safe. On the other hand, the “safest cities” may have so-called “hot spots” with a disproportionate number of crimes.

“A lot of the rhetoric concerning crime is just that — rhetoric — and is really seeking to divide Americans against one another with divisive fearmongering,” Abt said.

The recent surge in crime, Abt added, is “cause for deep concern but not panic.”

The rhetoric about violent crime is not happening in equal measure. With polls showing that more Republican voters worried about crime than Democratic voters, the Republican Party is outspending the Democratic Party in advertising focused on crime according to political ad spending data.

Blaming the rise in violent crime on one political party is not supported by the facts, Abt said.

“The rise in violence [during the COVID-19 pandemic] was surprisingly uniform. It occurred in red states and blue states. It occurred in cities and also in suburban and rural areas,” he said.

While no one knows exactly what drove the crime surge, Abt said most experts agree on three contributing factors: the pandemic, civil unrest following the death in police custody of George Floyd in 2020 and a spike in legal firearms purchases.
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Poll Workers Train for Conflict: ‘A Little Nervous? I Am.’

Milwaukee’s top election official surveyed about 20 poll workers gathered in a classroom in a city building stuffed with election supplies, then spoke frankly about the tense environment they may face next week when the city expects more people watching their work than ever before.

“So who is worried about observer disruptions?” Claire Woodall-Vogg, head of the Milwaukee Election Commission, asked the group. “Who has read things or heard things on the news, and you’re a little nervous? I am. I’ll raise my hand,” she said, smiling.

A few of the workers raised their hands, too. They’re not alone in their concern: Election officials across the country are bracing for confrontational poll watchers fueled by lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election spread by former President Donald Trump and others, even after Trump’s loss was upheld by repeated reviews, audits and recounts, and courts rejected legal challenges.

That tension is higher in the handful of battleground states like Wisconsin, where Trump and others were quick to cry fraud after late-arriving results from Democratic-dominated Milwaukee helped Joe Biden narrowly carry the state in 2020. Recounts demanded by Trump confirmed Biden’s victory.

Woodall-Vogg has already felt the pressure. In an interview, she described being harassed and threatened after that election via email, phone calls and letters to her home — threats serious enough that she has an assigned FBI agent to forward them to.

Still, Woodall-Vogg said she’d rather she be a target than her workers — some of whom have stepped down from managerial roles because of the pressure. “We’re not paying them millions of bucks to endure that stress by any means,” Woodall-Vogg said.

Election officials nationally are concerned about a flood of conspiracy theorists signing up to work as poll watchers, with some groups that have trafficked in lies about the 2020 election recruiting and training watchers, particularly in swing states like Wisconsin.

Wisconsin requires poll workers to be trained only every two years, but this year Milwaukee is offering much more frequent training than in elections past, including informational videos and one-hour sessions focused on specific topics, like voter registration. The content remains unchanged.

In the mid-October session observed by The Associated Press, Woodall-Vogg was presenting to an experienced group of poll managers — known as chief inspectors — who will be responsible for directing workers at individual polling places. The managers get a flat payment of $325 for Election Day duties that begin before 7 a.m. and can stretch into the wee hours of the next morning. Non-managers get $220.

When the training turned to how to handle potential problems, Woodall-Vogg was careful to note that observers play “a vital role in our democracy.” But she also said she didn’t want her workers to feel threatened by them.

She demonstrated how to tape off sections where observers can stand — between 3 and 8 feet from voter check-in and registration areas.

“Take your tape and make a line and say, ‘This is the observer area,’ or make a box and say, ‘Please don’t leave this area,'” she said.

Violators first get a warning; if they do it again, they’re ordered to leave. If someone refuses, police are called.

Woodall-Vogg also walked the workers through how to handle challenges to voter eligibility based on a voter’s race or the language they speak. Such challenges are unacceptable, Woodall-Vogg said, and should get a warning as frivolous. An observer who makes a second such challenge would be ordered to leave.

Some poll workers who spoke to AP said they expect to see conflict, but they’re ready for it.

“I have a calling to serve,” said 70-year-old Andrea Nembhard, who has worked elections for more than a decade. She added: “I’m not afraid.”

Melody Villanueva, 46, said the same.

“I’m a problem solver, so I will de-escalate if necessary, and I will have to call the proper authority if necessary,” she said. “I am not one to fear much.”

Some workers acknowledged their nerves.

Averil Fletcher recounted calling the police during the August primary when a voter — convinced he had been deliberately locked out of the polling place — threw chairs and threatened workers. She had to wait 35 minutes for officers who had been busy elsewhere handling a pair of shootings.

Woodall-Vogg assured the managers that Fletcher’s experience “will never happen again.”

“If there is an election disturbance, if someone’s refusing to leave the polling place and you’ve issued them an order to leave, we have a direct line and there will be officers that will respond to support you,” Woodall-Vogg told the chief inspectors.

Federal law enforcement will also be on standby. Four assistant U.S. attorneys are assigned to oversee Election Day in Wisconsin and deal with threats of violence to election staff and complaints of voting rights concerns, and the FBI has stationed agents throughout the country to address allegations of election fraud and other election abuses, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Thanks to increased interest, the city hit full election staffing levels with two weeks to spare, which Woodall-Vogg said has never happened before.

“Usually it’s more panicking, filling in gaps,” Woodall-Vogg said.

That included five times as many partisan nominees to be election workers than in previous elections, but Woodall-Vogg said she’s not worried about bad actors because the system is designed to prevent issues. Election inspectors always have multiple eyes over their shoulder as they work: a second inspector is required to sign off for each task, and chief inspectors are monitoring all workers.

“Anyone who might have bad intentions, we would immediately, I think, be able to identify,” she said.
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Immigrants Face Off in California Congressional District

A congressional race in California between two immigrants, one from Pakistan and the other from South Korea, reflects the changing demographics of the American electorate. Mike O’Sullivan reports that abortion and the economy are at the heart of rival messages in the November 8th midterm election.
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With US Midterm Vote, Massachusetts Cambodians Flex Local Power

For Cambodian American residents of Lowell, Massachusetts, the upcoming midterm vote is chance to voice concerns on a list of local concerns familiar throughout the U.S. — potholes, schools and housing costs.

Sreang Heng, the Cambodia-born owner of Heng Heng Auto Repair near Lowell’s Koumantzelis Park-Roberto Clemente Baseball Field, said potholes are taking a toll on his customers’ vehicles, which come to him with damaged tires and tie rods. While this means more work for auto repair shops like his, he’d rather not have it because of the social cost, especially to those who cannot afford to make all the repairs needed at one time.

“Most of them complain the spare parts are expensive because taxes are already included, so they bargain for the reduction of service charges,” said the 46-year-old who arrived in the U.S. in 2016.

Located on the Merrimack River, Lowell is 50 kilometers north of Boston. An early center of America’s once-thriving textile industry, Lowell has attracted European and Latin American immigrants since the 19th century. In the 1980s, Cambodian refugees fleeing civil war and the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge began arriving. Today, the city of about 115,000 residents is nearly 25% Asian, home to the nation’s second-largest Cambodian community in America after Long Beach, California.

But in a city where minorities are close to the majority, according to U.S. Census data, white residents held most of elected positions until recently.

The change came when a coalition of Latino and Asian American residents filed a civil rights suit in 2017. Their attorney, Oren Sellstrom, argued Lowell violated his clients’ voting rights by electing officials on a citywide basis. The plaintiffs and the city settled in 2019, agreeing to establish districts that better represented the city’s diverse neighborhoods.

The changes in Lowell mirror those rippling through the U.S., which the Census has projected will have a population with a majority of minorities within decades. And the evolution of the Cambodian community as one that has progressed from nominal representation to exerting political power in the city and state is a path to assimilation well-worn by earlier immigrant groups.

Lowell now has eight districts, two of them with a majority of non-white voters. The city elected a Cambodian-born mayor, Sokhary Chau, in 2021. He took office in January along with two Cambodian American council members who were also born in Cambodia.

Mony Var, 56, is the first Cambodian to work for the Lowell Election Commission. In the 1990s, the city had 30,000 Cambodian residents, but only 123 Cambodians were registered to vote. Now, about 2,000 Cambodians are registered to vote. He said midterm and primary elections are as important for the community as the general election.

Mony Var, who arrived in the U.S. in 1980, said while voters may be disinterested in the midterms, “All elections are important. We must take the opportunity and fulfill the duty to vote in every election. Don’t only come to vote on the presidential election.”

The midterm focus of the Cambodian community on issues like potholes and schools suggests the validity of the oft-repeated maxim of U.S. life, “All politics is local.”

Sovann Khorn, who arrived in the U.S. from Cambodia via the Khao-i-Dang refugee camp in Thailand, runs a party-service business that also provides video and still photography for weddings, and dress rentals. The 57-year-old wants Lowell schools to crack down on students’ misbehavior and limit their video-gaming time.

Rodney Elliott, a former Lowell mayor and city council member, is a Democrat running to be state representative for the 16th Middlesex District against Republican Karla Miller. The district is home to many Cambodians.

Elliott, who is not Cambodian but who has visited Cambodia twice, said when he was mayor in 2014 he raised $300,000 for victims of a fatal fire, some of whom were Cambodians. He also commissioned a statue of Cambodian refugees for City Hall’s front yard.

Miller, a first-time office seeker, said there are few Cambodians in Chelmsford, her home base.

“I would love to reach out to the Cambodian community. … This is my first rodeo, so I don’t know a lot of people in different communities,” she said.

State representative for the 17th Middlesex District, Vanna Howard, 52, arrived from Cambodia in 1980.

In 2020, she was the first Cambodian woman elected to be a state representative in the U.S., motivated by “the need to give back to a place which has been so good to me,” according to her website.

Howard is running unopposed for reelection this year. She told VOA Khmer that voters ask her for help with a variety of issues, including unemployment, and improving schools, roads and bridges.

“And another one is housing,” said the Democrat. Lowell faces a housing shortage and the available options are expensive, she said, adding, “They want [my] help to keep prices on housing from going up too much, [to find] funds for housing.”

Insurance company owner Mony Var, 56, arrived in the U.S. in 1981 and now lives in the 18th Middlesex House District. He said local representatives “should listen to businessmen in the area to write high-standard business law that help local business[es] prosper and to bring in other businessmen to our area.”

Veteran state representative Rady Mom, 54, who arrived in 1982, is a Democrat and running unopposed after defeating two Cambodian-born challengers for the 18th Middlesex House District in the September 6 primary. According to U.S. Census data, the district population is about 41% white, 32% Asian, 17% Hispanic and 7% Black. Thirty-one percent of the residents are foreign-born.

John Cluverius, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, told the Boston public radio station WGBH before the primary that the race among three Cambodian-born candidates showed how the community was moving beyond just seeking representation.

“It’s not that this coalition and this community is fighting for its political existence anymore or its simple representation,” Cluverius told WGBH. “But, instead, you see a community that looks like any other community with political power, which is that the divisions within start emerging more, and so you start seeing challenges within that community to incumbent representatives in that community.”

Or as Rady Mom, who in 2014 became the first Cambodian American state lawmaker in the U.S., put it, “My role is listening to people, convey their messages. If I don’t work for them, every two years, voters can vote me out and pick my challenger. That is democracy.”
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Biden Pushes Strong Jobs Market as US Midterm Elections Near

U.S. President Joe Biden has pushed his economic agenda while campaigning for his Democratic Party before the November 8 elections, but high inflation, energy prices and economic anxiety caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine make the economy a tough sell. VOA’s Anita Powell reports.
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Economy, Abortion Top Concerns as Voters Elect New US Congress

U.S. voters are weighing heavy issues as they head to the polls this November. From inflation to abortion rights, to border security and crime, concerns about the direction of the country will motivate voters to either keep Democrats in power or give Republicans a chance to control both the U.S. Senate and House. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from the voters. Videographer: Scott Stearns
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Pennsylvania’s Pivotal Senate Race Could Determine Fate of Biden Agenda

If opposition Republicans capture both the U.S. House and Senate in the November 8 midterm election, the legislative agenda of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, will be derailed. One of the most closely watched and tightest races is for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania. It features Republican Party nominee Mehmet Oz against Democratic Party nominee John Fetterman, who is the state’s lieutenant governor.

Fetterman’s campaign has issued social media memes mocking Oz’s apparent lack of knowledge about Pennsylvania, portraying him as a wealthy, out-of-touch carpetbagger from over the border, in New Jersey.

Oz, a physician and political novice, has sought to cast doubts among Pennsylvania’s voters about Fetterman’s fitness to serve as a senator since he suffered an ischemic stroke in May, shortly after capturing the Democratic Party nomination. The condition has left him with auditory processing difficulties.

During Tuesday’s televised debate with Oz, Fetterman was allowed to use a closed captioning device.

“I might miss some words during this debate, mush some words together. But it [the stroke] knocked me down. But I’m going to keep coming back up,” Fetterman said near the start of the hourlong encounter, which took place in Harrisburg, the state capital, without a studio audience.

Fetterman did have difficulty during the debate, as he predicted. When the moderators quizzed him about his changing positions on fracking, a controversial process to extract gas and oil, the candidate was visibly flummoxed.

“I do support fracking. And I don’t, I don’t, I support fracking. And I stand and I do support fracking,” he responded.

Oz faces scrutiny for some of the products he endorsed during his 15 years on his nationally televised talk program, with critics saying the supplements had dubious health benefits, at best, and might have been dangerous.

During the debate, Oz brushed off such concerns and focused on his treatment of patients.

“I can make the difficult decisions as you do in the operating room as a surgeon. I’ll make them cutting our budget as well, to make sure we don’t have to raise taxes on a population already desperately in pain from the high inflation rate,” he said.

Oz has sought to portray Fetterman as soft on crime during his time as mayor of a small town and while he held the state’s second-highest elected office.

“These radical positions extend beyond crime, to one thing to legalize all drugs, to open the border, to raising our taxes,” said Oz during the debate.

Fetterman, on the campaign trail, drew a distinct line between himself and Oz on the highly-charged issue of abortion.

“If you believe that the choice for abortion belongs between you and your doctor, that’s what I fight for,” he said during the debate, defending the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision struck down by the high court this year.

Oz said the federal government should not be involved in abortion legislation.

“I want women, doctors, local political leaders letting the democracy that always allowed our nation to thrive, to put the best ideas forward so state can decide for themselves,” he said on the debate stage.

The economy is also expected to be a significant matter in the decision of many midterm voters across the United States and especially in some parts of Pennsylvania.

“On the outskirts of Pittsburgh, people are struggling, just to keep up with rent just to keep up with paying their bills and getting groceries and so that’s a major issue,” according to associate professor Gerald Dickinson of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Dickinson cautioned that whatever the stances of Fetterman and Oz, their positions might not be the ultimate factor influencing voters’ decisions when they cast their ballots.

“It’s a very, very close race and, as a result of that, what I do think is going to happen is that the personalities of these candidates are going to end up swaying this election,” Dickinson said.

Fetterman, with tattooed arms and usually clad in short pants, promotes his Everyman persona even though he towers over most voters at a height of 2.03 meters.

Oz, the heart surgeon, is more polished, and a relaxed figure in front of the camera.

“It shows in the way that he’s been able to campaign, the way that he’s been able to communicate his issues to his audience,” said Dickinson, a former Democratic Party primary candidate for Congress.

Both candidates enjoy high-profile backers. Biden, a Pennsylvania native, has been campaigning for Fetterman, while Oz is supported by former President Donald Trump, who encouraged Oz to enter politics.

If elected, Oz, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Turkey, would become the first Muslim in the Senate.

Some of those viewing the hourlong debate at a nonpartisan watch party in Pittsburgh — a city evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — told VOA they did not see the encounter swaying the minds of many voters, even though Oz came across as more fluent than Fetterman.

“I think they both stuck to, primarily, what their party is saying. I think Fetterman had a disadvantage. He had to read before he responded and that comes across as if he’s unsure or thinking,” said Richard Covington.

“It was very much a performance, certainly by Dr. Oz — that’s what he’s used to doing. I think for John Fetterman it felt like a struggle. It was just very difficult. The whole thing was kind of painful to watch, frankly,” said Alma Wisniewski.

“When he’s pressured his speech becomes a little more challenging,” said Albert Moore, who expressed support for Fetterman, describing the Democrat as someone who was “not a real articulate guy” even before the stroke, but managed to get things done as a mayor and lieutenant governor.

Fetterman “deserves credit not ridicule” for taking the debate stage while recovering from the stroke, the Philadelphia Inquirer opined Wednesday, after the event.

“If elected to the U.S. Senate, Fetterman could become a role model in helping the nation better understand that a person’s struggles can also be a source of strength,” the newspaper said.

Fetterman appeared at a Pittsburgh rally on Wednesday evening with musician Dave Matthews.

“I may not get every word the right way,” Fetterman told the crowd. “I have a lot of good days. And every now and then I’ll have a bad day. But every day I will always fight just for you.”

More than 686,000 early ballots had been submitted by Wednesday, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State, so any assessment by those voters of the candidates’ debate performance will not make a difference.

In addition, neither candidate can take traditional party support for granted. Pennsylvania’s historical working-class areas, once reliably Democratic, have trended Republican, while many previously solid Republican suburbs now have Democratic Party majorities.

In a CNN poll, conducted by SSRS, a survey and market research firm, in mid-October and released the day prior to the debate, 51% of likely voters said they supported Fetterman while 45% of respondents backed Oz. Other recent surveys have shown the race closer, within the polls’ margins of error.
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Key States Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia Will Decide Control of US Congress

Control of the U.S. Congress is at stake on Nov. 8, when American voters will elect new representatives in the House and Senate. As VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson explains, just a handful of races across the country will decide whether Democrats remain in power or Republicans win the majority.
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