Some Republicans focus on ‘parental rights’ to close campaign; Biden adds events

HOUSTON — The Alliance for Retired Americans wrote to the Texas secretary of state on Friday requesting they explain how a recently expanded poll-watching law will be enforced.

The law makes it a crime for election workers to “obstruct the view of a watcher or distance the watcher from the activity,” and the group noted that Texas had investigated at least 10 election workers for violating it during the past two years, according to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

“The Texas Secretary of State must tell all election workers what specific actions would put them at risk of investigation,” said Gene Lantz, president of the group’s Texas chapter, whose members are working the polls.

Devastating cuts to Twitter’s workforce on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, are fueling anxieties among political campaigns and election offices that have counted on the social network’s staff to help them combat violent threats and viral lies.

The mass layoffs gutted teams devoted to combating election misinformation, adding context to misleading tweets and communicating with journalists, public officials and campaign staff.

The layoffs included a number of people who were scheduled to be on call this weekend and early next week to monitor for signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content around the election, one former employee told The Washington Post. As of Friday morning, employee access to internal tools used for content moderation continued to be restricted, limiting staff’s ability to respond to misinformation.

A new ad for Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis portrays him as God’s “fighter.”

The video — shared on Twitter Friday morning by DeSantis’s wife, Casey — borrows from a speech that conservative radio broadcaster Paul Harvey delivered in 1978, “So God Made a Farmer.”

Harvey opened his speech with: “And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God made a farmer.”

DeSantis’s ad opens with the same line, replacing “caretaker” with “protector,” “farmer” with “fighter,” and playing images of the governor as the narrator says, “God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, kiss his family goodbye … for no other reason than to serve the people.”

As President Biden rolled up his sleeve to receive his coronavirus booster shot at the White House last week, he was surrounded by leaders from the worlds of medicine, government and business — half of whom were of Indian origin.

The event took place less than 24 hours after Vice President Harris joined Biden to light a ceremonial diya at a White House Diwali celebration for hundreds of South Asian American guests. Biden used his speech during the event to hail the ascension of Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first prime minister of Indian descent.

At a campaign rally in Pittsburgh on Wednesday night, Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate, said that on Day 1 of a Mastriano administration, he would “order all of the schools to post their curriculum online for full transparency,” promising there would be “no more graphic porn in elementary school libraries” if he was elected governor.

At a speech in Onalaska, Wis., Tuesday afternoon, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) lamented that the nation’s “education system, unfortunately, is teaching our children not to like this country,” and declared, “This has to end.”

President Biden told reporters he’s confident Democrats will maintain their majority in the House.

“We’re going to win this time around,” the president said, per pool reports, as he prepared to leave California en route to Chicago for another campaign event. “I don’t think we’re going to not win. We’re keeping the House”

“I’m optimistic,” he added. “I really am.”

Biden has spent the past few days delivering a final campaign message nationwide, hoping voters will show up for congressional Democrats after the party secured funding for infrastructure, clean energy and manufacturing, as well as legislation to lower drug prices, enhance gun control and improve health care for veterans.

LAS VEGAS — Democrats have struggled to break through this election cycle with existential concerns about the future of democracy and many GOP candidates’ denial of the 2020 election results.

“I understand that democracy might not seem like a top priority right now,” former president Barack Obama conceded this week at a rally in Nevada, where Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) and Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) are among this year’s most vulnerable incumbents, and an election denier, Jim Marchant, could win the secretary of state race to oversee voting in a 2024 battleground.

Maxwell Frost, a Democratic congressional candidate from Florida who will probably become one of the first members of Gen Z in Congress, tells The Washington Post why “world building” is the best way to get his generation to the polls

Democrats’ gloom about the House has left the Senate as a final bright spot — even as tightening races there also make some Democrats more nervous. “The Senate has really been one of our shining lights of hope,” said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who points to “flawed” GOP nominees and spoke bluntly Friday about his feelings of unease about House.