Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is heading to Florida to underline the contrast between the Democratic and Republican agendas, blasting the GOP over proposals to undo prescription drug price caps and change Social Security and Medicare.

Biden’s trip Tuesday will include taxpayer-funded remarks in Hallandale Beach, where the White House said he would highlight Republicans’ “very different vision” for America. Also on Biden’s schedule are a fundraiser for Florida gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist and a rally for the state’s Democratic Party, including Senate candidate Val Demings.

The visit to Florida, where Democrats are trailing in both the Senate and the gubernatorial races, may appear counterintuitive just one week before polls close in the midterm elections when so many other races are tighter. Yet Biden allies say it exemplifies the president’s efforts to go where he can be helpful — Florida Democrats are hoping Biden can help boost base turnout — but also to drive a message that vulnerable Democrats can amplify nationwide.

Biden has avoided appearing with some of the Democrats’ most embattled candidates, including Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, but his aides insist he can be helpful from afar by talking about GOP policies they believe voters find objectionable. Biden is set to campaign in New Mexico on Thursday, California on Friday and Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Republicans are bullish on their prospects across Florida as voter registration trends and demographic shifts suggest the state will continue shifting to the right.

Democrats are particularly concerned about the trend in Miami-Dade County, home to 1.5 million Hispanics of voting age and a Democratic stronghold for the past 20 years, where the GOP made significant gains in the last presidential election. Republicans, such as Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez, are openly predicting that the region will turn red on Nov. 8.

Should Democrats lose Miami-Dade, it would virtually eliminate their path to victory in statewide contests, including presidential elections, moving forward.

Biden has seized on Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s February proposal to sunset all federal legislation after five years, which the president says would require Congress to reauthorize Medicare and Social Security, as emblematic of what he’s termed the “ultra-MAGA” agenda Democrats are running against.

Besides Scott’s plan, the White House said Biden would emphasize other GOP proposals that affect older Americans, including raising the retirement age and repealing Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers and the $2,000-a-year cap on out-of-pocket drug costs included in Democrats’ August health care and climate law.

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Associated Press National Political Writer Steve Peoples in New York contributed to this story.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Even before Republican legislators this summer made Indiana the first state to pass an abortion ban since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats started urging angry voters to take their revenge at the ballot box.

Indiana Democrats haven’t let up on that push in the final days of this year’s elections, although a limited number of competitive races on the Nov. 8 ballot for the currently Republican-dominated Legislature leave them with slim chances of being able to do much about abortion access that is also being debated during campaigns across the country.

Indiana Republicans, meanwhile, argue that voters are more worried about other issues such as inflation and crime — concerns widely believed to favor the GOP.

Democratic candidate Joey Mayer said the abortion ban has remained a top issue as she’s talked with voters in a northern Indianapolis suburban district where she’s challenging a four-term Republican House member who voted in favor of the ban when it passed in August.

“Many people that I have met through door-knocking that identify as a Libertarian or a lifelong Republican have said, ‘I’m done, I’m done. This is ridiculous overreach,’” Mayer said.

The state Supreme Court has allowed abortions to continue in Indiana while it considers a lawsuit from abortion clinic operators arguing that the ban violates the state constitution.

Mayer, a business consultant from Westfield, said the blocking of the abortion ban only slowed down talk about it among voters for a couple days.

“Then people were like, ‘This doesn’t fix the problem’ and it seemed like everybody started to get spun up again,” Mayer said.

Republicans go into the election with a 71-29 Indiana House majority and a 39-11 state Senate advantage, giving them supermajorities in both chambers that allow them to take action even without any Democrats present.

Republicans used those commanding margins to boost their legislative campaign funds to about $8 million for the year through the end of September — about four times what Democrats raised, according to state campaign reports. GOP lawmakers also controlled last year’s redistricting process that produced new legislative district maps that political analysts found locked in a partisan advantage for the next decade.

In order to pick up the five House seats needed to break the two-thirds supermajority, Democrats such as Mayer will have to capture Republican-held seats in suburban Indianapolis and hold onto GOP-targeted seats in cities such as Anderson and Jeffersonville.

Current Republican lawmakers largely held off numerous hard-right challengers in the May primary who argued that the Legislature had not been aggressive enough in attempting to ban abortion. The law that ultimately passed during a special session over the summer includes exceptions allowing abortions in cases of rape and incest and to protect the life and physical health of the mother — exceptions that were opposed by many anti-abortion activists as making the ban too lax.

Republican House Speaker Todd Huston said he believed his party would retain the supermajority as GOP candidates have focused on talking about issues such as the economy, education and crime.

“It’s hard to talk about how Democratic leadership is doing things positively across the country,” Huston said. “So, you have to pick one thing and they decided the one thing they wanted to pick. I think we’ve got a much broader and better story to tell.”

Many voters won’t have a chance of voting Democratic for the Legislature as the party doesn’t have candidate on the ballot for 33 of the 100 House seats and eight of the 25 Senate seats up for election. Republicans aren’t running in 14 House races while all Senate districts have GOP candidates.

The July 15 deadline for parties to fill ballot vacancies passed a couple weeks after the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling and before the Legislature’s special session began.

Republican state Sen. Vaneta Becker of Evansville, who joined Democrats in opposing the abortion ban, said many women have been angry about the law and Democrats missed an opportunity by not have more candidates. Time also hasn’t been on the side of those campaigning as abortion-rights supporters, said Becker, a 41-year member of the Legislature.

“I think if the election had been held in September they would have done a lot better,” Becker said. “I think now it’s kind of fatigued.”

Democratic candidate Katherine Rybak said issues such as rising utility costs were on her mind when she decided last year to challenge Republican Rep. Wendy McNamara in a GOP-leaning district that covers part of Evansville and extends into rural Posey County in southwestern Indiana.

The abortion issue was pushed to the forefront in that race as Huston picked McNamara to sponsor the abortion ban bill this summer and Cheryl Batteiger-Smith, a former Posey County Republican vice chair, joined the ballot as an independent calling for a tighter abortion ban without exceptions.

Rybak, a semi-retired lawyer, said she believed that victories by candidates such as herself who support abortion rights would send a strong message to the Legislature.

“If I can pull this out, it will show that there is a groundswell of support for women and women’s rights, and I think it may moderate the Republican Legislature,” Rybak said. “That’s all we can hope at this point. I think it does show that maybe a safe seat isn’t a safe seat.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — At least three Republicans running for the U.S. House attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and made their way toward the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection to stop Joe Biden’s election.

Countless other House Republican candidates are skeptics and deniers of the 2020 election lost by Donald Trump.

There are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, small-business owners and the most geographically, racially and culturally diverse group of Republicans seeking House seats in the modern era — many of whom, like Trump in 2016, are political newcomers who have never held elected office.

All told, the House GOP’s Class of 2022 midterm candidates includes a new generation of political outsiders, populists and some extremists who could bring an intensity to Capitol Hill. They would be an untested and potentially unruly majority if Republicans win the House in the Nov. 8 election.

“Trump inspires all of this,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist who was the long-serving spokesperson for former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

“There’s not a lot of shrinking violets,” Feehery said about the House Republican candidates. “Not a lot of people trying to be moderates. They’re warriors for their beliefs.”

Republicans are increasingly confident they will win control of the House, confronting Democrats on a widening map. The party in the White House traditionally suffers setbacks in the president’s midterm, and Democrats are weighed down by Biden’s lagging approval ratings and voter unease over inflation’s grip on the economy.

In many ways, Republicans are reassembling the Trump coalition with a well-funded but unusual alliance of candidates reflecting his supporters: charismatic Trump-styled media stars, “America First” military veterans, women, minorities and what’s left of the GOP’s traditional conservatives.

“This is going to be the most diverse class of Republicans — ever — in every sense of the word,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former congressman from Florida. “What it means for governing is a big question mark.”

To be sure, some of the House Republican candidates are familiar with elected office or more moderate conservatives who have come up through the ranks of public service — like the former mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, Allan Fung, the son of immigrants who is working to flip a seat opened by a Democratic retirement.

But the Republican class is likely to be defined by the Trump-styled newcomers.

Retired Navy SEAL Derrick Van Orden traveled to Washington for Jan. 6 — though he insists he didn’t join the mob attack on the Capitol — and is considered a rising star poised to defeat Brad Pfaff for an open Wisconsin seat long held by Democrats.

Florida’s Cory Mills caught attention with a provocative campaign ad in which the former combat veteran, who was also in special operations and went on to be a Trump adviser at the Pentagon, boasts about his company’s riot gear that was used on Black Lives Matter protesters and various liberal groups.

Karoline Leavitt was not her party’s first choice to take on Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, but Republican voters made the former Trump White House press aide, who questioned the 2020 election results, their nominee.

“She’s an election denier who believes the last election was stolen from Donald Trump,” Pappas said during their recent debate.

Leavitt, who recently said during a WMUR event that Biden is, in fact, “the legitimate president,” retorted that Pappas voted with Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “100% of the time.”

Unlike the Republican tea party class of 2010 that came to Congress to slash federal budgets or the 2018 Democrats who swept to power on the promise of good governance, the 2022 candidates appear less unified around a common policy agenda.

Instead, what many of the Republican recruits do share is Trump’s rejection of the establishment and civic norms, an approach much like that of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, that is transforming the party.

Across the country, the GOP candidates reflect Trump’s lasting influence and willingness to bring the far-right into the fold — as seen in Washington state after Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and CIA officer with a harrowing life story, advanced to the November general election over Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump over the Jan. 6 attack.

“Kevin McCarthy and MAGA Republicans have worked overtime to nominate extremist candidates across the country,” said CJ Warnke, the communications director at House Majority PAC, an outside group aligned with Pelosi. “We look forward to voters rejecting their out-of-touch policies at the ballot box in November.”

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who is poised to become House speaker if Republicans gain control, has been instrumental in recruiting the new class that could lift him to power.

Learning from the past elections, McCarthy reached deeper for candidates that better reflect the diversity of America, a turnaround from the 2018 election that left about a dozen Republican women and no Black Republicans in the House.

Among Republican incumbents and other candidates, there are 28 Black nominees, 33 Hispanics, 13 Asian Americans and three Native Americans, according to the National Republican Campaign Committee, the party’s House campaign arm.

McCarthy has maintained a close if sometimes rocky relationship with the former president. In a speech this summer in South Carolina, he championed his far-flung recruits, many of whom have been endorsed by Trump. Since August, McCarthy has visited 34 states in support of Republican candidates and members.

“There’s not one place we are not going to play,” he vowed.

Not all those Republicans are party favorites. In fact, leaders tried to keep some of the more extreme Republican candidates off the ballot.

More than $11 million was spent during the primary campaigns to prop up favored GOP candidates in Virginia, Texas, California and other states by the Conservative Leadership Fund, the outside group aligned with McCarthy.

The leadership fund achieved its preferred outcome in most of those races, though there were setbacks. In North Carolina, Trump-styled Sandy Smith — she tweeted on Jan. 6, “In DC fighting for Trump! Just marched from the Monument to the Capitol! — trounced the party favorite.

McCarthy campaigned early with JR Majewski, another Republican nominee who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The party has stuck with the Ohio candidate after The Associated Press reported that he misrepresented his military record.

During the primaries, Democrats promoted some of the more far-right candidates, helping elevate Trump-backed John Gibbs in Michigan, in a controversial counteroffensive strategy designed to push centrist and independent voters away from Republicans.

But Republicans are digging deep into Democratic strongholds of New England, Florida and notably South Texas, where three Latina candidates with tough border control positions reflect a dramatic re-sorting of traditional party allegiances, sounding alarms among Democrats.

“The moment reflects where the party is right now — Republicans are becoming a more broadly tented party that is making inroads in all types of communities,” said CLF spokesperson Calvin Moore.

“It’s a whole cadre of new voices putting forward their vision of what it means to put the country back on track.”

But recruiting and electing candidates and governing the country are different skill sets.

If Republicans win the House, “they’re going to have to teach these guys the value of regular order and the value of working together as a team,” Feehery said. “And that’s not going to come naturally.”

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Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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BELOIT, Wis. (AP) — Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, emerging from a private meeting last week with business executives at a massive foundry-turned-tech hub, smiled despite what he said was a difficult conversation about inflation, high energy prices, staffing shortages and rising crime.

“We had a very good discussion, even though it wasn’t particularly uplifting, because the reality right now is concerning,” Johnson said.

As one of the nation’s critical U.S. Senate races nears an end, Johnson has reason to feel confident. All those negatives stand to work well for him and his party in a midterm election in which voters typically blame the party that holds the White House. And Johnson is hammering those themes in what amounts to his closing argument for voters to give him a third term over Democrat Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor.

“These people are fundamentally destroying this country,” Johnson said of Barnes and Democrats at a campaign stop Monday. “They have to be stopped. They need to be defeated. They need a real shellacking.”

Barnes has ratcheted up his own rhetoric in the closing days, saying Johnson has “lied to our faces for 12 straight years” and returned repeatedly to Johnson’s downplaying of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and his attempts to deliver a slate of fake electors to former Vice President Mike Pence.

“He’s not just a danger to this state, he’s a threat to the stability of this country,” Barnes said Tuesday at a meeting of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee. “That’s who he is.”

The Wisconsin race is one of a handful that could be critical to which party controls the Senate. Polls have shown Johnson with an apparently increasing lead over Barnes, and national Republicans who abandoned his campaign six years ago are pouring money into the final days.

The former plastics manufacturer rode the tea party wave in 2010 to win his first Senate race over Sen. Russ Feingold, then beat Feingold in a rematch six years later.

Johnson has proven to be an elusive target for liberals even as he has drifted rightward since Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and polls have shown Johnson’s favorability rating to be upside down. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, and lost it in 2020, by less than a point. Johnson won both of his elections by fewer than 5 points.

Barnes, who is seeking to become Wisconsin’s first Black senator, has sought to portray Johnson as out of touch with the cares of middle-class voters. He has reminded them of an investigation by ProPublica that found that provisions Johnson added to the 2017 tax bill delivered millions in tax savings to key donors including billionaire Diane Hendricks of Beloit-based ABC Supply.

Hendricks developed the industrial park in Beloit where Johnson had his meeting. She has poured millions into his race, including $3.1 million a month before Election Day.

Johnson hasn’t shied away from his vote in support of the 2017 tax bill. He said a provision he pushed for cutting business taxes “allows small businesses to compete with the big guys.”

Barnes, who paid no income taxes in 2018 and was on the state’s Medicaid program, has contrasted his upbringing in Milwaukee by his schoolteacher mom and factory worker father with Johnson’s wealth. He has also pointed out a generational divide; at 35, he’s almost half the age of the 67-year-old Johnson.

“Ron Johnson does not truly represent who we are,” Barnes said at the Madison rally with U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a fellow millennial and former Democratic presidential candidate. “People like Ron Johnson have had their day; it’s our time now.”

Barnes, like Democrats all across the country, has also tried to make the race a referendum on abortion rights. Johnson is a longtime supporter of an abortion ban without exceptions, a position Barnes calls “dangerous and out of touch.” Johnson has tried to blunt the issue by saying he supported a state referendum to let voters decide, but he opposed an effort by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers for such a vote.

And Barnes has tried to present himself as a unifier, echoing themes of both President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama’s campaigns, saying Tuesday that “we’ve got to bring back decency to this state and to this country.”

Both Barnes and Johnson say the other has done little to help the state over their time in office.

Barnes served four years in the Assembly as part of a Democratic minority that could do little against the Republican majority. As lieutenant governor, a job with almost no official duties, Barnes took up the issue of climate change and led a task force examining ways the state can address it.

Johnson points to passage of his “right-to-try bill,” which allowed terminally ill patients to receive experimental drugs, as one of the ways he has delivered for Wisconsin.

Johnson has said things politicians usually shy away from, including taking away guaranteed funding for Social Security and Medicare, saying that’s the only way to save the popular entitlement programs. He contends voters will reward him for truth-telling.

“When I ran in 2010 I made two promises,” Johnson said in Beloit. “I’ll always tell you the truth, and I’ll never vote or conduct myself with my reelection in mind. I’ve honored those promises.”

A reporter pointed out that Johnson had also promised to only serve two terms.

“That was my intention,” Johnson said. “Things change.”

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The vast majority of candidates running to become their states’ chief election officers oppose hand counting ballots, a laborious and error-prone process that has gained favor among some Republicans embracing conspiracy theories about voting machines.

An Associated Press survey of major party secretary of state candidates in the 24 states found broad skepticism about hand counting among election professionals of all ideological stripes. Of 23 Republicans who responded to the survey, 13 clearly said they opposed implementing a statewide hand count of ballots instead of a machine count.

GOP candidates in Arizona and New Mexico have previously endorsed the idea of a hand count. But others cautioned it was a dangerous road to follow.

“Hand counting ballots is a process that requires time, manpower, and is prone to inaccuracies,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican who is seeking re-election this year, wrote in response to the AP survey.

The desire to hand count ballots stems from conspiracy theories spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies that the electronic machines that tabulated the results of the 2020 presidential election were rigged. Now some Republicans inspired by his election lies seek to expand or require hand counting of all ballots.

Counting by hand takes longer, requires large groups of people to examine ballots, and has been found by multiple studies to be less reliable than using voting machines.

“The reason the U.S. moved to counting machines is due to both human error and fraud with hand counts, so we looked for a better way to count the vote,” said Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Minnesota, in an email. “The error rate for hand counts is higher than the error rate for ballot counters in most cases.”

Crockett, who has called the 2020 election “rigged” and echoed some of Trump’s other election falsehoods, also stressed that she thinks her state’s voting machines still need further inspection.

The process came under scrutiny last week when rural Nye County in Nevada embarked on an unprecedented full hand count of this year’s midterm votes, starting with mailed ballots and those cast early in-person. The process was painstakingly slow until it was halted by the state’s supreme court over concerns that early vote tallies could be leaked publicly.

While the AP survey found most candidates strongly favor machine tabulators, two GOP secretary of state candidates in politically pivotal states — Arizona and New Mexico — want to shift to the unreliable method of counting ballots. A third in yet another swing state, Nevada, has backed Nye County’s effort and voiced support for making that sort of procedure standard statewide.

In Arizona, Republican State Rep. Mark Finchem, who is running for secretary of state, joined his party’s nominee for governor, Kari Lake, in filing a lawsuit seeking to outlaw the use of any machine to record or tabulate votes. The case was dismissed by a judge who levied sanctions against the Republicans.

In New Mexico, GOP secretary of state nominee Audrey Trujillo has said she wants widespread hand counting of votes.

“Hand count my ballot. We already have paper ballots,” she said in an interview on the video platform Rumble. “If we had that, I guarantee you tons more people would go out and vote.”

Neither Finchem nor Trujillo responded to the AP’s survey.

Nevada’s Republican secretary of state candidate has offered conflicting responses. A campaign spokesman for Republican nominee Jim Marchant told the AP that Marchant would be fine with a machine count as long as there also are paper ballots, which are universally used in Nevada. But the prior month, Marchant told the AP in a separate interview, “My goal is to go to a hand count paper ballot system.”

Nevada’s current secretary of state, Republican Barbara Cegavske, told interim Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf to halt the hand count of early arriving mailed ballots and early in-person votes until after polls close Nov. 8 following a ruling late last week from the state’s high court. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had sought to halt the hand count over concerns that observers could hear the results as they were announced, risking a potential public leak of early returns.

The nascent hand-count had been riddled with problems on its first day, with repeated delays and errors among the volunteer staff of 12 teams of five split into two different shifts. They got through 900 of 1,950 ballots on the first day, with one volunteer lamenting the slow pace: “I can’t believe it’s two hours to get through 25.”

An AP reporter observed two teams of five taking as long as three hours to count 50 ballots. When teams realized they had mismatched tallies for certain candidates, they would stop and recount the ballots for those candidates again. That effort followed a hand count in another rural Nevada county, Esmeralda, where election workers in June spent more than seven hours hand-tallying the 317 primary ballots.

Kampf said the teams improved during the second day.

Eleven candidates, mostly Republicans, did not respond to the AP’s survey, including one of the most prominent election conspiracy theorists running for the position — Republican Kristina Karamo in Michigan, a community college instructor who has spreading the lie that voting machines in 2020 were rigged.

“Election deniers are using the language of election integrity to dismantle the actual infrastructure of election integrity,” said David Becker, the co-author of “The Big Truth,” a book about the risks of Trump’s voting lies, and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “If you want inaccurate results that take a really long time and cost a lot, then hand counting is your solution.”

Voting machines are routinely checked before and after voting to make sure they count accurately. The post-election test usually involves pulling a sample of random ballots and counting them by hand to see if the automated tally differs.

But repeated studies — in voting and other fields such as banking and retail — have shown that people make far more errors counting than do machines, especially when reaching larger and larger numbers. They’re also vastly slower.

Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official in Colorado and Utah, noted that hand counts are enormously labor-intensive. The election consulting firm where she works estimated that in a typical-sized jurisdiction of 270,000 voters, it would take 1,300 people to count the ballots within seven days.

That’s because the typical ballot has dozens of races on it, which machines tabulate automatically but humans would have to count line by line, page by page.

“Voting equipment is uniform and efficient in a way that humans will never be,” Morrell said.

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Associated Press statehouse reporters from around the U.S. contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Reports of people watching ballot boxes in Arizona, sometimes armed or wearing ballistic vests, raise serious concerns about voter intimidation, the Justice Department said Monday as it stepped into a lawsuit over the monitoring.

The statement from the Justice Department comes days after a federal judge refused to bar a group from monitoring the outdoor drop boxes in the suburbs of Phoenix.

Threats, intimidation and coercion are illegal under the federal Voting Rights Act, even if they doesn’t succeed, the government’s attorneys wrote. While lawful poll watching can support transparency, “ballot security forces” present a significant risk of voter intimidation, the court documents state.

“While the First Amendment protects expressive conduct and peaceable assembly generally, it affords no protection for threats of harm directed at voters,” U.S. government attorneys wrote.

Liburdi is a Trump appointee and a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. The Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans is appealing the order in the swing state with several closely contested races this year.

The two cases were merged and the Justice Department filed a statement of interest Monday. Attorneys for Clean Elections USA did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The law doesn’t specifically list which activities are prohibited near polling places, but video recording and photographing voters has been recognized as a concerns for decades and was named in a 1994 Justice Department letter on potential violations of the Voting Rights Act, federal attorneys wrote.

As of last week, Arizona’s secretary of state said her office has referred six cases of potential voter intimidation to the state attorney general and the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as a threatening email sent to the state elections director. Arizona law states electioneers and monitors must remain 75 feet (23 meters) from a voting location.

Groups around the United States have embraced a film that has been discredited called “2000 Mules” that claimed people were paid to travel among drop boxes and stuff them with fraudulent ballots during the 2020 presidential vote.

There’s no evidence for the notion that a network of Democrat-associated ballot “mules” has conspired to collect and deliver ballots to drop boxes, either in the 2020 presidential vote or in the upcoming midterm elections.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Democrats have created a super PAC in New York to boost incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, a sign of the party’s growing fears that a late-stage surge by her Republican opponent Lee Zeldin could result in an upset in the blue state.

The committee created Friday by the Democratic Governors Association comes as both parties have deployed more resources and political stars in New York as ballots have started being cast in a surprisingly competitive race.

The notion that the governor’s office would be winnable for Republicans in New York, where there are twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a GOP governor has not been elected in 20 years, is the latest warning for Democrats that they could face deep losses in this year’s midterm elections.

Zeldin, a congressman and ally of former President Donald Trump, has tightened the race in recent weeks after focusing for months on rising violent crime in New York. He has been campaigning around the state, holding a large rally in GOP-friendly Long Island over the weekend with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a Monday rally in a New York City exurb with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

“This is about all of you taking control your government again,” Zeldin told the crowd at his rally Monday.

Hochul, in turn, has brought on former President Barack Obama to appear in a new radio ad on her behalf and is planning a Thursday rally with Hillary Clinton in New York City. That’s on top of a series of rallies she held around the state over the weekend, including a Sunday rally with New York City Mayor Eric Adams in Queens.

“Tell them you want someone who cares, and is not going to put more guns on the street, someone who is going to respect women’s rights, and lift our people up, and does not support the overturning of Joe Biden’s election,” Hochul said at the Sunday event.

Hochul has held a heavy fundraising advantage over Zeldin for much of the race, but Zeldin has been buffeted by spending from outside groups that have received donations from the Republican Governors Association and about $9 million from Estée Lauder heir Ronald Lauder.

“Republican Super PACs have spent a record amount of nearly $12 million to insert a election denying, abortion banning, MAGA Republican who would make New York less safe by rolling back laws to take illegal guns off the street,” David Turner, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association, said in a statement. “The DGA is taking nothing for granted, and won’t sit idly by.”

Turner did not detail how much the committee plans to spend.

The most recent campaign finance reports covering three weeks in October show that Zeldin outraised Hochul by bringing in $3.6 million to her $3.4 million, according to The New York Times.

Siena College polling since July, including as recently as mid-October, has shown Hochul with a significant lead over Zeldin. But other recent polls have suggested Hochul has only a modest advantage.

Hochul, who took over as governor in August 2021 after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned amid sexual harassment allegations, is trying to win the office outright this year, which would make her the first woman to be elected New York governor.

But Hochul has had a lower profile than her predecessor and has been working to introduce herself to New Yorkers over the past year.

She initially focused her campaign heavily on her support for abortion rights and highlighting Zeldin’s alliance with Trump and his vote as a member of the U.S. House against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. In recent weeks, she has been speaking more about public safety and stepped up her efforts to portray Zeldin as “extreme.”

Zeldin, meanwhile, has focused on rising crime rates and a string of high-profile violent incidents, including some killings on the New York City subways. He blames Hochul and Democrats in Albany for not being tough enough on criminals.

Rates of violent crime and killings have broadly increased around the U.S. since the coronavirus pandemic, in some places climbing from historic lows.

Rates of murder, rape, robbery and assault have all increased across New York since the pandemic, and all of those crimes except robbery have increased from 2012 to 2021, according to New York state data.

New York Police Department data shows that in New York City, murder rates are lower than they were two years ago, but rates of rape, robbery, assault and burglary are all up. Crimes on the transit system are also up, but the crimes represent a small fraction of the passengers on the subway system and come as ridership has also increased.

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Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump is going to the Supreme Court, again, this time to try to stop his tax returns from being handed to a congressional committee.

In an emergency appeal filed Monday, Trump wants the court to order at least a temporary hold on the Treasury Department turning over his returns to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.

Trump said the handover could happen as soon as Thursday, without the court’s intervention.

Lower courts ruled that the committee has broad authority to obtain tax returns and rejected Trump’s claims that it was overstepping.

Trump had most recently sought the justices’ intervention in a legal dispute stemming from the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August. The court rejected that appeal.

If Trump can persuade the nation’s highest court to intervene in this case, he could potentially delay a final decision until the start of the next Congress in January. If Republicans recapture control of the House in the fall election, they could drop the records request.

The House Ways and Means panel and its chairman, Democrat Richard Neal of Massachusetts, first requested Trump’s tax returns in 2019 as part of an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s audit program and tax law compliance by the former president. A federal law says the Internal Revenue Service “shall furnish” the returns of any taxpayer to a handful of top lawmakers.

The Justice Department, under the Trump administration, had defended a decision by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to withhold the tax returns from Congress. Mnuchin argued that he could withhold the documents because he concluded they were being sought by Democrats for partisan reasons. A lawsuit ensued.

After President Joe Biden took office, the committee renewed the request, seeking Trump’s tax returns and additional information from 2015-2020. The White House took the position that the request was a valid one and that the Treasury Department had no choice but to comply. Trump then attempted to halt the handover in court.

Then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. obtained copies of Trump’s personal and business tax records as part of a criminal investigation. That case, too, went to the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s argument that he had broad immunity as president.

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PORT WASHINGTON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin man accused of posting his marked election ballot on social media has been charged with a felony that carries possible incarceration if he’s convicted in what a prosecutor calls a “test case.”

Paul Buzzell, 52, of Mequon, appeared in Ozaukee County Circuit Court Monday where a judge found probable cause to proceed with the case and set a $500 signature bond.

According to a criminal complaint, Buzzell, a Mequon-Thiensville School Board member, posted a photo of his completed April ballot on his Facebook page. It resulted in a voter fraud charge that includes a maximum 3 ½ years behind bars and up to $10,000 in fines upon conviction.

Ozaukee County District Attorney Adam Gerol, a Republican, says he is trying to use the criminal complaint to resolve an issue.

“You could say it’s a test case,” Gerol said. “The best thing that could come of this would be an appellate decision as to whether it violates the First Amendment or not.”

There have been contradicting court rulings in other states following the 2016 election, including in New Hampshire where a federal judge held that a state law barring an individual’s right to publish their ballot violated the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of that ruling.

Wisconsin law says it’s illegal for anyone to show a marked ballot to anyone else or to place a mark on a ballot that identifies it as that person’s ballot. The state Senate in 2020 passed a bill to legalize the taking of so-called ballot selfies, but it died in the Assembly. County election clerks opposed changing the law, saying the ban is intended to protect ballot secrecy. Neighboring Michigan changed its law in 2019 to legalize ballot selfies.

Candidates for office in Wisconsin and others have sporadically posted photos of their completed ballots over the years, in apparent violation of the law, but charges were not brought.

Gerol said that while the felony doesn’t necessarily fit the behavior, a prosecutor can’t choose the penalties to apply. That’s up to legislators.

“There’s greater flexibility to resolve cases after they’re charged when the parties might agree to a different statute to plead to for the sake of resolution,” Gerol told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Mequon police contacted the Republican businessman about the post based on citizen complaints.

“Buzzell stated that his understanding was that it was not illegal to post a photo of a ballot with his name on it,” the complaint stated.

A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for Dec. 15.

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MILWAUKEE (AP) — 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.

___ Harm Venhuizen contributed from Madison. Venhuizen and Savage are corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

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