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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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