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Doug Mastriano’s Extraordinarily On-line Rise to Republicans’ Governor Nominee in Pa.

Doug Mastriano’s Extremely Online Rise to Republicans’ Governor Nominee in Pa.

BLOOMSBURG, Pa. — In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Diane Fisher, a nurse from Weatherly, Pa., was surfing through videos on Facebook when she came across a livestream from Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania state senator.

Starting in late March 2020, Mr. Mastriano had beamed regularly into Facebook from his living room, offering his increasingly strident denunciations of the state’s quarantine policies and answering questions from his viewers, sometimes as often as six nights a week and for as long as an hour at a stretch.

“People were upset, and they were fearful about things,” Ms. Fisher said. “And he would tell us what was going on.”

Ms. Fisher told her family and her friends about what Mr. Mastriano billed as “fireside chats,” after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts during the Depression and World War II. “The next thing you knew,” she recalled, “there was 5,000 people watching.”

Mr. Mastriano’s rise from obscure and inexperienced far-right politician to Republican standard-bearer in Pennsylvania’s governor’s race was swift, stunning and powered by social media. Although he is perhaps better known for challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election and calling the separation of church and state a “myth,” Mr. Mastriano built his foundation of support on his innovative use of Facebook in the crucible of the early pandemic, connecting directly with anxious and isolated Americans who became an uncommonly loyal base for his primary campaign.

He is now the GOP nominee in perhaps the most closely watched race for governor in the country, in part because it would place a 2020 election denier in control of a major battleground state’s election system. Both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump are making campaign appearances in Pennsylvania this week. As the race enters its last months, one of the central questions is whether the online mobilization that Mr. Mastriano successfully wielded against his own party establishment will prove similarly effective against Josh Shapiro, his Democratic rival — or whether a political movement nurtured in the hothouse of right-wing social media discontent will be unable or unwilling to transcend it.

Mr. Mastriano has continued to run a convention-defying campaign. He employs political neophytes in key positions and has refused for months to interact with mainstream national and local reporters beyond expelling them from events. (His campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

He grants interviews almost exclusively to friendly radio and TV shows and podcasts that share Mr. Mastriano’s far-right politics, and continues to heavily rely on Facebook to reach voters directly.

“It is the best-executed and most radical ‘ghost the media’ strategy in this cycle,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser, who said other Republican strategists were watching Mr. Mastriano’s example closely.

“It’s never been done before. He’s on a spacewalk,” he said. “And the question we’re all asking is, does he make it back to the capsule?”

Although Mr. Mastriano no longer hosts fireside chats, his campaign posts several times more often a day on Facebook than most candidates, according to Kyle Tharp, the author of the FWIW newsletter, which tracks digital politics. His campaign’s Facebook post engagements have been comparable to those of Mr. Shapiro, despite Mr. Shapiro’s spending far more on digital advertising.

“He is a Facebook power user,” Mr Tharp said.

But Mr. Mastriano’s campaign has done little to expand his reach outside his loyal base, even as polls since the primary have consistently shown him trailing Mr. Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, albeit often narrowly. And Mr. Mastriano’s efforts to add to his audience on the right through advertising on Gab, a platform favored by white nationalists, prompted a rare retreat in the face of criticism last month.

A career Army officer until his retirement in 2017 and a hard-line social conservative, Mr. Mastriano won a special election for the State Senate in 2019 after campaigning on his opposition to what he described as the “barbaric holocaust” of legal abortion and his see that the United States is an inherently Christian nation whose Constitution is incompatible with other faiths. But he was known to few outside his district until he began his pandemic broadcasts in late March 2020.

In the live videos, Mr. Mastriano was unguarded and at times emotional, giving friendly shout-outs to familiar names in the chat window. His fireside chats arrived at a fertile moment on the platform, when conservative and right-wing activists were using Facebook to assemble new organizations and campaigns to convert discontent into action — first with the Covid lockdowns and, later, the 2020 election outcome.

Mr. Mastriano linked himself closely to these currents of activism in his home state, speaking at the groups’ demonstrations and events. A video he livestreamed from the first significant anti-lockdown rally on the steps of the State Capitol in Harrisburg in April 2020, armed with a selfie stick, eventually racked up more than 850,000 views.

After the presidential election was called for Mr. Biden on Nov. 7, 2020, Mr. Mastriano was greeted as a star at the first “Stop the Steal” rally at the capitol in Harrisburg that afternoon. He became one of the most prominent faces of the movement to overturn the election in Pennsylvania, working with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to publicize widely debunked claims regarding election malfeasance and to send a slate of “alternate” electors to Washington, on the spurious legal theory that they could be used to overturn the outcome. (He would later be present at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, though there is no evidence that he entered the building.)

When Republican colleagues in the State Senate criticized those schemes and Mr. Mastriano by name, he pointed to the size of his online army.

“I have more followers on Facebook alone than all 49 other senators combined,” Mr. Mastriano told Steve Turley, a local right-wing podcast host, in an interview. “That any colleague or fellow Republican would think that it would be a good idea to throw me under the bus with that kind of reach — I mean, they’re just not very smart people.”

Mr. Mastriano was eventually removed from the chairmanship of a State Senate committee overseeing an investigation he had championed into the state’s election results, and he was later expelled from the Senate’s Republican caucus — episodes that burnished his credentials with supporters suspicious of the state’s GOP establishment . His campaign for governor, which he formally announced this January, has drawn on not only the base he has cultivated since 2020 but also on the right-wing grass-roots groups with whom he has made common cause on Covid and the 2020 election.

“That whole movement is rock-solid behind him,” said Sam Faddis, the leader of UnitePA, a self-described Patriot group based in Susquehanna County, Pa.

When UnitePA hosted a rally on Aug. 27 in a horse arena in Bloomsburg, bringing together a coalition of groups in the state dedicated to overhauling the election system they insist was used to steal the election from Mr. Trump, many of the activists who spoke offered praise for Mr. Mastriano and his candidacy. From the stage, Tabitha Valleau, the leader of the organization FreePA, gave detailed instructions for how to volunteer for Mr. Mastriano’s campaign.

The crowd of about 500, most of whom stayed for all of the nearly six-hour rally, was full of Mastriano supporters, including Ms. Fisher. “He helped us through a bad time,” she said. “He stuck with his people.”

Charlie Gerow, a veteran Pennsylvania Republican operative and candidate for governor who lost to Mr. Mastriano in May, said this loyally following what Mr. Mastriano’s greatest strength. “He’s leveraged that audience on every mission he’s undertaken,” he said.

But with recent polls showing Mr. Mastriano lagging between 3 and 10 points behind Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Gerow is among the strategists doubting his primary strategy will translate to a general electorate.

“I think it’s going to be important for him to run a more traditional campaign, dealing with the regular media even when it’s unpalatable and unfriendly,” Mr. Gerow said.

Mr. Mastriano has also drawn criticism for his efforts to expand his social-media reach beyond Facebook and Twitter into newer, fringier spaces on the right.

In July, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters noted that Mr. Mastriano, according to his campaign filings, had paid $5,000 to the far-right social media platform Gab, which gained notoriety in 2018 after the suspect charged in the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 people were killed, used the platform to detail his racist and anti-Semitic views and plans for the shooting. Gab’s chief executive, Andrew Torba, who lives in Pennsylvania, has made anti-Semitic statements himself and appeared at a white nationalist conference this spring.

Mr. Torba and Mr. Mastriano had praised each other in a podcast interview in May, after which Mr. Mastriano had spoken hopefully of Gab’s audience. “Apparently about a million of them are in Pennsylvania,” he said on his own livestream, “so we’ll have some good reach.”

Mr. Torba, who did not respond to emailed requests for comment, has continued to champion Mr. Mastriano, describing the Pennsylvania governor’s race as “the most important election of the 2022 midterms, because Doug is an outspoken Christian,” in a video he posted in late July. He added, “We’re going to take this country back for the glory of God.”

But after initially standing his ground, Mr. Mastriano finally bowed to sustained criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike and closed his personal account with Gab early this month, issuing a brief statement denouncing anti-Semitism.

This month Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, spent $1 million on TV ads highlighting Mastriano’s connections to Gab. “We cannot allow this to become normalized — Doug Mastriano is dangerous and extreme, and we must defeat him in November,” said Will Simons, a spokesman for the Shapiro campaign.

The push reflected a view that one of Mr. Mastriano’s core vulnerabilities lay in his vast online footprint, with its hours of freewheeling conversation in spaces frequented by far-right voices.

Still, some Democrats who watched Mr. Mastriano’s rapid rise at close range have cautioned against counting him out. “Mastriano’s been underestimated by his own party,” said Brit Crampsie, a political consultant who was until recently the State Senate Democrats’ spokeswoman. “I fear him being underestimated by the Democrats. I wouldn’t rule him out.”

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In New Hampshire, Republicans Weigh One other Onerous Proper Candidate

In New Hampshire, Republicans Weigh Another Hard Right Candidate

MANCHESTER, NH — He has said the state’s popular Republican governor is “a Chinese Communist sympathizer,” called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment allowing direct popular election of senators and raised the possibility of abolishing the FBI

The man behind these statements is Don Bolduc, a retired Army general, who leads the Republican field in what should be a competitive race for the New Hampshire Senate seat held by Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat.

In one primary after another this year, Republican voters have chosen hard-right candidates who party officials had warned would have trouble winning in November, and Mr. Bolduc could be on course to be the next. Like him, many embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s election denial. “I signed a letter with 120 other generals and admirals saying that Donald Trump won the election and, damn it, I stand by” it, Mr. Bolduc said at a recent debate.

The suddenly fraught midterm landscape for Republicans caused Senator Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader, to complain recently that poor “candidate quality” could cost his party a majority in the Senate that had long seemed the likely result.

In the final competitive primary of the year, scheduled for Sept. 13, Republican officials in New Hampshire are echoing Mr. McConnell. They warn that grass-roots voters are poised to elect another problematic nominee, Mr. Bolduc, and jeopardize a winnable race against a vulnerable Democrat.

This month, Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican moderate broadly popular in his purple state, said on New Hampshire talk radio that Mr. Bolduc was a “conspiracy theorist-type candidate.” He added: “If he were the nominee, I have no doubt we would have a much harder time trying to win that seat back.”

Mr. Bolduc, who served 10 tours in Afghanistan, held a formidable lead with Republican voters in a poll this month, in large part because he has barnstormed continuously for more than two years, while his rivals joined the race later. The contest was effectively frozen for a year until November, when Mr. Sununu, a top recruiting target of national Republicans, declined to run for Senate, deciding instead to seek a fourth term as governor.

Mr. Bolduc has built a following by offering red meat to the conservative base. But New Hampshire is a politically divided state where Republicans who win statewide traditionally appeal to independents and conservative Democrats. Its four-member congressional delegation is entirely Democratic; State government is firmly in the hands of Republicans.

“We’re not a red state, we’re not a blue state, we’re a weird state,” said Greg Moore, a Republican operative not involved in the Senate primary. He was skeptical that Mr. Bolduc, after targeting only his party’s base, would be able to attract a broader coalition in November.

In a debate on Wednesday outside Manchester, Mr Bolduc denounced the provision in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act authorizing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, saying, “Anything the government’s involved in, it’s not good, it doesn’t work.”

A rival of Mr. Bolduc’s, Kevin Smith, told him at an earlier debate, “You know, Don, your MO seems to be ‘Fire, ready, aim.'”

Mr. Bolduc, 60, is a compact figure who still sports a military haircut close-cropped on the sides. In the minutes before the debate went live on Newsmax, while other candidates studied their notes, he spontaneously led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance and in singing “God Bless America.”

A poll this month by the New Hampshire Institute of Politics showed Mr. Bolduc with support from 32 percent of registered Republican voters, well ahead of his closest rival, Chuck Morse, the State Senate president, who was at 16 percent. Others in the poll, including Mr Smith, a former Londonderry town manager, were in the low single digits.

All of the candidates have struggled to raise money and draw voters’ attention — 39 percent of Republicans said in the poll they were still undecided.

That gives Mr. Bolduc’s rivals hope, although time is running out: The primary is just one week after Labor Day, when most voters traditionally tune in.

Ms. Hassan has long been seen as vulnerable. Just 39 percent of voters in the Institute of Politics survey said they deserved to be re-elected.

At the debate outside Manchester, the candidates bashed Ms. Hassan, a former governor, linking her to rising gas prices and expected high prices for home heating oil this winter.

Ms Hassan, in response, defended voting for Democrats’ climate and prescription drug law. “While I’m fighting to get results for New Hampshire, my opponents are out on the campaign trail defending Big Oil and Big Pharma and bragging about their records of opposing a woman’s fundamental freedom,” she said in a statement.

Mr. Trump has made no endorsement in New Hampshire, and he may not make one at all. He snubbed Mr. Bolduc in a 2020 Senate primary, endorsing a rival. Neither Mr Bolduc nor Mr Morse have spoken to Mr Trump lately about the race, according to their campaigns.

Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s first 2016 campaign manager, who is a New Hampshire resident, has publicly urged his former boss not to back Mr. Bolduc, calling him “not a serious candidate.”

Mr. Bolduc declined to comment for this article. Rick Wiley, a senior adviser to Mr. Bolduc, said the criticisms of him — that he is unelectable, that independents won’t vote for him — were the same ones thrown at Mr. Trump in 2016.

“The electorate wants an outsider, that is resoundingly clear,” Mr. Wiley said. Shrugging off Mr. Sununu’s criticisms, he added: “I expect we’re probably going to be sharing a ballot with the governor. There will be unity on the ticket in November and Republicans up and down the ballot will be successful because of the policies Biden and Maggie Hassan have put in place.”

The biggest primary threat to Mr. Bolduc, and the preferred candidate of much of what remains of the GOP establishment, is Mr. Morse, a low-key, self-made tree nursery owner with a strong Granite State accent, who appears in his TV ads riding a tractor at dawn at his operation in southern New Hampshire.

Despite his prominent role in state government, a poll in April found that 54 percent of Republican voters didn’t know enough about Mr. Morse to have an opinion. Just 2 percent named him as their choice for the nomination. His rise to 16 percent in the latest public poll this month is seen by supporters as a sign of momentum.

Dave Carney, a strategist for Mr Morse, agreed that Mr Bolduc was the current race leader. But he said that Mr. Morse’s superior fund-raising, which allowed him to buy TV ads, was raising his profile, and predicted that he would continue to gain on Mr. Bolduc.

“Sixty-one percent of the voters are willing to replace Hassan,” Mr. Carney said, referring to the share of voters in the Institute of Politics survey who said that it was time to give someone new a chance to be senator or that they were undecided. “We need to nominate somebody who can do that.” He called Mr. Bolduc a “flawed candidate,” adding, “I don’t think there’s any way in hell he could get conservative Democrats or the vast majority of independents to go his way.”

Mr. Morse had $975,000 in his campaign account as of July, compared with Mr. Bolduc, who had just $65,000. Ms. Hassan’s $7.3 million on hand has allowed her to aggressively spend on TV ads all year, including one promoting her work for people with disabilities that features her son who was born with cerebral palsy.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which this month slashed its planned spending in three battleground states — Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin — has kept a commitment to spend $6.5 million on the New Hampshire race after the primary, reflecting its belief in Ms. Hassan’s vulnerability.

With the Senate divided 50-50 between the parties and Democrats optimistic about flipping at least one seat, in Pennsylvania, Republicans need to take down two or more Democratic incumbents to win a majority. Their top targets are in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire.

At the recent debate, the audience was mostly committed supporters of each of the candidates, with few appearing undecided. Bolduc fans dismissed out of hand Mr. Sununu’s view that their candidate would have a hard time in November.

“Sununu is a globalist clown and is not a Republican,” said Kelley Potenza, a candidate for the state House of Representatives who is from Rochester. “He’s afraid because Don Bolduc is the only candidate that’s not going to be controlled.”

In the audience before the lights went down, Bill Bowen, a recent transplant from California and a Morse supporter, said Mr. Bolduc had reached his ceiling in the polls. He said supporters of Mr Bolduc who ignored doubts about his electability in November were misguided.

“That’s all that matters,” he said, adding, “This is the 51st vote,” referring to a potential Republican majority in the Senate.

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Republicans Flip-Flop on Assist for Afghanistan Withdrawal

Republicans Flip-Flop on Support for Afghanistan Withdrawal

WASHINGTON – Early last year, California MP Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader, praised former President Donald J. Trump’s deal to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan as a “positive move.” As Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo helped negotiate this deal with the Taliban. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley last November urged the withdrawal as soon as possible.

Now include the three to dozen prominent Republicans who sharply reversed themselves after President Biden enforced the withdrawal – attacking Mr Biden despite keeping a promise Mr Trump made and carrying out a policy they lead to had given their full support.

The collective U-turn reflects the Republicans’ eagerness to attack Mr Biden and ensure he pays a political price for ending the war. With Mr Trump reversing himself as the withdrawal turned chaotic and fatal in its endgame, it also offers new evidence of how allegiance to the former president has come to overcoming concerns about political flip-flops or political hypocrisy.

“You can’t go out in May and say, ‘This war was worthless and we have to bring the troops home,’ and now beat Biden for it,” said Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who went broke with Mr. Trump after the Capitol – January 6 uprising and has long advocated maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan. “It’s no longer a shame.”

Mr Trump took office after revising his party’s longstanding position on foreign intervention and calling for the immediate removal of American troops stationed abroad. In February 2020, he announced a peace treaty negotiated by Pompeo with the Taliban, which provided for the end of the American presence by May 1, 2021.

After his defeat last November, Republicans clung to Trump’s first line of America. They urged Mr. Biden to abide by the May 1 deadline and publicly railed when Mr. Biden extended the date for a withdrawal to August 31, Arizona complained at the time.

But as the last few days of Americans in Afghanistan turned into a frantic race for more than 125,000 people – in which 13 soldiers were killed in a bombing raid outside Kabul airport – Republican lawmakers and candidates who voted Trump’s deal with the Taliban changed theirs Mood abrupt. They devastated Mr Biden for negotiating with the Taliban and condemned his declared zeal to dismantle the American presence in Afghanistan before 9/11, calling it a sign of weakness.

“I would not allow the Taliban to dictate the date of the Americans’ departure,” McCarthy said at a press conference on Friday. “But this president did, and I don’t think any other president, Republican or Democrat, except Joe Biden.”

Once defined by its falconry addiction, the GOP has been part of camps of traditional interventionists such as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who never fully embraced Mr. Trump’s inward foreign policy, and supporters of Mr. Trump’s America, since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016 – first approach that shared his impatience to rescue the nation from intractable conflicts abroad.

Last year, Mr McConnell, the majority leader at the time, went before the Senate to condemn Mr Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, warning that an early exit would be a “reminder of the humiliating American departure from Saigon.”

But beating Mr. Biden unites them all.

Republican calls for the resignation, impeachment or impeachment of Mr Biden under the 25th Amendment are also a reminder of how much more polarized the country’s politics have become since the start of the US war in Afghanistan immediately after September 11th Attacks when Democrats and Republicans alike backed President George W. Bush.

No Republican has turned against the Afghanistan withdrawal faster than Trump himself, who after years of returning to isolationism has spent the last two weeks attacking Biden for carrying out the exact withdrawal he demanded and then negotiated.

On April 18, Trump warned Mr. Biden to speed up the withdrawal schedule: “I planned to resign on May 1st,” he said. “We should stick to this schedule as closely as possible.”

However, when things seemed to get mixed up, the former president began speaking out against the withdrawal.

On August 24, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Biden of forcing the military to “run from the battlefield” and left “thousands” of Americans as “hostages”. And he suggested that Mr. Biden should have kept at least some troop presence in Afghanistan.

“We had Afghanistan and Kabul perfectly under control with only 2,500 soldiers and he destroyed it when they were told to flee!” Mr Trump said.

Other Republicans fell behind Mr Trump in the attack on the president: Mr McCarthy wrote a letter this week calling on lawmakers to argue that Mr Biden was solely responsible for “the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation.”

Updated

Sept. 1, 2021, 8:56 p.m. ET

However, their efforts have been hampered by Mr Trump’s rhetorical reversal, leaving Republicans struggling to articulate a view that contradicts neither his previous support for leaving Afghanistan nor his current stance on criticizing the withdrawal.

The results have made it difficult to see exactly what Mr Trump and his supporters are now actually believing.

Last week McCarthy claimed the United States shouldn’t keep troops in Afghanistan but then suggested keeping Bagram Air Base. When asked whether Trump had wrongly negotiated with the Taliban, McCarthy instead replied that the chaos of the withdrawal was under the supervision of Mr Biden, not Mr Trump’s.

Urged again on Tuesday to say whether the United States should maintain a military base in Afghanistan, McCarthy again disagreed. “The priority right now is what is the plan to get people home?” He said.

Understanding the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan

Map 1 of 6

Who are the Taliban? The Taliban emerged in 1994 amid the unrest following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including flogging, amputation and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here is more about their genesis and track record as rulers.

Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who for years have been on the run, in hiding, in prison and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to rule, including whether they will be as tolerant as they say they are. A spokesman told the Times that the group wanted to forget their past but had some restrictions.

To try to differentiate their support for the concept of withdrawal from their criticism of Mr Biden’s handling of the actual withdrawal, some Republicans – including Mr Pompeo, the former Secretary of State – claim that Mr Trump would have been tougher and not have tolerated the advance of the Taliban on Kabul. They suggest he stopped the withdrawal and said the Taliban had violated the terms of the peace agreement.

But the terms negotiated by the Trump administration were largely vague, and nothing in the deal required that the Taliban cease military campaigns, not capture Kabul, or agree to a power-sharing deal with the Afghan government.

The Republicans have yet to reveal any specific terms that they believe the Taliban violated. And those who praised Mr Trump’s plan but attacked Mr Biden’s withdrawal have made few substantive suggestions as to what the president should have done differently.

“Last year there was a plan that was handed over to the Biden administration that I supported and that would have worked,” Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, told a press conference Tuesday held by the far-right House Freedom Caucus was held.

But he made no reference to the blueprint he said had disregarded Mr. Biden.

Some of the loudest criticism of Mr Biden came from lawmakers who urged him to speed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan on the grounds that there would never be a good time to leave.

Missouri Senator Mr. Hawley wrote in November that “the time has come to end the war in Afghanistan” and urged Mr. Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense to withdraw troops “as soon as possible.” In April he publicly complained about Mr. Biden’s extension of the withdrawal period. But after Thursday’s bombing, Mr Hawley called for Mr Biden’s resignation, arguing that the chaotic retreat was not inevitable, but rather the product of Mr Biden’s failed leadership.

“We must reject the lie put forward by a useless president that this is the only option for withdrawal,” said Hawley.

Those with smaller megaphones also showed flexibility.

Wisconsin Rep. Glenn Grothman was a cheerleader for Mr Trump’s withdrawal plans. As the senior Republican on the House Oversight Committee’s National Security Subcommittee, he praised the “Taliban peace treaty” for the months that followed, during which no Americans were killed in Afghanistan. Again and again he praised Mr. Trump for getting the troops off the ground.

However, when chaos erupted in Kabul, Mr. Grothman became a vocal critic of the withdrawal. “It doesn’t surprise me,” that the Afghan government fell quickly to the Taliban, he told WFDL, a local radio station in his district. He argued that US troops should have stayed.

“I don’t see how you can go because what will happen if you don’t get people out in the face of the Taliban?” Mr. Grothman told the radio station. “Are they going to kill people?”

In an interview, Mr Grothman argued that Mr Trump looked strong in negotiating the peace deal with the Taliban, while Mr Biden’s failure to prevent last week’s violence made him look weak.

He said he did not remember praising Trump’s agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan. Still, he added, “We didn’t know how the deal would turn out.”

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J.D. Vance Transformed to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Purchase It?

J.D. Vance Converted to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Buy It?

Before he was a celebrity supporter of Donald J. Trump’s, J.D. Vance was one of his most celebrated critics.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s searing 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky, offered perplexed and alarmed Democrats, and not a few Republicans, an explanation for Mr. Trump’s appeal to an angry core of white, working-class Americans.

A conservative author, venture capitalist and graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Vance presented himself as a teller of hard truths, writing personally about the toll of drugs and violence, a bias against education, and a dependence on welfare. Rather than blaming outsiders, he scolded his community. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” he wrote.

In interviews, he called Mr. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue leading “the white working class to a very dark place.”

Today, as Mr. Vance pursues the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat in Ohio, he has performed a whiplash-inducing conversion to Trumpism, in which he no longer emphasizes that white working-class problems are self-inflicted. Adopting the grievances of the former president, he denounces “elites and the ruling class” for “robbing us blind,” as he said in his announcement speech last month.

Now championing the hard-right messages that animate the Make America Great Again base, Mr. Vance has deleted inconvenient tweets, renounced his old views about immigration and trade, and gone from a regular guest on CNN to a regular on “Tucker Carlson,” echoing the Fox News host’s racially charged insults of immigrants as “dirty.”

When working-class Americans “dare to complain about the southern border,” Mr. Vance said on Mr. Carlson’s show last month, “or about jobs getting shipped overseas, what do they get called? They get called racists, they get called bigots, xenophobes or idiots.”

“I love that,” Mr. Carlson replied.

Whether Ohio Republicans do, too, is the big question for Mr. Vance — who will crucially benefit from a $10 million super PAC funded by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who once employed Mr. Vance.

His G.O.P. rivals in the state have had a field day. Josh Mandel, a former treasurer of Ohio who is the early front-runner in the five-candidate field, called Mr. Vance a “RINO just like Romney and Liz Cheney,” referring to the Utah senator and the Wyoming congresswoman who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Capitol riot.

Liberals and some conservatives have also dismissed Mr. Vance for cynical opportunism. One Never Trump conservative, Tom Nichols, wrote of “the moral collapse of J.D. Vance” in The Atlantic.

Mr. Vance’s adherence to some of the most extreme views of Trump supporters shows how the former president, despite losing the White House and Congress for his party, retains the support of fanatically loyal voters, who echo his resentments and disinformation and force most Republican candidates to bend a knee.

Yet Mr. Vance’s flip-flops over policy and over Mr. Trump’s demagogic style may not prove disqualifying with Ohio primary-goers when they vote next spring, according to strategists. Although Mr. Vance’s U-turn might strike some as too convenient in an era when voters quickly sniff out inauthenticity, it is also true that his political arc resembles that of many Republicans who voted grudgingly for Mr. Trump in 2016, but after four years cemented their support. (Mr. Vance has said he voted third-party in 2016.)

“Will he be able to overcome his past comments on Trump and square that with the G.O.P. base? Maybe,” said Michael Hartley, a Republican strategist in Ohio who is not working for any of the Senate candidates. He added that Mr. Vance had the lived experience to address policies that lift working-class people “in a way that others cannot.”

Mr. Vance, 37, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Cincinnati, has carefully seeded the ground for his candidacy, appearing frequently on podcasts and news shows with far-right influencers of the Trump base, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.

In interviews, speeches and on social media, he has become a culture warrior. He threatened to make Big Tech “pay” for putting conservatives “in Facebook jail,” and he mocked Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the four-star general said he sought to understand “white rage” in the wake of the assault on the Capitol.

To Mr. Vance, it is a “big lie” that Jan. 6 was “this big insurrection,” he told Mr. Bannon.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance credited members of the elite with fewer divorces, longer lives and higher church attendance, adding ruefully, “These people are beating us at our own damned game.” But that was not his message at a recent conservative gathering where he blamed a breakdown in the American family on “the childless left.’’

Mr. Carlson, Fox’s highest-rated host, all but endorsed Mr. Vance during the candidate’s appearance last month. Mr. Vance also has the backing of Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, a rising conservative leader in the House. And Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who has ties to the Trump family, has endorsed the “Hillbilly Elegy” author.

“He has been consistent in being able to diagnose the anxieties of Trump’s base economically almost better than anyone else,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview. Although Mr. Vance once mocked Mr. Trump’s position that a southwest border wall would bring back “all of these steel mill jobs,” today he supports the “America First” agenda that reducing legal immigration will increase blue-collar wages, a link that many economists dispute. “Why let in a large number of desperate newcomers when many of our biggest cities look like this?” Mr. Vance said recently on Twitter over a picture of a homeless encampment in Washington.

Mr. Trump has met with all five major declared Ohio Republican Senate candidates — who are seeking the open seat of the retiring Senator Rob Portman — but has not signaled a preference. He is not likely to do so any time soon, according to a person briefed on his thinking. Among Democrats, Representative Tim Ryan has the field nearly to himself. Ohio, once a battleground state, has trended rightward in the Trump era.

Mr. Vance declined to be interviewed for this article. But an examination of his embrace of Trumpism through the ample record of his writings and remarks, as well as interviews with people close to him, show that it happened the way a Hemingway character famously described how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

The year 2018 appears to have been the turning point. That January, Mr. Vance considered a Senate bid in Ohio but ultimately decided not to run, citing family matters, after news reports brought to light his earlier hostile criticism of Mr. Trump.

Later that year, the furious opposition on the left to the Supreme Court nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh was a milestone in Mr. Vance’s political shift. Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha, whom he met in law school, had clerked for Justice Kavanaugh. “Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” Mr. Vance told a conservative group in 2019.

Although Mr. Vance has said that he came to agree with Mr. Trump’s policies on China and immigration, the most important factor in his conversion, he told Mr. Gorka in March, was a “gut” identification with Mr. Trump’s rhetorical war on America’s “elites.”

“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” Mr. Vance said.

(His adoption of Trump-style populism did not inhibit him from flying to the Hamptons last month for a fund-raiser with Republican captains of industry, as reported by Politico.)

Finally, the influence of Mr. Thiel, a founder of PayPal, whom Mr. Vance has called a “mentor to me,” appears to have been decisive in Mr. Vance’s embrace of Trumpism.

An outspoken and somewhat rare conservative in Silicon Valley, Mr. Thiel addressed the 2016 Republican convention and advised the Trump transition team. He is a fierce critic of China and global trade and a supporter of restrictionist immigration policies, and Mr. Vance has moved toward all those positions. Mr. Thiel, who did not respond to an interview request, is also paying for a super PAC for another protege, Blake Masters, in a Senate race in Arizona.

In March, Mr. Thiel brokered a meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s resort in Florida. Mr. Vance made amends for his earlier criticism and asked Mr. Trump to keep an open mind, according to people briefed on the meeting. If Mr. Trump were going to attack Mr. Vance — as he has other Republican 2022 candidates around the country whom he perceives to be disloyal — he probably would have done so already.

For now, the former president’s appetite for revenge in Ohio seems to be sated by attacking Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican who voted for impeachment in January. Mr. Trump held a rally in the state in June to back a primary challenger to Mr. Gonzalez. Mr. Vance was on hand, sharing a photo on Twitter to show his support for Mr. Trump.

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Biden, Republicans and the Pandemic Blame Recreation

Biden, Republicans and the Pandemic Blame Game

President Biden finds himself in a difficult position: he advocated the ideas that he had the team to deal with a pandemic and that his five-decade long career as a deal maker in Washington was just the thing to reverse political polarization of the land to overcome.

That doesn’t happen, not even a little.

Not only are Republicans resisting Mr Biden’s push to end the pandemic, some of them are actively obstructing it. The Republican governors have slowly pushed ahead with vaccination efforts and lifted the mask requirement early. In Washington, GOP leaders like Steve Scalise, the second-tier Republican in the House of Representatives – who was vaccinated only about two weeks ago – mocked public health guidelines that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors as “government control”.

There is little Mr. Biden can do. Nearly a year and a half of living in a pandemic has shown exactly who will and will not adhere to public health guidelines.

It was only last week in my Washington neighborhood, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the city and who voted 92 percent for Mr. Biden, started masking themselves again in supermarkets and even outdoors in parks.

In places like Arkansas, hospitals are overloaded with Covid patients and vaccination rates remain persistently low. The anti-mask sentiment is so strong that the General Assembly of the state has passed a law banning any mandate that requires it. On Thursday, Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, announced a special session of lawmakers to amend the anti-mandate bill he signed in April to allow schools to require masks for students who are too young to receive a vaccine. Good luck with that, replied his Republicans in the legislature.

That leaves the President at a loss. With the Delta variant proving to be far more contagious and dangerous than previous iterations of the virus, the people he needs most to hear his message about vaccines and masks are the rarest.

Six years of Donald J. Trump largely hiding all other voices in his party left Republicans without a credible messenger to push vaccines forward, even if they wanted to. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, may use his campaign money to advertise vaccinations in his home, Kentucky, but he is barely a popular figure within the party and is viewed by its grassroots as just another member of the Washington establishment.

There are certainly other communities of vaccine resistance out there, including the demographics of people who have been mistreated by the federal government in the past (and also a small but noisy minority of professional athletes and Olympians), but it is Republicans and Republican-led states that are considered biggest hurdle in American vaccination efforts.

Without the ability to convince the vaccination hesitation and the party he had pledged to work with, Mr Biden and the federal government were left with a step that he had been resisting for weeks: making the lives of the unvaccinated more difficult to try to force them to change their minds.

That brings us to the President’s press conference on Thursday. Mr Biden said that for the first time all federal employees would be required to provide evidence that they have been vaccinated (or wear a mask at work), undergo weekly tests, and maintain social distance.

He stopped short of a vaccine mandate, saying such a requirement was a choice for local governments, school districts and businesses. He said if things get worse and those who oppose vaccines are denied access to workplaces and public spaces, maybe things would get better.

“I suspect if we don’t make further progress, a lot of companies and lots of companies will need proof in order to attend,” said Mr Biden.

This maneuver – essentially a shift of responsibility away from the federal government – is in line with the way Mr Biden often tries to project a tone of hope while airbrushing the reality of a highly divided nation.

Updated

July 30, 2021, 7:36 p.m. ET

The disinformation market in America is bigger than ever with Mr Trump despite starting the program that resulted in the full vaccination of 164 million Americans, leading to charges of discrediting the same program during the Biden administration.

But it wasn’t Mr Trump and the Republicans running to end the pandemic last year – it was Mr Biden and the Democrats who successfully turned the election into a referendum on how to tackle a unique global public health crisis.

Now, just weeks after celebrating the great strides made against the pandemic, Mr Biden is facing a new wave. And it probably won’t be long before Republicans, who did everything in their power to resist counter-measures, blame the president for failing to get the country out of the crisis he promised to resolve .

“SO EXCITED. SO PROUD,” Marathon County board member Ka Lo wrote on Thursday in a series of cheering text messages, “IT’S SOOOOOO GOOD !!!”

It remains to be seen how much Ms. Lee’s triumph will give a boost to local efforts to gain recognition for the Hmong in Wisconsin. Both the district marathon and the city council of Wausau have rejected the resolutions “community for all”, which led to the spreading of “community for all” labels and a further attempt to pass the measure in the district executive committee.

The next vote of the executive committee of the district board is planned for August 12th.

Sometimes even presidents get a little dirt on their chins.

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Key Republicans Say They’re Able to Take Up an Infrastructure Deal

Key Republicans Say They're Ready to Take Up an Infrastructure Deal

The new agreement would save $50 billion by delaying a Medicare rebate rule passed under President Donald J. Trump and raise nearly $30 billion by applying tax information reporting requirements to cryptocurrency. It also proposes to recoup $50 billion in fraudulently paid unemployment benefits during the pandemic.

Republicans blocked the Senate from moving ahead with the plan last week, saying that too many issues remained unresolved. Mr. Portman’s comments and those of other Republicans in the group, who spoke after meeting with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, suggested that they would now allow it to move forward.

It remained unclear whether enough Republicans would join the five core negotiators in advancing the measure, although a handful of G.O.P. senators outside the group signaled that they would be open to doing so.

“It’s not perfect but it’s, I think, in a good place,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who said he would vote in favor of taking it up.

Some Senate Democrats, including at least one key committee chairman, said they were still reviewing the plan before deciding whether to support it.

But Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he believed “we have the votes.”

If they do, Democrats would still have to maneuver the bill through the evenly divided Senate over a Republican filibuster, which will require the support of all 50 Democrats and independents and at least 10 Republicans. That could take at least a week, particularly if Republicans opposed to it opt to slow the process. Should the measure clear the Senate, it will also have to pass the House, where some liberal Democrats have balked at the emerging details.

The five Republicans who have spearheaded the deal with Democrats — Mr. Portman and Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mitt Romney of Utah — urged their colleagues to support a measure they said would provide badly needed funding for infrastructure projects across the country.

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Home Republicans Use Vaccine Press Convention to Bash Democrats

House Republicans Use Vaccine Press Conference to Bash Democrats

House Republican leaders and doctors rallied for a news conference Thursday morning allegedly to urge Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine amid rising infections in the United States, but they used the event to attack Democrats, from whom they are said they had misrepresented the origins of the virus with no evidence.

The appearance of second- and third-tier Republicans in the House of Representatives, Reps Steve Scalise from Louisiana and Elise Stefanik from New York, along with a dozen doctors suggested that a resurgence in the spread of the virus fueled by the more contagious Delta variant was not had taken place called on the party to change its tone. Instead, Mr. Scalise and Ms. Stefanik beat up the Democrats for what they called a cover-up on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

Only at the urging of reporters did the leaders mention vaccinations.

“I would encourage people to get the vaccine,” said Mr. Scalise towards the end of the event, when his position pushed him to do so. “I have great confidence in that. I got it myself. “

He and other Republicans spent most of Thursday discussing unsubstantiated claims that the Chinese released a virulent, man-made virus in the world, accusing Democrats of ignoring it.

The event in front of the Capitol was planned as a “press conference to discuss the need for vaccinations for individuals, uncover the origins of the pandemic and keep schools and businesses open”. Yet the Republicans who attended, many of whom represent constituencies that have refused to get the vaccine, seem unable to bring themselves to stress the importance of the move.

Even the doctors who emphasized vaccinations, Rep. Andy Harris from Maryland and Senator Roger Marshall from Kansas, quieter and narrowed their statements.

“If you are at risk you should get this vaccine,” said Dr. Harris, adding, “We urge all Americans to speak to their doctors about the risks of Covid, speak to their doctors about the benefits of vaccination, and” then make a decision that is right for them. “

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that everyone aged 12 and over – not just those at higher risk – get the coronavirus vaccine as soon as possible.

North Carolina Republican Rep. Greg Murphy countered, “This vaccine is a medicine and, like any other medicine, there are side effects and this is a personal choice.”

The emphasis on the so-called lab leak theory was surprising given the surge in infections that were concentrated in rural, heavily Republican regions of the country.

Nationally, the average of new coronavirus infections in 14 days is up 171 percent to more than 41,300 a day on Wednesday, and the death toll – a delayed figure – is up 42 percent from two weeks ago to nearly 250, so a New York time database. Still, new cases, hospital admissions and deaths remain at a fraction of their previous devastating highs.

Vaccines remain effective against the worst effects of Covid-19, including the Delta variant. Experts say that breakthrough infections are still relatively rare in vaccinated people. The delta variant accounts for an estimated 83 percent of new cases in the United States, the CDC said earlier this week.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reported in late June that 86 percent of Democrats had at least one shot, compared to 52 percent of Republicans. An April analysis by the Times found that the country’s least vaccinated counties had one thing in common: they voted for Mr Trump.

But dr. Murphy said the notion that conservatives are reluctant to get the vaccine “isn’t just insincere; It is a lie.”

As for the theory of the laboratory leak, the Republicans successively presented the issue as practically done: Research in a virus laboratory in Wuhan, China, created the novel coronavirus through risky experiments to “gain functionality” and then released it into the world.

“Criminals have been convicted on less evidence than is currently the case, and more evidence is being revealed every day,” said Iowa representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

Recently, some scientists have urged the possibility of a laboratory leak to be taken seriously, along with the possibility that the coronavirus emerged naturally, most likely from an animal. But they are mainly testing the possibility that a naturally developed virus was present in the laboratory and escaped, not that the virus was created on purpose. Even some of the most vocal scientific proponents of a laboratory leak do not claim that there is definitive evidence as to the origin of the virus.

Instead of covering up the matter, President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence services in late May to investigate the origins of the coronavirus and report back in 90 days.

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Trump ally Jim Jordan amongst Republicans on Jan. 6 Capitol riot committee

Trump ally Jim Jordan among Republicans on Jan. 6 Capitol riot committee

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks during his weekly news conference at the U.S. Capitol on February 27, 2020 in Washington, DC.

Mark Wilson | Getty Images

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Monday picked five House Republicans to serve on the select committee that will investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. 

The California Republican named five out of the 13 members of the select House committee, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the final say over which lawmakers McCarthy can appoint. 

McCarthy’s picks include Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., who will serve as the ranking member of the panel. The other members include Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio., Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Illinois., Rep. Kelley Armstrong, R-N.D. and freshman Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas. 

The most well known of the five lawmakers is likely Jordan, who is a committed supporter of former President Donald Trump and is the founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers. In January, Jordan helped lead an unsuccessful effort to prevent the House of Representatives from impeaching Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.

McCarthy’s picks come just a day before the committee is set to hold its first hearing, which will feature witnesses from the U.S. Capitol Police Department and Metropolitan Police Department. It also comes days after McCarthy met with Trump at the former president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

In a piece published Monday, Trump is quoted as saying that he wanted the same thing the rioters wanted: to overturn President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

The committee hearings come more than six months after the violent insurrection in which supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol to disrupt the certification of Biden’s win. 

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The five Republicans picked by McCarthy are not the only GOP members of the panel. Earlier this month, Pelosi appointed Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. as one of her eight choices. 

Cheney was one of the two GOP representatives who had voted to create the committee last month. She was also one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January.

The decision to choose Cheney was notable, especially as McCarthy reportedly threatened to strip GOP representatives’ committee seats if they accepted an appointment to the panel from Pelosi, according to NBC news. 

Pelosi also appointed Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who will lead the panel. The other members include Democratic Reps. Pete Aguilar, Adam Schiff, and Zoe Lofgren of California, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Elaine Luria of Virginia and Stephanie Murphy of Florida. 

The formation of the panel has been a flashpoint of debate between Democrats and Republicans. 

The select committee passed in a mostly 222-190 party-line vote last month, after Senate Republicans blocked a previous bill that would have created an independent commission to investigate the insurrection.

Many GOP leaders asserted that the select committee would only duplicate existing efforts by the Justice Department and standing congressional committees to probe the attack on the Capitol.

The committee will investigate what caused the attack on the Capitol, which includes examining activities of law enforcement agencies and technological factors that may have prompted the event. It will also issue a report on its findings and how to prevent another attempt to disrupt the transfer of power.

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After Marathon Hearings, Texas Republicans Advance Voting Measure

After Marathon Hearings, Texas Republicans Advance Voting Measure

AUSTIN, Texas – The Texas Republicans moved the state electoral overhaul legislation closer to enactment on Sunday, putting aside fierce opposition from the Democrats to gain approval from key House and Senate committees after hearings over the marathon weekend.

The committee’s votes, held just days after a 30-day special session, stick to Governor Greg Abbott’s schedule for swift action against legislation he has identified as a priority for his administration. The Senate, which consists of 31 members, is expected to vote on its bill on Tuesday. The 150-strong house is likely to take up its own version of the measure this week.

The Democrats on both committees united against the bills and prepared for further fighting on the Senate and House floors. Beverly Powell, a Senator from the Fort Worth suburbs who voted against the bill on committee, said Senate Democrats were planning “many” changes during the plenary debate and could try to propose an alternative bill.

It took the Senate State Affairs Committee about 45 minutes Sunday afternoon to approve the bill, known as SB1, in a 6-to-3 party election after modifying the bill slightly with nine Republican amendments. “We feel good about the bill,” said Bryan Hughes, chairman of the Republican committee.

Previously, the committee met for nearly 15 hours, ending at around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, and heard testimony from more than 200 witnesses, many of whom were against the law.

The House Committee hearings lasted even longer, ending around 7:30 a.m. on Sunday with a vote on the adoption of the bill after nearly 24 hours of debate and public comment. All nine Republicans on the committee supported the bill, while the five Democrats voted against.

Mr. Abbott, a Republican, has said that passing a new electoral law is one of his top priorities. He called the legislature into the special session that began Thursday after the Democrats blocked the law in late May with an 11-hour walkout from the Capitol denying Republicans the quorum.

Hundreds of Texans flocked to the Capitol over the weekend to watch the committee hearings on Republican-sponsored voting laws, part of a national effort by the party to place new restrictions on state electoral systems. Republicans say the restructuring is necessary to improve voter integrity, but opposition Democratic forces are fighting what they call an unprecedented campaign to suppress the vote.

“This is the largest coordinated attack on democracy in our lifetime, and perhaps in the lives of this country,” said Beto O’Rourke, a former US representative and presidential candidate who took and was a leading role for the Democrats in voting on the subject for the hearing in the Capitol.

But Mr. Hughes, the Republican chairman, opened the hearing on Saturday by stating that the law was intended to “create a better electoral process that is safe and accessible”.

House and Senate Democrats have vowed to do whatever it takes to kill the legislature a second time, but their options are limited. They have indicated that they are ready to take another bold step, such as another strike or possibly the more extreme step of fleeing the state.

Studies consistently place Texas at the top of the list of states making it harder to register and vote, which in part explains why the Democrats view the stakes as so high.

Voting laws would, among other things, prohibit 24-hour voting and drive-through polling sites, increase criminal penalties for election workers who violate regulations, limit support for voters, and expand the authority and autonomy of partisan election observers.

But two provisions from the previous session that the Democrats had vehemently opposed were removed: a restriction on the Sunday election and a proposal that would have made it easier to reject an election.

For the weekend hearings, Democrats and opposition to the bill had gathered witnesses from across the state to testify.

State Senator Borris Miles, a Houston Democrat, said two busloads of Witnesses and a caravan of 20 cars had traveled from his district. Both Mr. Miles and Lina Hidalgo, the executive director of Harris County, the state’s most populous district, told reporters that the Houston area’s bills would take a heavy toll by introducing electoral innovations like the 24-hour vote that was tabled , would be reduced in the 2020 election.

“We’re under attack,” said Mr. Miles.

After starting the poll late by spending hours on a bail revision bill, the House committee worked all night to hear many of the nearly 300 witnesses who had pledged to testify. Some who waited in the committee room after sunrise began to joke about the time, thanking Trent Ashby, chairman of the Republican House of Representatives, for not stopping his testimony.

“Good morning, Mr. Chair, thank you for staying,” said Hector Mendez, who represented the Texas College Democrats group. “Good luck at 6:30 am,” said another witness.

Although the Democrats were looking for more time to digest the bill, Ashby said he wanted to move on to a committee vote because of the “compressed nature” of the special session. Before voting on sending the measure to plenary, the committee also rejected eight Democratic amendments, including on party-level votes.

Texas follows several other Republican-controlled battlefield states that have radically revised their electoral laws and introduced new voting restrictions this year. Since January, at least 22 bills have been signed in 14 states that make voting difficult.

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Some Republicans Discover Failure to Grapple With Local weather Change a ‘Political Legal responsibility’

Some Republicans Find Failure to Grapple With Climate Change a ‘Political Liability’

That same week, a group of young Republicans with signs saying “This is what an environmentalist sees” held an initial rally for “conservative” climate action in Miami.

On Capitol Hill, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy plans to set up a Republican task force on climate change, his staff confirmed. Mr. McCarthy declined an interview request.

And on Wednesday, Mr Curtis plans to announce the formation of the Conservative Climate Committee, which aims to educate his party about global warming and develop policies to counter what the committee calls “radical progressive climate proposals”. So far, 38 members of the Republican House of Representatives have joined, its employees said.

“I hope that any Republican member of this group, when asked about the climate in a community meeting, will be very comfortable talking about it,” said Curtis, adding, “I fear that too often Republicans simply have said “what you don’t like without adding ‘but here are our ideas’.”

These ideas include limited government, market-based policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions as formulated by new conservative think tanks. One of them is C3 Solutions, jointly run by a former advisor to the late Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, who called global warming “crap”. The organization also recently recruited an energy policy expert from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that until recently promoted vocal critics of climate change.

A package of bills presented by Mr. McCarthy on Earth Day advocated carbon capture, an emerging and expensive technology that captures and stores carbon emissions generated by power plants or factories before they are released into the atmosphere. It also encouraged tree planting and the expansion of nuclear power, a carbon-free energy source that many Republicans prefer to wind or solar power.

These measures would do little to reduce fossil fuel emissions, which raise average global temperatures and cause more extreme heat, drought and forest fires; stronger storms; and rapid extinction of plant and animal species. Republicans have not offered any specific emissions reduction targets.