Politics

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.

___

Fields reported from Washington.

source

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.”

___

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

___

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.

source

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.”

___

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.

source

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.

source

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.”

source

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Standing beside the pulpit at King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church on a crisp fall Sunday morning, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes was preaching to the choir – they were assembled behind him, clad in blue and gold robes.

“This community is always top of mind for me,” he reassured the mostly older congregants filling the pews, as he hit on issues he knew they care about: crime, jobs, inflation.

It’s a typical strategy for any Democrat who wants to win in battleground Wisconsin – go to Milwaukee, speak in Black churches, pose for pictures with the churchgoers. And it’s a share of the electorate that should be especially fertile ground for Barnes, who grew up on Milwaukee’s mostly Black north side and first dipped his toe in politics as an organizer and later state representative there.

As Barnes, the state’s lieutenant governor, seeks to become Wisconsin’s first Black senator, his chances against two-term Sen. Ron Johnson may depend on how well he can connect with voters here who have not always turned out in big numbers.

“Our white population is split down the middle and minority voters will make the decision,” Reverend Greg Lewis, an influential organizer in Milwaukee’s Black community, said in an interview. “Whoever they vote for will win.”

Barnes knows most of the people at King Solomon are already in his corner, with some already turning in early votes for him. It’s not older, religious Black voters he needs to worry about mobilizing. It’s these congregants’ nieces, nephews, children and grandchildren that community organizers describe as a disaffected and disinterested generation.

“I’m asking you to help talk to some other people – some friends, some family, some neighbors. If we get five to 10 people out each, we can win this thing,” Barnes told the congregants.

For Barnes, whom polls show slightly behind Johnson in one of the handful of races that could shift Senate control, that means connecting with people like Joe Louis Gordon II.

Gordon, 32, met Barnes at a campaign event on Black maternal health in mid-October. As his girlfriend, Makoria Morrow, joined the discussion, Gordon sat to the side with their 2 1/2-month-old daughter and said he “didn’t know too much” about Barnes. He said he hadn’t voted since Barack Obama was running for president.

“Just like everyone else in the community, we really don’t really care about voting or care about the race or anything like that because we feel like our voice is not going to get heard anyways,” he said.

After seeing Barnes in person, Gordon said he planned to vote for him.

“I just felt something different to come and just meet him and just to see that he actually is a genuine human being. He’s just like us. He could be my neighbor,” Gordon said.

In the two weeks until Election Day, the Barnes campaign is doubling down on breaking through to young Black voters with events at Black student unions and elsewhere in the community. They’re also investing millions in reaching young voters of color on streaming platforms like YouTube and Spotify. Obama himself comes to town on Saturday for a rally at a north Milwaukee high school, part of a parade of national names who have visited to support Barnes.

“Mandela has run an aggressive campaign schedule to connect with Black voters in Milwaukee, and he’ll continue to do so through Election Day and beyond that,” said Barnes campaign spokesperson Maddy McDaniel.

Republicans aren’t conceding the votes. They opened their first office in the city’s downtown in 2020 in hopes of peeling away some of Democrats’ most loyal supporters. According to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide, 9 in 10 Black voters nationally backed Joe Biden in 2020.

For Michelle Wilkins, a 27-year-old doula who took part in the discussion on maternal health that Gordon attended, this election is the first time in a while she’s felt like her vote could make a difference. Barnes’ strong support for abortion rights and for Black mothers resonated with her, she said.

“We need someone to fight for African American people. And not just people, but women. And especially with the Roe versus Wade situation,” she said.

Older Black voters, like the aunts and grandmothers at King Solomon, said they planned to press their family members to vote. At a Barnes rally, Fannie Harris, 69, of Wauwatosa, spoke of the sacrifices of the Black suffrage movement in calling it a duty: “Our ancestors worked too hard for us to be able to vote,” she said.

Rep. Gwen Moore, who is Black and represents most of the city of Milwaukee, fretted that major issues of the moment — a pandemic, inflation, and rising crime — have put such stresses on many Black families that voting is on the back burner.

“When you’re concerned about survival, sometimes voting just doesn’t get prioritized,” she said.

___

Harm Venhuizen is a corps member 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. Follow Venhuizen on Twitter.

___

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.

source

Pivotal elections in Brazil and the United States will present an early test to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk and his promise to ease up on the platform’s policies on misinformation.

Voters in both nations have already faced a torrent of misleading claims about candidates, issues and voting. That torrent could become a deluge if Musk makes good on his vows to roll back Twitter’s rules just as millions of voters prepare to cast a ballot.

“This is the most critical time for this work, right before an election,” said Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic who has been monitoring the online response to Musk’s purchase. “We’re going to see a test run with the election in Brazil this Sunday, when we’ll see how bad things get.”

Even if Musk waits until after the elections to make changes, his decision to fire the executive in charge of content moderation raises questions about the company’s ability to combat misinformation and extremist content linked to deepening distrust in democracy.

Musk, the world’s richest man, hasn’t detailed his plans for Twitter, which he purchased this week for $44 billion. But he has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and has said the platform should tolerate any content that is legally permissible.

That’s a threshold that varies widely among countries. In the U.S., it would cover misleading content about vaccines or elections as well as Holocaust denialism and hate speech.

He’s also said he disagreed with Twitter’s decision to banish Donald Trump after the ex-president’s lies about the 2020 election helped spur the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Yet Musk has also signaled that he’d consider some level of moderation, as he did this week when he said he didn’t want Twitter to become a “ free-for-all hellscape.”

On Friday, Musk announced the creation of a committee to review Twitter’s policies on content moderation and the reinstatement of suspended accounts. “No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes,” Musk tweeted.

One of Musk’s first moves as Twitter’s owner was to fire top leaders at the platform, including chief legal counsel Vijaya Gadde, who had overseen Twitter’s content moderation and safety efforts.

Gadde’s departure is not only a blow to Twitter’s current election efforts, but a sign of where Musk may take Twitter, Caraballo said. Musk is also reportedly considering deep layoffs at the company.

Twitter began preparing for the elections in Brazil and the United States months ago. Over the summer, the platform rolled out a series of policies designed to stop the spread of election-related misinformation while also making it easier for users to find trustworthy sources.

Despite sometimes inconsistent enforcement, Twitter at least had rules in place prohibiting hate speech and the most harmful kinds of misinformation. Those “guardrails” have been shown to be necessary, according to Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, a New York-based literary and human rights group.

“Our politicians have learned that trafficking in disinformation can pay off big time,” Nossel told the AP. “Hopefully he (Musk) takes this seriously. Hopefully he’s listening and asking questions. If he makes good on some of his more outlandish promises we could be in trouble.”

Misinformation can have an even greater impact when delivered right before an election, when officials and independent journalists have little time to push back. Sometimes misleading claims about voting can be part of an intentional campaign to confuse or frighten people into staying home. Other times, it can mislead voters about results.

Brazilians have been bombarded by false political claims ahead of this weekend’s presidential election between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Similarly, there’s been a significant increase in misleading and deceptive content about the election in the U.S. next month, which will decide control of Congress.

Long-time critics of social media moderation cheered Musk’s purchase of Twitter and said it heralded a new day for unfettered online communication.

“He has stated he intends to do away with content moderation … that more speech, not censorship, is the best way to arrive at the truth,” said Jenin Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Eager to test the rules under Twitter’s new owner, some conservative and far-right Twitter users on Friday posted conspiracy theories about COVID-19 or the 2020 election. In many cases, however, the content was already permitted even under Twitter’s old rules.

“I can finally speak the truth on Twitter. Joe Biden did not win the 2020 Election,” comedian and far-right commentator Terrence K. Williams tweeted. Yet on Jan. 6, 2021, Williams posted that the election was rigged and blamed liberals for staging the Jan. 6 insurrection. That post remains up.

Musk will have to weigh many factors before deciding how to moderate content on his new platform, said A.J. Nash, vice president for intelligence at ZeroFox, a cybersecurity firm that tracks misinformation. Advertisers, for example, could become reluctant to place ads on the platform if it becomes too extreme, he said.

Musk may also learn that running a platform with 240 million daily users in dozens of nations is harder than criticizing it from the sidelines, Nash said.

“It’s easy to do that from the stands,” Nash said. “Let’s see what happens now.”

___

Follow AP’s coverage of Elon Musk: https://apnews.com/hub/elon-musk

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.

source

WASHINGTON (AP) — An America that can already feel like it’s hurtling toward political disintegration has been jolted yet again, this time by the violent attack on the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi less than two weeks before Election Day.

Seizing a hammer and leaving a trail of broken glass, an intruder broke into the couple’s San Francisco home early Friday and repeatedly struck Paul Pelosi, 82. He 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.

The assailant confronted Paul Pelosi by shouting, “Where is Nancy,” according to another person familiar with the situation who was granted anonymity to discuss it. The Democratic congresswoman was in Washington at the time.

The calling out of her name was a sign that the assault could have targeted the lawmaker, who as speaker is second in line to the presidency. The ambush was a particularly savage reminder of the extremism that has coursed through American politics in recent years, adding to a sense of foreboding with the Nov. 8 election nearly at hand.

Armed watchers are staking out ballot drop boxes in Arizona to guard against false conspiracies about voter fraud. Threats against members of Congress have risen to historic levels. Public opinion surveys show fears for a fragile democracy and even of a civil war. Former President Donald Trump continues to deny that he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, and his acolytes are attempting to consolidate their power over future elections.

A new domestic intelligence assessment from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies said extremists fueled by election falsehoods “pose a heightened threat” to the upcoming midterms.

The assessment, dated Friday, said the greatest danger was “posed by lone offenders who leverage election-related issues to justify violence.”

“It is worse than it’s ever been,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster. “This is uncharted waters.” Belcher blamed “the mainstreaming of behavior in politics that was, once upon a time, left or right, abhorrent.”

Police have not identified a motive for the attack on Pelosi’s husband. Judging by social media posts, the suspect appears to have been stewing in a mix of conspiracy theories about elections and the coronavirus pandemic.

“It’s bad regardless of the reasons, but if it’s politically motivated, it’s just another example of political violence and irresponsibility of folks who are opening the door to that type of violence against other elected officials,” Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said in an interview. “It’s a very sad time for our country right now.”

Politicians from both parties expressed outrage about the assault.

“This attack is shocking, and Americans should worry because it is becoming more common,” said Joe O’Dea, a Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado. “Partisanship and polarization are tearing the country apart.”

Some responses, however, reflected a sharp sense of partisanship.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., worked the incident into his remarks at a campaign stop for a congressional candidate as he called for Democrats to lose power in Congress.

“There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send her back to be with him in California,” Youngkin said. “That’s what we’re going to go do.”

From the Civil War and attacks on Black voters during Jim Crow to the assassination of elected leaders like John and Robert Kennedy, the United States has experienced spasms of political violence. No party or ideology has a monopoly on it.

Five years ago, a left-wing activist opened fire on Republicans as they practiced for an annual charity baseball game. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana was critically wounded. In 2011, then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was shot in the head at an event outside a Tucson grocery store.

Today, violent rhetoric and imagery have become a staple of right wing politics in the United States, and it escalated during Donald Trump’s presidency. Democrats viewed the intrusion into Pelosi’s home as an extension of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters interrupted the peaceful transition of power to Biden.

On that day, protesters searched for Pelosi and chanted that they wanted to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence, who had defied Trump’s demands to overturn the election results.

Less than two years later, only 9% of U.S. adults think democracy is working “extremely” or “very well,” according to this month’s poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack have received a steady stream of threats for their work.

“If we do not stop the big lie, perpetuated by those who seek to win at any cost, our democracy will cease to exist,” Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat who was assigned a security detail in recent months because of her work on the committee, said in an interview. “Then nothing else we do will have mattered.”

Nowhere has the temperature been hotter than in Arizona, a cauldron for election conspiracy theories. People inspired by unsupported claims that ballot drop boxes perpetuate election fraud have camped outside those boxes, photographing voters and their license plates as they turn in ballots.

Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said on Monday that he is patrolling around drop boxes and devoting unprecedented manpower to election security after two people armed with pistols and wearing tactical gear were seen keeping watch on a ballot drop box outside Phoenix. The incident sparked fears of voter intimidation and the potential for confrontations that could escalate into violence.

“It goes very quickly from well-intended to poorly executed, and then bad things happen,” Penzone said.

Penzone, a Democrat, said there’s “a growing toxic problem where individuals feel that it is appropriate to use forms of intimidation and threats to try to influence political outcomes.”

Left-leaning groups have filed two lawsuits against groups organizing watch parties, including one with ties to the Oath Keepers militia. A federal judge on Friday declined to order one group to stop its activities.

A 36-year-old man was arrested this past week for allegedly breaking into the campaign headquarters of Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor and the current secretary of state. There’s no indication the burglary was politically motivated, but it alarmed her staff, which is constantly on guard for threats.

Federal prosecutors have charged three people with threatening to harm Arizona election officials, including Hobbs, since the last election.

Earlier in the week, three men were convicted of supporting a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after a trial that raised fears about paramilitary training and anti-government extremism.

And on Friday, a man pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. Also, a Kansas man is facing a felony charge of threatening to kill one of the state’s congressmen, Republican Jake LaTurner.

Rep. Val Demings, a Florida Democrat who is running for Senate, has campaigned with a large private security detail for much of the year. It is a necessary precaution, she said in an interview, given an uptick in violent threats in the months since she served as a House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial.

“I never thought that I would have my worst moment, feeling like I was really going to die, in the Capitol on Jan. 6,” said Demings, a former Orlando police chief. “When I had been in back alleys and bar fights and arresting people who killed other people, and never did I have the feeling on the streets like I had that day. And it was all in politics, and I’m like, ‘What is going on?’”

___

Cooper reported from Phoenix and Peoples from New York. Associated Press writers Jake Bleiberg in Dallas and Farnoush Amiri and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

___

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.

source

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Dueling lawsuits have been dropped by a former Nebraska candidate for governor and a fellow Republican state lawmaker who accused him of groping her at a political function several years ago.

Charles W. Herbster, who lost his bid in May to become the Republican nominee for governor despite an early endorsement from former President Donald Trump, sued state Sen. Julie Slama for defamation. That came after Slama told the Nebraska Examiner that, in 2019, Herbster reached under her skirt and groped her at the Douglas County Republican Party event when she was 22.

Slama was one of eight women who accused Herbster of unwanted groping, but Slama was the only one to go on the record with her name. Herbster denied the allegations and painted them as a politically motivated attack.

Slama quickly countersued, accusing Herbster of sexual battery. The competing lawsuits had largely stalled in the months since being filed, with both sides seeking delays.

Online court records show that both sides on Wednesday submitted a motion to dismiss their lawsuits with prejudice, meaning they can’t be refiled. On Thursday, the judge granted the motion. Neither the motion nor the judge’s order addressed why the parties sought to dismiss their respective lawsuits.

An attorney for Slama confirmed the dismissal Friday, but declined to answer questions on what led to the dismissal, saying the firm “will make no further statement on the matter.”

Attorneys for Herbster did not immediately return phone messages Friday seeking comment.

The accusations of sexual misconduct against Herbster and subsequent lawsuits exposed deep divisions in the state Republican Party.

Herbster had been seen as a strong front-runner through much of the primary, thanks to the early endorsement of Trump. But the accusations of unwanted groping proved damaging — even after Trump came to Nebraska for a rally to help bolster the embattled Herbster.

Most of Nebraska’s Republican establishment, including Gov. Pete Ricketts, backed the eventual winner of the gubernatorial primary: hog producer and University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen. Several female Republican state lawmakers set up a legal fund to help the women who accused Herbster.

At least one GOP lawmaker, Omaha Sen. Lou Ann Linehan, labeled Herbster “a predator.”

Two months after Herbster was defeated in the primary election, hard feelings within the state party boiled over at the state Republican Party convention, at which longtime state Chairman Dan Welch was voted out, leading other top party leaders to resign.

source

STAFFORD, Va. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump has endorsed Yesli Vega, the GOP county official and former police officer challenging Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia’s competitive 7th Congressional District.

While Vega did not immediately tout the endorsement, Virginia Democrats moved quickly to highlight it. Over the course of his term, the former president ignited a wave of Democratic resistance in Virginia, a state he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020 by 10 points.

Vega told reporters at a rally Friday afternoon in Stafford that she had just learned of the endorsement — which was posted on social media Thursday night — on the way to the event.

“I’ve gotten a lot of endorsements. I’ve gotten the most important endorsements for me, which is the voters of the 7th District. So I’m really excited,” she said.

Vega said she was “laser focused” on the Nov. 8 election. Asked if the endorsement could hurt her with voters who were still undecided, she responded: “This race is between myself and my opponent, not anybody else.”

Spanberger emphasized the endorsement Thursday night in a tweet, saying: “Tonight, my opponent was endorsed by former President Trump. Virginians are exhausted by his division, lies, and hyper-partisanship.”

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Vega, a military spouse and former police officer who currently serves as an auxiliary deputy, would be a strong Republican voice against violent crime “and all other of the things that are destroying our Nation.”

A former CIA officer first elected to Congress in 2018, Spanberger has not campaigned with Biden — whose recent job approval ratings have been in the low 40s. She said bluntly during a recent interview that she did not intend to.

“I’m the one on the ballot,” she said.

She has instead recently appeared with local and state elected officials, and Virginia’s U.S. senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. She’s also touted endorsements from The Washington Post editorial board and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Virginia’s newly redrawn 7th District is centered around the Interstate 95 corridor in exurban Washington, including Fredericksburg and part of Prince William County, where Vega serves on the board of supervisors.

source