PHOENIX — For the first time in as long as anyone can remember, Arizona’s largest public school district isn’t opening its schools to voters as polling sites.

The reasons have been building for years, but the final straw for Mesa Public Schools officials came last November with a small, low-turnout election that became mired in misinformation and menace.

“It was very chaotic,” Assistant Superintendent Scott Thompson recalled. “It was overwhelming.”

Although voting was supposed to be done mostly by mail, mistrust led many voters to drive to the schools to fill out their ballots in person, causing traffic jams and confrontations. Voters confused school staff for election workers and harangued them. Some accused school staff of “disenfranchising voters” for hosting secure ballot drop boxes.

“I couldn’t imagine it in 2024,” Thompson said. “We just don’t know how to make it work.”

For generations, public school gymnasiums, classrooms and cafeterias have been fundamental to American elections. But when voters in Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and more than half of this swing state’s registered voters — show up to make their voices heard in November, chances are, it likely won’t be at a school. Some will instead head to rented-out storefronts. Others to aquatic centers. Or even a funeral home.

In the eight years since Donald Trump was first on the ballot, hundreds of schools throughout this fiercely contested battleground county are no longer willing to assume the risks associated with holding elections. In 2016, 37 percent of county polling locations were schools, according to a Washington Post analysis of data obtained through a public records request. So far this year, it’s 14 percent.

Heightened school safety protocols and sustained attacks on voting systems and the people who run them — largely by Trump and his supporters — have prompted school leaders across America in both red and blue states to close their doors to the democratic process, according to interviews with nearly 20 school district leaders, county officials, school safety officials and election experts. In at least 33 states, the law says public buildings, including schools, can or should be made available as polling locations. In many districts, administrators now cancel classes on Election Day.

The challenge has been especially acute in Arizona, where Trump’s narrow loss in 2020 inspired ceaseless conspiracies, false assertions that his and other GOP losses were illegitimate and death threats against county leaders who oversee voting and the workers on the front lines of running elections. Trump allies like Kari Lake, a Republican who lost her 2022 race for Arizona governor and is now running for the Senate, have empowered self-styled election-fraud detectors who are critical of both elections and the public school system.

Schools in the state can opt out of elections if principals say they don’t have enough space or if the safety of students is at risk. Administrators say there is little upside to taking part in an exercise that can draw divisiveness and intimidating scenes — creating a crisis for election officials who must provide convenient and accessible voting locations.

“In this environment, where you have people with body cameras and weapons that are being brandished, that is a concern — that is intimidating for many people,” said Scott Menzel, superintendent of the Scottsdale school district. “It just takes one flash point to ignite something that’s catastrophic and I absolutely don’t want that to happen on any one of my campuses.”

The trendline endangers the very voting method that Trump and many of his supporters have spent the past four years demanding: in-person voting.

The decline of school participation could confuse voters accustomed to stopping by familiar institutions to vote, experts said, adding an extra step to find a voting center that some people might be unwilling to take. Public schools are often core to the identities of communities big and small, and their proximity to voters and large spaces make them ideal to accommodate crowds and voting equipment.

Maricopa County has had to scramble to find replacements, often resorting to renting privately owned spaces, including those in shopping malls. Officials have budgeted nearly $1 million to lease voting locations this year, up from $53,000 in 2016.

“We cannot provide an in-person voting model without the support of our community,” said Scott Jarrett, a county elections director. “That’s schools, it’s churches, it’s community centers, it’s trusted buildings inside of our communities. It is a civic duty and a responsibility that we all share to make sure that we have a strong democracy.”

Location scouts for democracy

Maricopa County has a three-person team in charge of finding polling sites. They have grown accustomed to hearing the refrain: “Sorry.”

Late last year, they began planning for this year’s presidential election, according to election officials. They spend days driving from one edge of the county’s boundaries to the other. As one of the fastest-growing areas in the nation, new opportunities are literally built every election cycle, and officials said the team scribbles addresses into scouting notebooks.

The team examines records from the county assessor’s website, looking for large properties and contact information. They even stumbled upon retired NBA star Charles Barkley’s home, which seemed large enough to host a site, although election officials said they did not ask him.

The team sizes up everything from building space to parking lots and determines if they meet all sorts of requirements, such as accessibility for those with disabilities. They email and call schools, town halls, commercial building managers and others who previously opened their doors or may consider doing so for the first time.

Ahead of the elections in 2022, they emphasized their “desperate need” of polling places, according to emails reviewed by The Post. This year they’re instead stressing the need for community involvement in democracy.

Many declined, citing parking, insufficient space or no reason at all. Over the past four years, 159 locations stopped serving as sites — including 28 schools, according to The Post’s analysis.

In 2016, schools made up 239 of the county’s 644 polling locations during the general election, according to The Post’s analysis. Four years later, amid the pandemic, the county changed its rules to fully allow voters to cast their ballots at any polling location instead of an assigned precinct, reducing the overall number of locations for the general election to just 175. That year, 27 schools participated.

There has been no rebound, as election officials had hoped: For a July 30 primary, just 31 of 221 polling locations were expected to be schools, as of June 28. General election locations have not yet been finalized but will likely be similar.

“This is people making a cost-benefit analysis,” said Bill Gates, a Republican county supervisor. “The costs are perceived as being greater because it could create issues or bring threats of violence — or even violence. And by hosting a vote center, could they be pulled into a conspiracy? Is it worth it?”

Curtis Finch, a superintendent from a school district north of downtown Phoenix, said he considered hosting a polling site.

“Heck no,” he instinctively thought to himself. “Have you been reading the newspapers lately?”

In 2022, he had to tell a man who showed up with a firearm in this open-carry state that weapons were not allowed on school property, he recalled. And he said belligerent voters yelled at his staff over lines.

“In the old days, it was fun, and people were all excited to come vote — red, blue, green, didn’t matter what your party was, they weren’t yelling and screaming at each other,” Finch said. “It wasn’t a big production. Well, now it’s a big production.”

After weeks of negotiating, Finch agreed to allow a district office to be used as a polling site — only because children can be easily separated from voters, he said. He also offered up a bus parking garage.

“I have been trying to be a good neighbor,” he said.

High state of ‘uncertainty and anxiety’

Over the past two decades, amid school shootings and heightened safety protocols, many schools across the country began bowing out of participating in elections. The covid-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated the pullback, as administrators worried about the spread of the deadly virus. And amid deepening Republican distrust of institutions and elections, it has been difficult to recruit those schools back, according to school and election officials, and a national report that examined where people vote.

“We’re in the highest state of ambiguity, uncertainty and anxiety around school safety than we’ve ever been in my more than three decades in this field,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, which consults for school districts. School leaders he works with “are on edge sometimes to the point where, quite honestly, we’re telling people to stop and breathe. To exhale.”

Schools that are able to move polling away from their campuses have done so, but many cannot, often because of state laws requiring that they serve as voting sites if asked. Those school districts have increasingly held staff-only training days on Election Day, he said.

“The schools that have gotten rid of it are happy that they did, and they’re not going back,” Trump said. “Those that still have it will tell you privately, ‘No, I wish it wasn’t here, but we’re stuck with it and we’re doing the best we can.’”

In some counties, the number schools that are hosting polling locations has gone up.

In Florida’s fast-growing Osceola County, some churches, YMCAs and other community institutions view participation in elections as burdensome, exacerbating “polling place deserts,” said Mary Jane Arrington, the county’s supervisor of elections. When they refuse, she said she turns reluctantly to schools, which must participate under Florida law.

“It’s inconvenient all around,” she said. “But unfortunately, other community buildings just aren’t as receptive to us as they used to be.”

In New Jersey, Union County election board administrator Nicole DiRado is also relying more heavily on schools, which can lose state funding if they refuse to host polling places. The overwhelming majority of the county’s 156 polling places this year are schools, DiRado said.

“Look, I get it — I have two kids in public school,” DiRado said. Before she learned their school would be closed, she added, “I thought about keeping them home this year on Election Day.”

Push for civic participation

For all the challenges in Maricopa County, there have been wins.

Over the past four years, 109 new polling locations have emerged, including 15 school-affiliated ones and a large viewing room at a mortuary — although it’s only available on Election Day, election officials said, as it’s needed for funerals most other days.

The newly opened Mountain Park Health Center in a city west of Phoenix was designed to ensure that its community room and parking lot are large enough to accommodate voters. Though that clinic will not be a polling site this year because of election-calendar deadlines, two of its other locations will be.

“People feel healthy and stronger when they’re part of decision-making,” said Dr. John Swagert, the center’s chief executive.

And churches make up a higher proportion of polling places, a trend largely driven by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which emphasizes civic participation. The church planned to provide 27 buildings for this year’s primary, as of June 28, a decade high for the Church, according to The Post’s analysis.

“It really comes down to: we cherish the opportunity to live in a country where we have the privilege to vote,” said Candice Copple, the LDS Church’s Arizona spokesperson. “If we can be helpful by making it easier for people to have a nearby location to cast their vote, we’re glad to do so.”

Morse and Natanson reported from Washington.

ST. LOUIS — The mail carrier arrived to deliver the attack ads at the same time Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) arrived to dispel them.

“He’s about to hand you some lies about me,” Bush said as the carrier handed a glossy leaflet to a voter at a home in Old North St. Louis where she was canvassing for votes.

“All we ever see about you are negative ads,” the woman barked back at her as she pulled the handbill out of a stack of mail. “You need to get some of your own!”

“It’s because I called for a cease-fire in Gaza,” Bush replied. “That’s where all of this started.”

In Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, the pro-Israel lobby is pouring millions into a campaign to unseat Bush as part of a broader, well-funded effort to replace critics of the Israeli government and the war in Gaza, such as Bush, with more Israel-friendly Democrats. Outside groups have already spent over $15 million in this race, according to Open Secrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data. More than 80 percent of that money has gone toward ads opposing Bush and supporting her opponent.

A prominent member of the Squad of far-left Democrats, Bush was the first member of Congress to call for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, nine days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. She has described Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza — which, according to the Gaza health ministry, has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians — as a genocide. (Israel has denied the allegation in hearings at the U.N.’s top court.)

Bush is facing a tight primary contest Tuesday against St. Louis county prosecutor Wesley Bell, who is backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel group. By the end of June, Bell, a former member of the city council who pushed for policy changes after a police officer killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014, had four times more cash on hand than the incumbent.

Bell and Bush are liberal Black Democrats who were born and raised here and who entered public service after protests against police shooting unarmed Black men. Both are beating back allegations of improper behavior: Bush faces a federal investigation over allegations that she misused campaign funds to hire her husband to provide security, and Bell faces a civil trial that has been delayed until January over allegations that he fired people based on their gender, age and race. Both candidates have denied wrongdoing.

But other than their conflicting positions on Israel — which has not been mentioned in any of the ads AIPAC’s Super PAC, the United Democracy Project, has spent $8.86 million on — the dispute seems to be over political style. At the heart of the race is a question: Should voters here elect a candidate who will vote with the Democratic Party, or one who will challenge its direction?

AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups spent $17 million to help defeat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) in a June contest that became the most expensive House primary in U.S. history but could be surpassed by this race. Bush, an outspoken critic of Israel’s nine-month war in Gaza, is their next target.

The National Black Empowerment Action Fund, founded by AIPAC veteran Darius Jones, threw $1 million to the race last week. Jones described Bush as an “extremist” who uses her position to champion issues that will elevate her own profile to the detriment of the Black community.

At the voter’s home in Old North St. Louis, the constituent and the mail carrier said the huge numbers of ads had left them deeply confused about what to believe.

While Bush says her constituents resent having their tax money funding the bombing of civilians — drawing parallels to the Black Lives Matter movement — Bell said in an interview that she is “wrong” in her stance and that while he does not want to see “a single innocent civilian hurt,” he would continue to stand with Israel against a “genocidal” Hamas.

In interviews, most of the more than a dozen voters across the district did not know that a difference in opinions over the Middle East had triggered the flood of money into their local primary. Most also said that although they found the issue important, it would likely not be a deciding factor in who they vote for. In a district with a lower-than-average median household income and some of the highest rates of violent crime in the country, voters are worried about inflation, the cost of living and safety.

Jovan Manuel, 35, was one of the many voters who said that while the war embroiling the Middle East is awful, it would not affect his vote. “As far as I know, it’s a centuries old issue … We have to prioritize us, our children, our schools, instead of trying to fix that,” he said.

Spending a Saturday afternoon in a park in Ferguson with his family, he said he was not aware that pro-Israel groups were supporting Bell’s campaign. “I don’t know how I feel about that,” he said. “But people around here are fed up of Cori [Bush] and feel like she hasn’t done enough,” he said, adding that his vote would still likely go to Bush’s opponent.

Ads funded by the UDP and Bell’s campaign have largely focused on Bush’s two terms on Capitol Hill, pointing out how the activist-turned-lawmaker voted against several major Democratic or bipartisan bills that President Biden ultimately signed into law. Bell, who was also a liberal activist before becoming a prosecutor for the county, has pledged to work with the Democratic Party to pass major initiatives rather than “grandstand,” as he mentions in his campaign ad.

Patrick Dorton, a spokesman for UDP, said its endorsement of Bell was because of Bush’s “horrific anti-Israel record” as well as her “record of voting against President Biden and the interests of her own St Louis district.”

“I don’t know what Cori Bush is doing in Washington, but she’s not helping us here … She fights with Biden, she votes against our jobs, she gets nothing for us,” a man wearing a hi-vis jacket says in one of UDP’s ads. “I have had enough of Cori Bush, she did not deliver for St. Louis.”

In an interview, Bell denied being actively recruited by AIPAC, saying he had no communication with the group before he decided to run for Congress. He call AIPAC “an interest group just like clean energy is an interest group.”

Those in Bush’s camp see it differently. In her ads, Bush has said “St. Louis is not for sale,” attacking Republicans for meddling in the primary.

“Wesley Bell is taking money directly from the same Republican megadonors spending millions to elect Donald Trump and JD Vance to the White House,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, a liberal political action committee dedicated to electing far-left candidates to Congress that has poured $2.3 million into the race.

“It’s deceitful,” Bush said in an interview. “If AIPAC and UDP decided to run [Bell] because they want someone who is going to say that they stand 100 percent with Israel … then say that in the commercials.” She views it as a projection of AIPAC’s power. “What they want to do is show that if you go against them, then you are at risk,” she added.

Bush’s personal story resonates with many voters here. She catapulted into the national spotlight as an outspoken activist during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, which gave her momentum to unseat Rep. William Lacy Clay, a centrist Democrat who held the office for two decades. Bush has since spoken openly — given that abortion is on the ballot in Missouri in November — about being raped and getting an abortion when she was younger. She has also recounted facing eviction. Her most notable act in Congress may have been protesting the expiration of the pandemic eviction moratorium by sleeping three nights on the House steps in 2021, which ultimately resulted in a temporary extension of the policy.

But after four years, Bush’s outsize, outspoken personality now appears to polarize her district. Voters describe her either as one of the most authentic St. Louisans they could have in office and a breath of fresh air, or as someone who has prioritized her personal politics above her district’s interests.

One of her biggest local vulnerabilities is that she voted against Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, drawing the ire of local labor unions, many of which are now backing Bell.

Bush has also missed 187 votes between January 2023 and June 2024, making her fifth among lawmakers with the most missed votes, according to an analysis by Derek P. Willis of the University of Maryland and reviewed by The Washington Post. Of the four members who missed more votes, two were being treated for cancer, one had a spouse who died suddenly and one was running for president. Bush’s office acknowledges she missed 100 votes over three days for a covid diagnosis, 56 votes one week after the sudden death of a loved one, and several after surgery.

Bush remains under federal investigation into use of campaign finances over allegations of improperly hiring her husband to provide security. In a Jan. 30 meeting, Bush told staff that improperly using campaign funds could be viewed as “messed up,” according to an audio recording provided to The Post.

“One thing to remember is, there are people who are very, very angry with us, powerful people who are angry with us because we say ‘cease-fire,’” she said then.

Bush also told staff that the Justice Department was investigating her to prevent the appearance of a Democratic administration avoiding looking into Democrats. She encouraged her staff to stick by her — like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s followers did while he was being investigated — and suggested that the government was using similar tactics as COINTELPRO, a reference to the 1960s-era FBI counterintelligence program to try to derail uprising radical movements.

“Look at what’s happening, the history-making moment that we are in the middle of. Do we run from it because it’s tough … or do we push through and walk through it and come out on the other side victorious for the people who need us the most,” Bush told staff. “Can I make a mistake? Absolutely, we all can make mistakes. I’m not infallible.”

In a statement responding to both the audio and the investigation, Bush said it was her “understanding from my attorneys that the investigation appears to be concluded and we are just waiting on formal word from the Department of Justice,” which she thinks will “find no wrongdoing.”

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Bell awaits a civil trial in a discrimination lawsuit filed against him by a former assistant prosecutor who claims he fired her and other prosecutors because of their age, gender and race. And though he drew support from the activist community early in his career after making his name as someone who mediated between protesters and the police, many were dismayed when he declined to prosecute Darren Wilson, who killed Brown in 2014. The Department of Justice also declined to prosecute Wilson.

Bell’s detractors also accuse him of opportunism, pointing to the fact that he had been running against Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — a race he was unlikely to win — until shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, when he dropped out to challenge Bush. He said that decision was rooted in his view that Bush was more interested in issues he sees as lower priorities for people in the district.

Abbie Cheeseman reported from St. Louis and Washington, D.C. Marianna Sotomayor reported from Washington, D.C. Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report.

One way you know that CBS News’s new poll of the presidential race is bad news for former president Donald Trump is that Trump’s campaign is trying to spin it as unreliable.

In a “confidential memorandum” sent to reporters on Sunday, a data consultant for the campaign argued that the poll, conducted by YouGov, had been “manipulated” to show an advantage for Vice President Harris — a shift since the last CBS-YouGov poll released last month. It was a return to the days of poll “unskewing,” a central component of Republican optimism about Mitt Romney’s chances in the 2012 presidential election … which he then lost.

The objections from the Trump campaign can be dismissed most easily by considering the motivations of the two parties involved. YouGov is in the business of providing a wide range of businesses and media outlets with reliable evaluations of public opinion, the sort of effort that rewards accuracy over the long term. (YouGov is the fourth-best pollster in 538′s ratings.) Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, is in the business of presenting him as a political juggernaut with an unmatched level of support.

In other words, why the pollster would tweak a midyear presidential poll to benefit the Democrat is not clear. Why the Trump campaign would like to suggest that the poll was tweaked is obvious.

Even given its motivations, the response from Trump’s campaign to this one poll was odd. The poll, as the memo notes, shows a subtle shift in the race, one that puts Harris in front of Trump but still well within the margin of error. There are other indicators that the race is shifting in Harris’s direction (polling analyst Nate Silver’s average has Harris leading nationally and gaining in swing states), but modestly. This isn’t surprising, given that changes in political support are generally gradual. It’s possible that as the campaign progresses, Harris will open up a wider lead — or Trump will regain one. For now, though, the shift is small.

That said, the CBS poll does suggest that a wider Harris lead is quite possible. CBS has published three polls evaluating the presidential contest over the past month. The first asked respondents to choose between Trump and President Biden, his opponent at the time. The second asked for a choice between both Biden and Harris. The third, released this weekend, had only Harris. This lets us see both how the Trump-Harris race compares with the Trump-Biden one — and how Harris’s position has changed since she became the presumptive nominee.

The biggest changes are among independents and Black respondents. In the CBS poll released in the middle of last month, Trump led Harris among independents by 11 points; they’re now tied. Among Black respondents, Harris led by 55 points. Now she leads by 63 — much closer to the Biden-Trump split shown in 2020 exit polls, though still less heavily Democratic.

The bigger shift is seen when respondents were asked to select from a wider field of candidates. Here we see bigger shifts over the past month, in large part because respondents considering third-party candidates shifted their support to Harris. Notice, below, that the change in support for Trump is relatively subtle month-to-month. The change in support for his Democratic opponent, though, is often significant.

That’s in part because younger voters and non-White voters — two central components of the Democratic base — are more likely to back Harris in a larger field than they were to back Biden. In CBS’s new poll, both groups also indicated that the shift of the nomination to Harris made them more motivated to vote in November. Such questions should be taken with a grain of salt, but this comports with polling over the course of the year showing broad apathy about Biden’s reelection bid.

We can see how this works when looking at the trend in other questions included in CBS’s poll. Last month, half of Biden supporters said their vote was a function of wanting to stop Trump, not of support for the president. Now, about 4 in 10 indicate that their vote is against Trump — meaning that more respondents plan to cast an affirmative vote for Harris.

These numbers are consistent with YouGov’s broader finding that Harris has had a jump in favorability among poll respondents, itself a not-uncommon shift for a new candidate. Trump and his allies are trying to portray the enthusiasm for Harris’s campaign as inauthentic, but they might recall that before Trump’s campaign launch in 2015, his favorability among Republicans was well below water.

YouGov’s poll has also consistently asked respondents who have a preference between the two major-party candidates whether they would ever consider voting for the other party’s candidate. Overall, fewer Trump supporters say they would never support Harris than said they would never support Biden last month. That’s particularly pronounced among younger respondents, women and Hispanic respondents. (There were not enough Black Trump supporters to include in the chart below.)

Some of this is a function of the newness of Harris’s campaign. As her campaign is rolled out, it’s likely that opposition from many of those who support Trump will firm up. It’s possible, too, that she’ll peel away some of that support or, at least, soften the support in a way that dampens turnout in November.

It’s early. That “confidential” Trump campaign memo is correct in noting that the shift in the CBS poll is subtle, though its disparagement of the pollster is not. What this and other polling shows, though, is a shifted presidential contest, one that has moved from mirroring 2016 to one that is potentially, instead, mirroring 2020.

And in political polling, the direction of movement can be more important than scale.

The first night of last month’s Republican convention was centered on the sort of politics the party loudly eschews. The speakers included an array of supporters of former president Donald Trump who weren’t White or male or business leaders — representatives of other groups who were there, very clearly, to indicate that it is acceptable for Black people or Hispanics or union members to pull the lever for Trump.

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was one of those speakers. He is probably Trump’s most visible Black supporter, having effectively increased his profile among Trump’s base in recent years. He’s a cable-news fixture who, on Sunday, made the transition to broadcast for an appearance on ABC News’s “This Week.”

It didn’t go very well.

Among the news that occurred last week was Trump’s suggestion that Vice President Harris is some sort of race opportunist. During an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Trump claimed that Harris had been “Indian all the way” before “all of a sudden she made a turn” to identify as Black.

The California-born vice president is the daughter of a Black father from Jamaica and a South Asian mother from India. She graduated from the historically Black Howard University in 1986.

“This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked Donalds why Trump was “questioning” Harris’s identity. Trump has gone to great lengths to attempt to appeal to Black voters, which might be aided by presenting Harris as inauthentically Black. In a sense, that was the answer that Donalds offered.

“If we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was [the Associated Press] that said she was the first Indian American United States senator,” he said in his response. “It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate. Now she’s running nationally. Obviously, the campaign has shifted. They’re talking much more about her father’s heritage and her Black identity.”

The contrast between what Donalds says the Harris campaign is talking about “much more” and an old AP article is not just apples-to-oranges; it’s imaginary apples being compared with another store’s oranges.

Donalds’s answer mostly focused on criticisms of the Biden administration, but Stephanopoulos pressed him on the question of Trump’s attack on Harris. The legislator tried again.

“This is something that’s actually a conversation throughout social media right now,” Donalds said — not mentioning that this was mostly a function of Trump. “There were a lot of people who were trying to figure this out. But again, that’s a side issue, not the main issue.”

The two went back and forth for a while, with Stephanopoulos noting that Donalds repeatedly reiterated Trump’s assertion that there was something suspect about Harris’s presentation of identity. Ultimately it was Donalds, not the host, who suggested that they move on.

What Trump and Donalds were doing with their responses was leveraging Harris’s background to present her as inauthentic. Perhaps the inauthenticity was supposed to be about how Harris campaigned; perhaps it was supposed to be about who Harris actually was. But it is centrally dependent on the fact that we view race as strictly delineated in a way that is both overly reductive and that doesn’t carry over into other personal identifiers.

Consider Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio). He is a guy who prides himself on being a child of Appalachia, a veteran and someone with a background in venture capital. Depending on his audience, he highlights different elements of that experience — as he probably has for much of his life.

The term code-switching is generally used to describe people who adopt different mannerisms for different contexts, such as a member of a racial minority speaking to members of that community as opposed to a group of White Americans. But it also applies to the sort of shifts Vance might have adopted when interacting with his rural grandmother as opposed to his Yale University classmates.

There’s not necessarily anything contradictory in this; those are elements of who Vance is. There’s undoubtedly some opportunism, but this is politics, where pandering is the name of the game. But Harris offering herself as Black and South Asian — which, mind you, she generally hasn’t done — is presented as unacceptably insincere.

Americans have a very naive understanding of racial boundaries. This is in part because so much rides on racial identity in the United States, with racial categories helping determine social status and power. This disincentives nuance. The naiveté is in part, too, because racial boundaries have shifted throughout American history and particularly in recent decades. “Non-White” used to suggest “Black.” That is no longer the case.

It’s also because our systems for measuring race have been rudimentary. Most people don’t think about their racial identity until they’re prompted, often by some form presented to them. The Census Bureau does this, for example, giving people different boxes to check to identify what their background is. You can see the challenge here: If you’re Harris, what do you check? If she’s forced to choose, it doesn’t change who she is, just how she is recorded by the government.

Something interesting happened with the 2020 Census. There’s a field on the form in which Americans can offer additional details about their heritage — checking “White,” for example, but then adding that they have a Hispanic grandparent. In 2010, only the first 30 characters of those responses were catalogued by the Census Bureau. In 2020, the first 200 were — meaning that much more nuance about identity was recorded.

This contributed to a huge shift: From 2010 to 2020, the number of Americans who identified as “White and Some Other Race” soared from about 2 million to more than 19 million. In 2010, about 3 percent of Americans were categorized as multiracial. In 2020, more than 1 in 10 were. Some of this was an actual increase in diversity. (Younger Americans are much more likely to be non-White and multiracial than older Americans.) Some of it, though, was just a change in our capturing racial identity.

About a million Americans identified as “Black and Some Other Race,” as Harris might. Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data determined that there are probably about 8 million multiracial Black or Black Hispanic Americans. Were any of them running for president, it seems fair to assume that some might point out their familiarity with Black family traditions in some contexts and other traditions in other contexts. As with Vance’s presentations of economic class, this isn’t contradictory. It’s complementary.

Donalds could have offered Stephanopoulos a nuanced response about race when asked. But he was there as an ally of Donald Trump, so no such nuance was presented.

Perhaps you, like me, were curious over the weekend about how many people were seeking instructions on the classical art of harp-playing.

The answer to this is hard to ascertain specifically because there aren’t that many harpists (extant or aspiring) out there. In 2022, YouGov asked Americans what instruments they learned to play at any point in their lives; only 1 percent nodded when asked about playing the harp.

Among Republicans, that number dropped to zero percent. This is an important point because Republican politics are the prompt for the question in the first place.

On Saturday, The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey detailed how Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hopes to leverage outside groups for voter contact before Election Day. They sat in on a presentation from one of those groups, Turning Point Action.

Those contacting voters, staff organizers were told, should not lead with their support for Trump. Instead, the organizers were told that they should “research their marks and start reaching out through Facebook groups, community events, or neighborly gestures,” Arnsdorf and Dawsey documented, “such as recommending plumbers or harp teachers.”

This advice was admittedly at odds with the instructions on another slide: “BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL. BE NORMAL.” Harp-playing is demonstrably not a normal avocation.

You can see why this component of the story attracted so much attention, particularly given the synchronicity between “BE NORMAL” and the left’s recent use of “weird” to describe Trump. But this was not the most important element of the story.

The most important element, instead, was this:

“For the large armies of paid and volunteer door-knockers and canvassers who typically drive turnout in presidential elections, the campaign is largely relying on outside groups such as America First Works, America PAC and Turning Point Action.”

The Republican Party “had been planning an extensive field program, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post,” Arnsdorf and Dawsey report. Those plans, though, have been “discarded” after Trump and his campaign absorbed the party this year.

That takeover was by no means surprising. The year began with Ronna McDaniel leading the Republican National Committee (RNC), something she’d done since shortly before Trump took office as president. She was robustly loyal to Trump, even reportedly agreeing to drop her maiden name of “Romney” in deference to his hostility to her uncle. But she was also seeking to balance the needs of the party with the needs of its most influential figure, to deploy the power of the institution in ways that weren’t always centered around Trump.

And now she’s gone. The party’s new co-chairs include Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. Her first instinct when presented with a Republican Senate candidate who lightly criticized her father-in-law was to say that the candidate “doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party.”

Since it became obvious that Trump would be the party’s presidential nominee once again this year — since the first half of 2023, in other words — he’s finalized his control over Republican institutions either directly or indirectly. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that he would step down from caucus leadership ahead of the next congress. The party’s 2024 platform was a pastiche of Trump-authored Trumpisms. Like the Trump Organization before it, the GOP is mostly just a collection of brands under the control of Trump himself.

This brings us back to voter outreach efforts. Such efforts, generally categorized as “get out the vote” or GOTV, has not traditionally been one of the Republican Party’s strengths. The Democratic Party, bolstered by labor unions, had a history of strong GOTV efforts in part because its voting base was less likely to turn out of its own accord. Only in more recent elections did the national GOP match that push, investing in GOTV and in building a database of voters that could be used over multiple cycles and by multiple candidates.

For the party, this offered two benefits. It made their candidates more likely to win, given the increased ability to target specific low-propensity voters and push them to vote. More importantly, it built the party. It allowed them to collect new data on voters and on volunteers. It gave them something to offer to candidates — data and resources — that could help them shape candidate campaigns and policies. This increased the institutional power of the Republican Party.

But since he first became the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential contest, Trump has made obvious that he intends to suck every drop of institutional power out of the GOP for his use. It’s not that he’s hostile to the party necessarily, though he obviously is often at odds with its traditional power structure. It’s just that the party has something he wants — power and resources — and he’s going to use them as he sees fit … without worrying about replenishing them.

Who benefits from outsourcing GOTV efforts to Turning Point Action (TPA)? The youth-focused group can send its data on harp enthusiasts back to the GOP, but it’s safe to assume that won’t be a priority. TPA is interested in building its own institutional power, and is using its strong relationship with Trump to do so. It’s building its database of volunteers and using the lure of volunteering to help Trump to do so. And, importantly, its effort will be an institutional success even if Trump loses. The central incentive is on raising and spending the $100 million Turning Point Action is budgeting for this year.

The Republican Party is doing some organizing on Trump’s behalf. It plans, according to Lara Trump, to dispatch a small army of poll-watchers to polling places on Election Day to ensure that no rampant fraud occurs — as it didn’t in 2020 when the party similarly tried to encourage volunteers to keep an eye on voters. I encountered some in Pennsylvania the weekend before Election Day that year; the party’s original GOTV plan for the state this year noted (according to Arsndorf and Dawsey) that the failure to instead turn out voters was a central challenge to Trump’s reelection bid.

That’s the GOTV plan that has now been scuttled. But no worries. By November, Turning Point Action will know just which Pennsylvanians need plumbers and harp instructors. And they’ll all get fundraising emails from Turning Point for the next few years, whoever’s in the White House.

Some of the ugliest moments in the 2016 Republican nominating contest came when Donald Trump attacked Sen. Ted Cruz’s family. Trump baselessly suggested Cruz’s father might have participated in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and he both attacked the appearance of Cruz’s wife and threatened to “spill the beans” on her.

Cruz’s response? To call Trump a “sniveling coward” and telling him to “leave Heidi the hell alone.”

“I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” the Texas Republican added later at the Republican National Convention.

Cruz, of course, was soon supporting that same “sniveling coward” — and has done so for the past eight years. When it emerged recently that a Trump adviser was actually involved in planting the story about Cruz’s father in the National Enquirer, Cruz declined to re-litigate the issue.

Republican officeholders have spent the better part of a decade shrugging off Trump’s personal attacks and sidelining their pride in the name of being a team player. But on few counts has that been as pronounced as when he’s gone after family members.

Repeatedly this election cycle, Trump has invoked the spouses and family of Republicans who have criticized him. And repeatedly, those Republicans have stood by Trump because he’s the party’s standard-bearer.

The most recent example came this weekend in Georgia, when Trump made a point to attack not just Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) but also his wife, Marty.

Trump cited Marty Kemp having said recently that she isn’t planning to vote for Trump, even as her husband has come around to the party’s nominee.

“Now she says she won’t Endorse me, and is going to ‘write in Brian Kemp’s name,’” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Well, I don’t want her Endorsement, and I don’t want his.”

Trump added at a rally in Atlanta: “I haven’t earned her endorsement? I have nothing to do with her.”

The governor responded by echoing Cruz’s 2016 admonition, urging Trump in an X post to “leave my family out of it.”

But Kemp otherwise suggested he would still help Trump, saying, “My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats.”

The pattern was also evident at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where two former primary foes whose spouses Trump had criticized spoke on his behalf.

Trump during the primary campaign had suggestively pointed to the absence of Nikki Haley’s husband, Michael, who was in fact deployed to Africa as a member of the South Carolina National Guard at the time.

“Where’s her husband? Oh, he’s away,” Trump said, adding: “What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone.”

Trump also said Michael Haley should “come back home to help save her [Haley’s] dying campaign.”

Haley responded at the time by saying, “Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief.” But by last month, she used her convention speech to play up Trump’s foreign policy.

Trump also falsely accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) wife, Casey, of trying to “commit organized voter fraud” for comments she made about supporters from outside Iowa helping with her husband’s campaign there. His campaign cited the DeSantises’ “openly stated plot to rig the Caucus through fraud.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also endorsed Trump despite Trump’s racist attacks on his wife, Taiwan-born former Trump administration transportation secretary Elaine Chao. Trump has also made repeated insinuations about the couple’s ties to China.

McConnell endorsed Trump in March. At the time, he was asked about Trump’s attacks on his wife and about the senator’s assertion that Trump was culpable for Jan. 6. McConnell simply repeated his past promise to support Trump if Trump won the nomination.

Former Texas land commissioner George P. Bush has supported Trump even after Trump’s attacks on his father (former Florida governor Jeb Bush) and his uncle (former president George W. Bush), as well as social media posts suggesting his mother’s Mexican heritage influenced Jeb Bush’s immigration policies.

Trump has made little secret of his propensity for attacking family members. He’s done it repeatedly with judges, prosecutors and others who run afoul of him. Less than a year before the assassination attempt against him, he made light of an attack that left former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband, Paul, with serious head injuries.

There are certainly gradations to Trump’s invocations of spouses; the attacks on Chao and Heidi Cruz are in a different ballpark than what Trump said about Michael Haley and Marty Kemp.

But few things demonstrate Trump’s domination of the Republican Party like the fact that he can go there and still maintain the support of these Republicans. And he appears increasingly intent upon driving that home.