Politics

ATKINSON, N.H. (AP) — New Hampshire’s Republican governor described Don Bolduc as a “conspiracy theory extremist” just two months ago. But now, a week before Election Day, Gov. Chris Sununu is vowing to support him. And the leader of the GOP’s campaign to retake the U.S. Senate stood at Bolduc’s side over the weekend and called him “a true patriot.”

“I’m here for one reason, and that’s to make sure Don Bolduc is the next U.S. senator,” Rick Scott, a Florida senator and chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told dozens of voters on Sunday gathered inside an Atkinson, New Hampshire, community center.

“Here’s a guy who’s a true patriot,” Scott said as he introduced Bolduc, a retired Army general. “He served his country. He believes. He cares.”

The New Hampshire dynamic reflects the emboldened GOP’s increasing confidence in candidates who party leaders believed were essentially unelectable — or at least seriously flawed — just weeks or months ago. But heading into the final full week of the 2022 midterms, Republican leaders are betting that anti-Democratic political headwinds will supersede what Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell himself called “candidate quality” issues in his own party.

Republican Senate contenders from Arizona to Georgia and North Carolina to New Hampshire are grappling with revelations about their personal lives, extreme positions and weak fundraising. Yet they may be in position to win on Nov. 8. Leaders in both parties believe Republicans are poised to take the House majority, with control of the Senate in sight as well.

At the same time, Republicans are waging competitive battles for governorships in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.

As Republican optimism grows, Democrats have been forced into a defensive position with voters looking to punish the party that controls Washington for surging inflation, crime concerns and general pessimism about the direction of the country. Saddled by weak approval ratings, the leader of the Democratic Party, President Joe Biden, has avoided many of the nation’s most competitive battlegrounds for fear he would do his party more harm than good.

Biden is set to spend the night before Election Day at a rally in deep-blue Maryland. He’ll travel this week to New Mexico and California, two Democratic strongholds where Republicans are threatening to make gains.

Former President Barack Obama rallied voters in Michigan and Wisconsin over the weekend.

“I understand why people are anxious,” Obama said in Detroit. “Moping is not an option.”

It was first lady Jill Biden, not her husband, who campaigned with New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan on Saturday. The first lady called New Hampshire’s Senate contest “an enormous race” and encouraged volunteers to “dig a little deeper” and “work a little harder” in the coming days.

In an interview moments before taking the stage with the first lady, Hassan refused to say whether she wanted Biden to run for a second term when asked.

“How about we just get through 2022?” Hassan said. “That’s obviously his decision to make.”

The GOP’s embrace of risky Senate contenders has been playing out for months in states like Georgia, where $60 million will have been spent on television advertising to benefit Republican Herschel Walker by Election Day. That backing comes even as Walker confronts reports of violence and mental health issues from his past and more recent allegations that he paid at least two women to have abortions. Walker has denied the abortion allegations.

The Republican Party is also rallying behind Arizona Senate contender Blake Masters, a so-called election denier viewed as deeply flawed by GOP leaders earlier in the year. Washington Republicans aggressively recruited outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey to run for the Senate, but Ducey declined.

Masters, a 36-year-old venture capitalist, is now the GOP’s only hope to defeat incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut. Ignoring Masters’ embrace of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, former Vice President Mike Pence campaigned for the Arizona Republican recently and called him “one of the brightest stars in the Republican Party.”

In North Carolina, local Republicans have raised concerns about the strength of Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate Ted Budd. The congressman who has struggled to energize Republican voters in his campaign against Democrat Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice on the state Supreme Court. Local GOP officials openly criticized Budd for skipping a recent debate against Beasley, although over the last week Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas campaigned with him.

It’s been much the same in Ohio, where local officials have spoken out against Trump’s preferred Senate candidate, J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist who has promoted the former president’s election lies and underwhelmed as a fundraiser.

Steven Law, a chief McConnell ally who runs the McConnell-aligned super PAC known as the Senate Leadership Fund, says that apparent flaws in candidates — including those who have railed against McConnell himself — are far less important than the party’s ultimate goal this fall: winning.

“At the end of the day, our focus is on winning the majority. And I feel like a lot of those concerns have faded into the background as we work toward that goal,” Law said in an interview.

Still, the Senate Leadership Fund shifted roughly $6 million it had planned to invest in the New Hampshire Senate race to Pennsylvania in recent days, suggesting it was essentially giving up on Bolduc. But just days later, the NRSC invested another $1 million — and Scott, its chairman, campaigned with Bolduc, sending the unmistakable message that the GOP stands behind the controversial New Hampshire Republican.

Over the weekend, a conservative group aligned with the conservative Heritage Fund invested another $1 million into Bolduc’s candidacy.

Meanwhile, Bolduc continues to rail against Washington leadership in both parties as he wages an aggressive retail campaign across New Hampshire. In a brief interview before a Windham town hall on Saturday, Bolduc said he would work to replace McConnell and other Republican leaders if elected.

“The leadership on both sides have drug us into the mess that we see ourselves in. I’m the only candidate that says that,” Bolduc said. “It’s a Republican problem. It’s a Democrat problem.”

Inside the town hall, one Bolduc supporter mistakenly believed that Bolduc backed abortion rights. She sought to clarify his position as he shook her hand before taking the stage.

“I have a question,” said the voter, who declined to give her name. “Are you pro-choice?”

“I am pro-life,” Bolduc responded.

He added that he would not support a federal ban on abortion and instead prefers to let the issue be decided at the state level. That’s despite telling Republicans in Dover, New Hampshire, earlier in the year: “I’m not going to vote contrary to pro-life. I respect life from the beginning to the end.”

Sununu, the New Hampshire governor who Washington Republicans tried and failed to recruit for the Senate contest, addressed his change of heart on Bolduc during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” In August, Sununu had dismissed Bolduc as “not a serious candidate” and a “conspiracy theory extremist.”

“Don and I didn’t see eye to eye during the primary,” Sununu said. “But again, I’m going to support the Republican ticket because the issues that folks are voting on are inflation, gas prices, heating oil, which is skyrocketing here in New Hampshire and causing a major concern.”

Sununu was not asked about Bolduc’s repeated allegations of voter fraud in New Hampshire.

Bolduc has softened his tone since winning the GOP primary, but during a debate last week, he falsely claimed voters had been bused into the state to vote illegally. And when asked about the integrity of the 2020 election at a town hall earlier in the month, he said, “I can’t say whether it was stolen or not.”

Meanwhile, Hassan, a former Democratic governor with a massive fundraising advantage, acknowledged that Bolduc is waging a competitive campaign.

“Don Bolduc has been working really hard to conceal his extremism from the people of New Hampshire,” she said. “He is the most extreme U.S. Senate nominee we have seen in modern New Hampshire history.”

Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, who leads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, predicted Democrats would retain their narrow Senate majority because of the sharp contrast in the quality of candidates.

“The Republicans have put up a cast of characters who are extreme and not ready for — not just prime-time, but any time,” Peters said. “There’s not a red wave. And we will win. But these are going to be close races.”

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Associated Press writers Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2022 midterm elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections. And check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterm.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — In liberal Rhode Island, Republican Allan Fung stands a chance of flipping a U.S. House seat and possibly helping his party gain control of the chamber.

There is just one Republican in New England’s congressional delegation, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. Fung saw an opportunity to break the Democratic Party’s three-decade hold on the seat for Rhode Island’s 2nd Congressional District when longtime Democratic Rep. Jim Langevin announced his retirement this year.

Despite Fung’s momentum, some political observers say it’s still hard to fathom a Republican pulling off such a big win in Rhode Island. But many others say it’s a tossup, or think Fung could have a slight edge over Democrat Seth Magaziner. Moderate candidate William Gilbert is also on the ballot.

“All the ingredients are there for the right kind of Republican to win that district and Allan Fung is the right kind of Republican,” said Wendy Schiller, a Brown University professor and director of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Fung said, “I want to be part of bringing back that brand of moderate Republican leadership that is missing in Congress in all of New England right now.”

Magaziner, the state’s treasurer, says voting for Fung will empower House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and far-right Republicans to adopt extremist policies because Fung won’t stand up to them. McCarthy has visited Rhode Island to raise money for Fung.

“I will fight against the extremists that are trying to overturn our democracy, cut Social Security and Medicare,” Fung said during a recent debate. “He wants to put them in charge of Congress. I will not let that happen.”

Nationally, Democrats up for election face headwinds because voters are blaming President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for inflation. Fung is laser-focused on inflation — in ads, debates, conversations with voters and interviews, he talks about the cost of groceries and home heating oil. He says it’s Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault and he wants to rein in federal spending.

Fung is known throughout Rhode Island because he served as mayor of the state’s second-largest city, Cranston, from 2009 to 2021, and ran for governor twice. He lost both times to Democrat Gina Raimondo, now U.S. commerce secretary.

He projects the image of a New England moderate Republican by comparing himself to another popular Republican in a liberal neighboring state, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker.

Fung also talks about how he would work with Democrats, pointing to common priorities like investing in infrastructure and creating U.S. manufacturing jobs. Fung said he supports Biden’s hard-fought $1 trillion infrastructure law, as well as the CHIPS and Science Act to revitalize domestic manufacturing.

Magaziner is well known too, having won election statewide twice. He was elected treasurer in 2014 and reelected in 2018. He has the state’s Democratic establishment behind him and support from national Democratic leaders. U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh spoke at a rally and First Lady Jill Biden campaigned for him.

Emily Lynch, an assistant teaching professor at the University of Rhode Island, said there isn’t anything Magaziner has or hasn’t done that is negatively affecting him — “it’s that pressure, the negative views of the economy affecting the party in power.” It’s going to be a really close race, she said.

Magaziner has worked to keep abortion front and center in the campaign. He said that unlike Fung, he’ll fight any attempts to roll back women’s rights.

“I trust women to make the choice of whether or when to have children,” Magaziner said in their debate. “He thinks that it should be up to politicians and judges.”

Fung said he would not support a national ban on abortion and he backs legislation proposed by a bipartisan group of senators seeking to codify the right to an abortion and protect contraception access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“I do not support a national abortion ban. Never said it, never will vote for it, nor would I criminalize it,” Fung said.

“I would protect a woman’s ability to make that deeply personal decision within a timeframe and reserve late-term abortions for life of the mother, rape or incest,” he added. “So I would support that bill that has been proposed on the Senate side.”

The Congressional Leadership Fund said it has put $2.8 million into the district to support Fung and oppose Magaziner because Fung’s strength as a candidate combined with a Democrat’s retirement “have given us a real shot to win a seat Democrats thought they could take for granted.”

Democrats are heavily invested in the race too, spending about $2.4 million through the House Majority PAC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the DCCC said Wednesday.

Among Rhode Island’s registered voters, 44% are Democratic, 41% are unaffiliated and 15% are Republican, according to state data.

Parts of the 2nd Congressional District are more conservative than one would expect. In the western part of the state, the towns of Foster, Glocester and Burrillville are “about as red as they get for the Northeast,” said Adam Myers, an associate professor at Providence College.

Republican-heavy neighborhoods were moved into the district from U.S. Rep. David Cicilline’s district during redistricting a decade ago. Critics at the time said the changes seemed crafted to help Cicilline’s reelection efforts. Biden still won the district by about 14 points in 2020.

The state’s Democratic establishment has shown to be more effective than Republicans in the past at mobilizing voters on Election Day. Magaziner has that going for him, Myers said.

“It’s hard for me to see a Republican candidate winning in a 14-point district these days,” Myers said. “But I wouldn’t put a lot of money on that.”

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Lebanon Has No President, No Gov’t, as Parties SquabbleOver Candidates

Meanwhile, winter approaches amid an energy crisis that mayworsen

Lebanese President Michel Aoun concludes his six-yearpresidential term on Monday, leaving no successor to replacehim. This follows his announcement on Sunday that he hadaccepted the resignation of the current caretaker government ledby Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who failed to form agovernment after the elections in May of this year.

In Lebanon, the president is traditionally chosen by gaining atleast a two-thirds majority of the parliament’s 128 members.According to an agreement called the National Pact, settled justbefore the country’s independence from the French in 1943, thepresident must always be a Maronite Christian, the primeminister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament a ShiiteMuslim.

Marwan Abdallah, the international secretary of the KataebParty, one of the country’s Christian political parties, told TheMedia Line that, although the president must be a MaroniteChristian, there are different Christian parties, which havedifferent candidates, and the parliament has not agreed on one ofthem yet.

The problem, he says, is not that Sunnis and Shiites must votefor a Maronite Christian. “This has been the case for the past 80years – there are political alliances between different parties,” hesaid.

The question is: Which Maronite is going to be the president?And, most relevant for gaining the support of parliamentarians: What political affiliation will the new president have?

“Would he be more likely to support Hizbullah and the Iranians,or will the president be leaning toward the Gulf countries andthe West? Would he be willing to put all the big problems on thetable or just postpone the problems for the next six years?” asked Abdallah.

Mohamad Radwan Al Omar, president of the LebaneseAssembly for Inclusive Development and representative adviserof Lebanon on MediateGuru’s Global Advisory Board,explained that the Lebanese parliament is divided into twocamps: one led by Hizbullah and backed by Iran and Russia, andthe other one closer to the West and to the Sunni regionalpowers, to which the Sunni parties belong.

Al Omar told The Media Line that attempts earlier this month toselect a new president failed because the camp led by Hizbullah,gripped by an internal dispute, failed to agree on a candidate.

On the other hand, he added, the Western coalition, togetherwith the independent parliamentarians, backed Michel Moawadtwice without success. “It is now up to this alliance to fix theirinternal disagreements in order to elect a new president,” heconcluded.

Jamal Wakim, a professor of history and international relations at the Lebanese University in Beirut, told The Media Line that the parliament has not chosen a president because there are too many contenders. “Though no one is able to be backed by a majority, no one wants to step down,” he said. That is why he believes it will take at least a year for the parliament to choose a new president.

Abdallah points out that this situation leaves Lebanon with acaretaker government that cannot legally convene and makedecisions, and with no president either. “If you don’t have thegovernment and you don’t have a president, how would yougovern the country?” he asked.

However, Wakim says this is not a rare situation for theLebanese. “We are used to having vacuums in power, andpeople care more about their [daily] living.”

This vacuum finds Lebanon amid economic, financial, andpolitical crises, Abdallah notes, adding that, with the wintercoming and the current energy crisis, the situation will mostlikely worsen.

“You have only one or two hours of [energy] supply per day, which is nothing. With all these problems, I’m not sure how we will survive,” he said. “We used to hope for 24 hours of electricity per day; now I’m hoping for eight hours. We used to hope to live a life and have good businesses; now we hope to get our own money out of the bank,” he said.

The stresses of day-to-day living take people’s minds offpolitics. “The standards are going down, and I think that nownobody cares if there’s a president or not, if there’s a government or not, as long as they can have their daily life dealtwith, especially with bread and gas and the basic stuff that isnow very hard to find,” Abdallah said.

Al Omar believes that the caretaker government will try as muchas possible to fill the current political vacuum, but he notes thatit is not authorized to take the major, important decisions thatthe Lebanese people desperately need now to overcome thecurrent crisis.

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PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona’s Republican attorney general has issued an opinion saying county officials can hand-count all ballots in at least five races from the Nov. 8 election, a move that gives a green light to GOP officials in at least two counties who have been clamoring for hand counts.

The efforts to hand-count ballots are driven by unfounded concerns among some Republicans that problems with vote-counting machines or voter fraud led to former President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat.

The new attorney general opinion led the two Republicans on the three-member Cochise County board of supervisors to boost their plan to hand-count some races in both early and Election Day ballots. They had pledged to pare back the effort on Wednesday.

Under state law, the local leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties would have to provide hundreds of volunteers to do the counts.

At a fiery meeting Friday, Democratic Supervisor Ann English said she’ll do everything she can to stop the county Democratic Party chair from providing those workers.

“It would be my fondest hope, that if I have any authority, any way that I can convince the chair of the Democratic party in Cochise County not to provide people for this fiasco that will be my intent,” English said. “Because I think that every day that we’re discussing this, then people are wondering ‘what’s wrong with our elections.’ ”

That comment came after GOP Supervisor Peggy Judd said she wanted to move ahead, and Republican Supervisor Tom Crosby pushed back strongly on English’s opposition and effort to halt the full count.

“I’m OK talking about how this will be done, but all you want to do is make it not get done,” Crosby said. “So, I’m not interested in that discussion — I’m interested in the discussion of how it will get done.”

The Cochise County Democratic Party referred inquiries about whether they would send volunteers for the expanded hand count to the state party on Saturday. Arizona Democratic Party spokeswoman Morgan Dick said party officials are consulting with their attorneys on the issue.

The county party did post on its Facebook page Saturday, saying they were “beyond disappointed in yesterday’s circus of a meeting.”

“Judd, Crosby and (county Recorder David) Stevens are hell bent on appeasing MAGA election deniers instead of doing what’s right for our county,” the post continued.

The hand count would take place along with the machine count, and the machine count will be used for the legal results.

The informal opinion issued Friday by Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office came as the board has been battling with Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. She warned officials there not to expand the required small hand count to all races because it was illegal. Hobbs is the state’s top election official and is running for governor.

Hobbs did give them the OK to hand-count all Election Day ballots in four races, but she said it would be illegal to do so for early votes, which make up more than 80% of ballots in the state. Normal hand-count audits required under law to ensure accuracy of ballot counting machines cover only a small percentage of ballots.

The opinion from Brnovich’s deputy solicitor general said the county may hand-count all the ballots in as many as five races.

Hobbs’ office said they disagreed and that the law does not allow it for early ballots.

“With early voting well under way and less than two weeks from election day, these antics are doing nothing more than creating chaos and confusion around the election and tabulation of ballots, which is wildly irresponsible,” a statement from Hobbs’ office said.

Supervisors in Pinal County, a much larger and growing suburban area just south of metro Phoenix’s Maricopa County, also have been considering a hand count. Both boards have meetings planned for next week to discuss the issue.

The elected Republican county attorneys in both jurisdictions have warned their respective boards there is no legal authority to expand a hand-count of ballots.

“It would be illegal at this point to do a full hand count,” Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer told his board on Wednesday.

Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre has told the board he also believes a full hand count is illegal and said the board and county Recorder David Stevens would need to find outside attorneys if they went ahead. He repeated that Friday, after Supervisor Judd said Brnovich had given the go-ahead.

He also noted that the effort runs afoul of a legal doctrine set up by the U.S. Supreme Court that says election rules and procedures can’t be changed close to an election.

An effort to hand count ballots in rural Nevada’s Nye County has been beset with issues, including slow counts and a legal challenge that forced the effort to halt on Thursday night. Officials in the GOP-led county pledged to restart their effort as soon as they can.

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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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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A man broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco and severely beat her 82-year-old husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer early Friday while the Democratic lawmaker was in Washington.

Paul Pelosi had surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands, and his doctors expect a full recovery, the speaker’s office said. In a letter to congressional colleagues Saturday night, Nancy Pelosi said her husband’s condition “continues to improve.”

David DePape, 42, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, elder abuse and burglary, police said.

“This was not a random act. This was intentional. And it’s wrong,” San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said.

The violence was the latest jolt to an increasingly splintered political system that is riven with extremism.

A look at what is known about the attack and the suspect:

WHAT HAPPENED?

An intruder wielding a hammer smashed his way through a rear door into the Pelosi residence in San Francisco shortly before 2:30 a.m. Friday. The man confronted Paul Pelosi and shouted, “Where is Nancy,” according to a person familiar with the situation who was granted anonymity to discuss it.

Paul Pelosi called 911 himself and when police arrived they found him struggling with the assailant. The man managed to strike Pelosi at least once with the hammer before he was tackled by officers and arrested, police said.

Nancy Pelosi was in Washington at the time of the attack.

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HOW’S PAUL PELOSI DOING?

He underwent surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands, and his doctors expect a full recovery, the speaker’s office said Friday. Other than Nancy Pelosi’s letter to colleagues, there were no updates on his condition Saturday.

Nancy Pelosi arrived in San Francisco late Friday. The couple has been married since 1963.

In her letter, the speaker thanked colleagues for their prayers and warm wishes. “Our children, our grandchildren and I are heartbroken and traumatized by the life-threatening attack on our Pop,” she wrote. “We are grateful for the quick response of law enforcement and emergency services, and for the life-saving medical care he is receiving.”

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WHAT ARE INVESTIGATORS SAYING?

Scott, the San Francisco police chief, said the attack was not a random act. “This was intentional,” he said.

Police didn’t immediately confirm a motive, but three people with knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press that the assailant targeted Pelosi’s home.

The FBI and Capitol Police are also part of the joint investigation.

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WHO IS THE SUSPECT?

DePape was expected to be charged next week with attempted homicide, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse and burglary. After his arrest, he was taken to a hospital, where he remained as of Friday evening.

DePape posted frequently on social media, often making racist and rambling comments that included questioning the results of the 2020 election, defending former President Donald Trump and echoing QAnon conspiracy theories.

A two-decade resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he was known locally as a pro-nudity activist who had picketed naked at protests against laws requiring people to be clothed in public.

He grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before following an older girlfriend to California. He has three children with two women. Stepfather Gene DePape said the suspect had lived with him in Canada until he was 14 and had been a quiet boy.

“He was reclusive,” said Gene DePape. “He was never violent.”

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HAVE OTHER MEMBERS OF CONGRESS BEEN THREATENED?

It’s been almost two years since the riot at the U.S. Capitol, when Trump supporters broke into the building and hunted for Pelosi and other members of Congress. Since then, threats to lawmakers and their families have increased sharply.

The U.S. Capitol Police investigated almost 10,000 threats to members last year, more than twice the number from four years earlier.

Lawmakers have pressed for better security, especially for their families and their homes outside of Washington. Security officials have promised to pay for upgrades to certain security systems and an increased Capitol Police presence outside Washington. But the vast majority of members are mostly on their own.

The attack on Paul Pelosi happened when Nancy Pelosi was out of town, which meant there was less of a security presence in their home.

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ATLANTA (AP) — Black church leaders in Georgia organized rallies Sunday in a push to get their congregants to vote — a longstanding tradition known as “souls to the polls” that is taking on greater meaning this year amid new obstacles to casting a ballot in the midterm elections.

State lawmakers nearly did away with Sunday voting under a bill signed into law last year. The Republican-sponsored legislation followed former President Donald Trump’s false claims that voter fraud cost him reelection in 2020.

Though lawmakers backed off the Sunday voting ban, the bill shortened the time to request a mail ballot, rolled back the COVID-19 pandemic-driven expansion of ballot drop boxes, reduced early voting before runoff elections and prohibited groups from handing out food and water to voters in line.

Republicans said Georgia’s new law was necessary to restore confidence in the state’s election system. Civil rights advocates saw it as an attack on Black voters, who helped Democrats win the presidential contest in Georgia in 2020 for the first time since 1992 and later take the state’s two U.S. Senate seats. They are pushing back by redoubling efforts to turn out Black voters.

Sunday’s scheduled “souls to the polls” events include a caravan organized by church leaders and civil rights groups to take congregants from Rainbow Park Baptist Church in the Atlanta area to a mall where they can vote early. U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, also planned to hold a rally to get church members to vote on the last Sunday of the early voting period.

“Souls to the polls” reflects the Black church’s central role in the fight for justice and freedom in the U.S., said W. Franklyn Richardson, chairman of the board of trustees of the Conference of National Black Churches.

Richardson said efforts like it are particularly critical this election cycle.

“It’s the cumulative accomplishment of our people that is being challenged and threatened that makes this such an urgent election,” he said.

The idea for “souls to the polls” goes back to the civil rights movement. The Rev. George Lee, a Black Mississippi entrepreneur, was assassinated by white supremacists in 1955 after he helped nearly 100 Black residents register to vote in the town of Belzoni.

It reflects a larger effort in the Black community to leverage the church for voting rights, said Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont.

In addition to motivating potential voters, pastors provide the “logistical support to get people to go directly from church service to go to vote,” he said.

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Fields reported from Washington.

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MALVERN, Pa. (AP) — On a chilly Saturday morning in mid-October, state and national Republican Party leaders made their way to a hotel patio restaurant in the critically important Philadelphia suburbs to energize loyalists heading into next month’s election that features an awkwardly fitting pair at the top of the Pennsylvania ticket.

After citing what they said were the failings of Democrats, the party officials introduced the keynote speaker: Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Senate nominee against Democrat John Fetterman in a race that could decide control of the chamber and the fate of President Joe Biden’s agenda.

“I am excited to retire the name doctor and let’s make sure he’s a senator,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, told the crowd.

Nowhere in sight — and not even mentioned — was Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for governor against Democrat Josh Shapiro.

Oz, the heart surgeon-turned-TV celebrity, and Mastriano have national political winds at their back. But they are running dramatically different campaigns and targeting two very different types of voters — in ways that may hinder, rather than help, the other.

That dynamic is complicating a Republican path to victory in Pennsylvania on Nov. 8, strategists say, and forcing the GOP into an uneasy balancing act in which the two men only rarely appear together.

Party strategists said it makes sense to avoid Mastriano because he is trailing Shapiro in polls and running a far-right campaign that is driving off the moderate voters that Oz will need to beat Fetterman, the lieutenant governor.

Ryan Costello, a former Republican congressman who once represented this stretch of Chester County, said if he were running for office and were invited to a party event, “I would ask if Mastriano was coming and if they said ‘Yes,’ I would do something else. He’s horrible.”

Mastriano will lose Republican votes in Philadelphia’s moderate and heavily populated suburbs, just as Donald Trump did in his 2020 presidential election loss to Biden, Costello said.

GOP officials didn’t respond to questions about Mastriano.

The dynamic isn’t lost on Fetterman, who is continually tying Oz to Mastriano. In their Tuesday night debate, Fetterman interrupted Oz’s answer to a question on abortion to assert that “you roll with Doug Mastriano!”

The next day, Mastriano mentioned that line in a stump speech in Lancaster County, and chuckled about it —“I like that: Let’s roll together.” But he didn’t mention Oz, only Fetterman.

Like Mastriano, Oz has been endorsed by Trump. But unlike Mastriano, Oz hasn’t been warmly embraced by Trump’s most loyal voters — the ones that form Mastriano’s far-right base.

Mastriano has gone hard after the Trump bloc, sprinkling conspiracy theories about transgender youth into more mainstream GOP talking points on crime and inflation while refusing to answer questions from mainstream, independent news organizations. But that messaging, plus his blanket opposition to abortion, his peddling of Trump’s election lies and his presence outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, has alienated moderates and GOP donors.

“It’s like he’s still running a primary campaign,” said Republican campaign strategist Bob Salera. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s not talking to any groups of people who already aren’t going to vote for him in the general election. He’s not inviting media into his events. He’s not getting a message out beyond his base.”

Oz, meanwhile, emphasizes national GOP talking points on crime and inflation, aiming to persuade swing voters and even Democrats. He has campaigned with mainstream GOP figures, including Nikki Haley, Trump’s U.N. ambassador, retiring two-term Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, whom Oz hopes to succeed.

Mastriano has campaigned with far-right figures, including propagandists, QAnon conspiracy theorists, election deniers, self-described prophets and Christian nationalists such as Michael Flynn, who once led the U.S. military’s intelligence agency and now is at the center of a far-right Christian nationalist movement.

Toomey hasn’t endorsed Mastriano.

Mastriano had been set to speak at Flynn’s two-day ReAwaken America conference last weekend in Manheim, but skipped it without explanation. Most recently, he has campaigned with propagandist Jack Posobiec, perhaps best-known for peddling the conspiracy theory “ pizzagate, ” which suggested Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria.

“That’s who he surrounds himself with: white supremacists, extremists,” Shapiro, the two-term attorney general, said in an interview. “He’s the only candidate in the nation who is actively out recruiting white supremacists on Gab to be part of his campaign. So it shouldn’t surprise us. He’s the guy who wore the Confederate uniform on the grounds of the Army War College. This is who he is.”

Fetterman and Shapiro have no such issues appearing together. They show up at the same major party events and union rallies, such as one 30 miles away in Philadelphia where they threw an arm around each other and mugged for rallygoers’ cameras.

Mastriano can still help Oz, strategists say, by getting the party’s base to come out and vote for Oz. But Oz will have to attract moderate Republicans in places such as Chester County even if they refuse to support Mastriano, Costello said.

“And if he does, that’s where Oz wins,” Costello said.

Mike Mikus, a Democratic political strategist, said that kind of balance can work, but that Mastriano lacks the campaign cash to reach base GOP supporters who might not vote in a midterm election.

Those voters are critically necessary to motivate if the GOP is to win, Mikus said.

“There’s going to be high turnout,” Mikus said. “But there are going to be people who stay home because Oz can’t motivate them, and Mastriano would be able to motivate them, but doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to turn them out.”

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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter: twitter.com/timelywriter.

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics

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

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The man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.

David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS Store.

DePape was arrested at the Pelosi home early Friday. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she expected to file multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and elder abuse.

Stepfather Gene DePape said the suspect had lived with him in Canada until he was 14 and had been a quiet boy.

“David was never violent that I seen and was never in any trouble although he was very reclusive and played too much video games,” Gene DePape said.

He said he hasn’t seen his stepson since 2003 and tried to get in touch with him several times over the years without success.

“In 2007, I tried to get in touch but his girlfriend hung up on me when I asked to talk to him,“ Gene DePape said.

David DePape was known in Berkeley as a pro-nudity activist who had picketed naked at protests against local ordinances requiring people to be clothed in public.

Gene DePape said the girlfriend whom his son followed to California was named Gypsy and they had two children together. DePape also has a child with a different woman, his stepfather said.

Photographs published by The San Francisco Chronicle on Friday identified DePape frolicking nude outside city hall with dozens of others at the 2013 wedding of pro-nudity activist Gypsy Taub, who was marrying another man. Taub did not respond Friday to calls or emails.

A 2013 article in The Chronicle described David DePape as a “hemp jewelry maker” who lived in a Victorian flat in Berkeley with Taub, who hosted a talk show on local public-access TV called “Uncensored 9/11,” in which she appeared naked and pushed conspiracy theories that the 2001 terrorist attacks were “an inside job.”

A pair of web blogs posted in recent months online under the name David DePape contained rants about technology, aliens, communists, religious minorities and global elites.

An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q,” displayed a scatological collection of memes that included photos of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and made reference to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that espouses the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals.

“Big Brother has deemed doing your own research as a thought crime,” read a post that appeared to blend references to QAnon with George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

In an Aug. 25 entry titled “Gun Rights,” the poster wrote: “You no longer have rights. Your basic human rights hinder Big Brothers ability to enslave and control you in a complete and totalizing way.”

The web hosting service WordPress removed one of the sites Friday afternoon for violating its terms of service.

On a different site, someone posting under DePape’s name repeated false claims about COVID vaccines and wearing masks, questioned whether climate change is real and displayed an illustration of a zombified Hillary Clinton dining on human flesh.

There appeared to be no direct posts about Pelosi, but there were entries defending former President Donald Trump and Ye, the rapper formally known as Kayne West who recently made antisemitic comments.

In other posts, the writer said Jews helped finance Hitler’s political rise in Germany and suggested an antisemitic plot was involved in Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

In a Sept. 27 post, the writer said any journalists who denied Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election “should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”

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AP Global Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker reported from Washington and Breaking News Investigative Reporter Bernard Condon from New York. Reporters Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles, Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

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DENVER (AP) — Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet and Republican challenger Joe O’Dea clashed repeatedly in their final debate Friday over inflation, abortion and Bennet’s effectiveness during his 13 years in Congress.

O’Dea hammered Bennet for voting with President Joe Biden 98% of the time, blaming him for a spending spree that caused inflation and failing to secure the U.S. border with Mexico. But it was his use of a questionable statistic, that Bennet has only passed one bill in his 13 years in the Senate, that set off the normally soft-spoken Democratic senator.

“You’re a liar, Joe,” Bennet snapped.

O’Dea was referring to a lone standalone bill that Bennet authored, but that charge is potentially misleading because most senators, Bennet included, see the vast majority of the bills they write pass as part of larger packages. Bennet has had numerous measures pass that way, which he noted has included billions of dollars in wildfire and drought prevention and, in a separate measure, funding for rural areas to boost internet access.

O’Dea, a businessman and first-time candidate, kept repeating the statistic, using it to charge the often academic-sounding Bennet with incompetence.

“Michael Bennet doesn’t get results,” he said repeatedly. His campaign later said O’Dea was echoing the relatively low ranking of Bennet by the nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking.

The event in the northern Colorado city of Ft. Collins was the only full debate aired on television as O’Dea tries to demonstrate a way for the GOP to win a state shifting toward Democrats. Former President Donald Trump lost Colorado by 13 percentage points in 2020.

O’Dea kicked off a feud with the former president — for whom he voted twice — by saying earlier this month that he’d support another candidate in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Trump called O’Dea a “RINO” — a Republican In Name Only.

Still, Bennet kept tying O’Dea to Trump, repeatedly reminding his audience that his rival had voted twice before for the ex-president. “He voted for Donald Trump twice, after the children were separated from their mothers at the border,” Bennet said of O’Dea as he listed numerous controversies from the past president.

O’Dea has tried to focus the campaign on crime and inflation, which led to his sharpest attack on Bennet when he asked the Democratic senator about the $5 trillion in recent federal spending: “Do you regret the spending?”

“I regret the inflation that people are facing,” Bennet replied, adding that it was caused by “broken supply chains globally” and energy issues.

Bennet went on the attack on abortion, even though O’Dea is the rare Republican who backs abortion rights — at least through 20 weeks of pregnancy, after which he thinks the procedure should be banned. Bennet noted that only about 1% of abortions come after that date, all heartbreaking cases with a late-arriving health issue, he said.

The senator described “the reality of women having the worst experience of their life, the last thing they need is to have Joe O’Dea in there with them.”

O’Dea reiterated his support for abortion rights up to five months of pregnancy. “Michael Bennet has voted for abortion up to the moment of birth,” O’Dea said. “I think that’s extreme.”

In response to a question about when he’s disagreed with Biden, Bennet listed some of his objections to the president’s policies, including Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan, his trip to Saudi Arabia earlier this year and lifting a pandemic-related restriction on immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border.

O’Dea was asked about what priorities of the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, he might block. He said he did not think any more of former President Barack Obama’s health care law needed to be repealed.

Though national Republicans have admired O’Dea’s attempt to keep the race away from social issues, they have not invested much money in helping his campaign, a sign of the tough hill O’Dea has to climb to unseat Bennet.

Colorado Republicans have not won a top-tier race in the state since 2014, when Cory Gardner ousted Democratic Sen. Mark Udall. But Gardner was kicked out of office by the state’s voters in 2020 and he was the only top-of-the-ticket statewide Republican winner since 2004.

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Republican challenger Scott Jensen came out swinging Friday in their final debate of the campaign as they gave voters a last chance to make head-to-head comparisons on how the candidates would lead Minnesota.

“Scott’s vision is a dark and fearful vision of Minnesota. It’s one where women are criminalized for making their health care decisions. It’s one where we defund our public schools to give tax cuts to the wealthiest,” Walz said in his opening statement.

“I became a family doctor because I wanted to help people. I’m running for governor because Tim Walz hurt people,” Jensen countered. “His slogan was ‘One Minnesota.’ That’s a sham. Tim Walz failed. Minnesota is broken. We’re fractured. We’re (more) deeply divided than I can remember in my lifetime.”

Here are some key takeaways from the debate, which aired on Minnesota Public Radio just 11 days ahead of an election in which control of the governor’s office and the Minnesota Legislature are at stake.:

TAXES AND SPENDING

Jensen defended his hope to explore whether Minnesota can eliminate its personal income tax, although he has yet to say how he would make up for huge loss in revenue. He has already backed away from extending the sales tax to food and clothing though he continued to float the idea of a 10% cut in state spending.

Jensen said the state needs to use its budget surplus to foster a discussion of “Can we actually get to a point where we could go without a personal income tax? If we don’t use the surplus now to help lead that conversation, we’ll never know.”

But Walz accused Jensen of “cutting the income tax so that millionaires and billionaires — Scott’s friends — are able to see a tax cut so they can send their children to private schools,” while starving the state’s public schools. He called that “lazy budgeting” and suggested that across-the-board spending cuts would also mean less money for law enforcement.

COVID-19

Walz said he followed the best available science to fight the pandemic. He said Jensen, a physician, should have been an expert but became “one of the most … dangerous people when it came to COVID” through his outspoken skepticism of the mainstream medical consensus on the pandemic, including the value of vaccines and masks.

“This reckless, dangerous behavior, this pushing internet conspiracy theories, made our job even harder,” Walz said.

Jensen acknowledged he has “definitely been a skeptic.” He said shutting down schools was ”a horrible decision” and that shutting families out of nursing homes to keep the virus out condemned patients “to die a lonely death.”

Jensen also challenged Walz to pledge to never mandate COVID-19 vaccinations as a condition for children to attend school. Walz said he has no plan to mandate them but that he would wait to see what new variants emerge.

FEEDING OUR FUTURE

Federal prosecutors have charged 50 people in an alleged scheme that defrauded state-administered federal food programs out of $250 million that was meant to feed schoolchildren during the pandemic. At the center of the plot, the indictments allege, was a Minnesota nonprofit called Feeding Our Future.

Jensen said the Walz administration and Attorney General Keith Ellison missed opportunities to use their investigative powers to stop the fraud earlier. He noted a report by the Star Tribune on Thursday that the attorney general’s office had the authority to conduct its own investigation and to demand the nonprofit’s bank records before the feds took the case.

Walz provided few answers about when he learned there was a problem. He said doesn’t want to “jeopardize any opportunity to put these people in prison” while the federal investigation is ongoing.

“When this investigation’s done, and the Legislative Auditor and the folks take a look at this after that investigation, we’ll get a clearer picture of this,” Walz said.

ABORTION

Walz accused Jensen of flip-flopping on abortion. Jensen said early in the campaign when he was trying to win GOP support that he supported a ban, but softened his position this summer to favor some exceptions.

Jensen tried to minimize how much influence he could have on abortion rights, which are constitutionally protected under a state Supreme Court ruling. Abortion rights supporters have pointed out there are several ways a Republican governor and Legislature could try to roll back those rights.

“This is the most anti-choice, anti-woman ticket that’s ever run,” Walz said, criticizing Jensen’s running mate, former Minnesota Vikings and Baltimore Ravens center Matt Birk, a staunch abortion foe. “As long as I’m governor, women’s health care rights are protected.”

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