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“By the way, we’ve also … reduced the deficit by $350 billion my first year. This year, it’s going to be over $1.5 trillion, reduced the debt.”

— President Biden, in an interview with 60 Minutes, aired Sept. 18

Do Americans still care about budget deficits? President Biden appears to believe so, since he’s constantly crowing about his record of deficit reduction.

Just in the week before the 60 Minutes interview, the president mentioned having reduced the budget deficit by $350 billion six times, sometimes saying he wants to counter accusations that he’s running up the federal tab.

“By the way, when you hear your Republican friends or anybody else tell you, ‘Boy, they’re spending a lot of money,’ guess what? We cut the budget [deficit] $350 billion last year,” he said at an infrastructure event in Boston on Sept. 12. At a fundraising event in the city, Biden said: “Our Republican friends talk about, well, ‘Big Spendin’ Biden.’ Well, guess what? I lowered your deficit by $350 billion the first year and over $1 trillion this year.”

And when the president on Aug. 24 unveiled his plan for student loan forgiveness, which by some estimates would cost at least $500 billion over ten years, he remarked, “There is plenty of deficit reduction to pay for the programs — cumulative deficit reduction — to pay for the programs many times over.”

Biden never quite says his policies reduced the deficit. But when he says things like “I lowered your deficit,” he certainly signals that.

The president is playing a rhetorical shell game. He’s trying to dazzle listeners with impressive-sounding numbers. But the reality is he’s increased the budget deficit, not reduced it.

Budget deficit numbers are complicated — and often dull. So we will try to keep this as simple as possible.

The best way to determine a president’s impact on budget deficits is to look at what was predicted before he arrived — and then what happened after his policies have been enacted.

The Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper, in February 2021 estimated the budget deficit would fall dramatically in fiscal 2021 and 2022 because emergency pandemic spending would lapse. Budget deficits would be high in both years, but the red ink would begin to shrink.

When Biden says he cut the deficit by $350 billion in 2021, that’s a real number. In its latest report, the CBO says the figure is $360 billion.

But here’s the shell game.

Before Biden took office, CBO said in its early 2021 projection that the budget deficit was expected to decline $875 billion in 2021. But then Biden enacted additional covid relief funds and other new policies, resulting a more modest decline of $360 billion.

The budget deficit was expected to fall even more in 2022, and it has under Biden. But the combined 2021 and 2022 budget deficits were projected by CBO to be $3.31 trillion. Now, CBO says they will be $3.81 trillion.

In other words, Biden is bragging about reducing budget deficits even as he increased the national debt about $500 billion more than originally projected.

Of course, budget projections are not written in stone, especially in the long term. Technical factors, such as inflation increasing tax revenue, can change the underlying mix of spending and revenue. A White House official emphasized to the Fact Checker that outlays (spending) fell by about $950 billion from 2021 to 2022 but revenue also increased by around $800 billion.

The official noted that deficit share of gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of the economy, declined to 4.2 percent, compared to 4.6 percent in CBO’s February 2021 projection. “That shows that the strong recovery under President Biden didn’t just drive a strong recovery but also led to a better fiscal outcome,” the official said.

But Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), calculates that deficits would have been about 3.3 or 3.4 percent of GDP if everything were the same as in the February 2021 projection. The big difference was the impact of inflation, according to the CBO — and an unexpected $80 billion windfall in 2021 for the government for in the sale of telecommunications licenses.

In other words, again the data show the deficit picture has worsened under Biden.

Moreover, any suggestion that this claimed deficit reduction will help pay for student loan relief is disingenuous. The budget deficit soared in the first place because of a national emergency. “This is like a family going into debt for a one-time $100,000 medical expense, and then the next year claiming they can afford to borrow $50,000 for a sports car because the medical expense is over,” said Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute.

Now that we have examined the budget impact of the first two years of the Biden presidency, let’s turn to the future.

Unexpected emergencies, such as the war in Ukraine, often put pressure on the federal budget. Biden managed to obtain passage of an infrastructure bill long sought by members of both parties. We take no position on whether certain programs are necessary or desirable. We’re just looking at the numbers — and they also show future increases in the deficit.

According to a new accounting by the CRFB, under Biden an additional $4.8 trillion in borrowing has been added in the 2021-2031 period.

“This $4.8 trillion is the net result of roughly $4.6 trillion of new spending, roughly $500 billion of tax cuts and breaks, and $700 billion in additional interest costs, partially offset by $400 billion of spending cuts and $600 billion of revenue-increasing policies,” CRFB said.

The policies that have boosted deficits included:

Biden’s covid relief bill ($1.85 trillion added to deficits).The fiscal 2022 spending bill ($625 billion).The bipartisan infrastructure bill ($370 billion).Health and disability benefits for veterans exposed to toxic substances ($280 billion).Boosting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by 21 percent ($185 billion).Health-related executive orders ($175 billion).CHIPS Act for semiconductor manufacturing expansion in the United States ($80 billion).Assisting Ukraine in its war with Russia ($55 billion).Student loan debt relief and repayment pauses ($750 billion).

On the other side of the ledger, the energy and health bill dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act was crafted to show about $240 billion in deficit reduction over ten years. But the bill would shrink deficits by only about $90 billion if a three-year extension of expanded health care subsidies were made permanent, CRFB estimated.

You know how it goes in Washington — a temporary measure often keeps getting extended if the benefits remain popular. And, for budget optics, extending a program for only three years costs less, on paper, than one in place for ten years.

Biden is citing real deficit-reduction numbers, but doing so in a way to mislead listeners.

The president is leaving out important context. The budget deficit was supposed to shrink as the massive spending caused by the pandemic faded.

Indeed, the budget-deficit picture, now and in the future, would have been better if not for Biden’s policies. He has every right to argue that those policies were needed. But he cannot suggest that they reduced the budget deficit.

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PHILADELPHIA — Ted Gardner sat on his front stoop watching hundreds of people across the street snake down the block and around a corner, marveling that he hadn’t seen a crowd like that since former first lady Michelle Obama campaigned in the same spot eight years ago for Gov. Tom Wolf (D).

This time, the people in line were waiting to see Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, who on Saturday afternoon held a campaign rally in a predominantly Black neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia, his first public visit to the city since launching his candidacy in February 2021.

Fetterman has centered much of his candidacy’s appeal on his ability to woo voters in more conservative parts of the state, where White working-class voters have migrated to Republicans in recent years. As he’s worked to attract those voters, it has remained unclear whether Black voters — a critical voting bloc for any Democrat to win statewide in Pennsylvania — would turn out for Fetterman, particularly in vote-rich Philadelphia.

Gardner, 55, and his next-door neighbor, Ronald Lamb, 52, who are both Black, have “Fetterman for Senate” signs in their windows.

“I like John Fetterman because he’s one of us,” Gardner said. “He stands for everything I stand for,” Lamb added.

Donna Bess, 56, who was standing on the stoop with Gardner and Lamb, pointed to a picture of Fetterman plastered on the side of a black truck selling campaign merchandise. “Look how he dress,” she said, referring to his trademark oversized sweatshirts. “He’s one of us.”

During the Democratic primary, Fetterman’s challengers tried to convince Black voters that he was not one of them. They raised an incident from 2013 when Fetterman, then mayor of the predominantly Black town of Braddock, a suburb of Pittsburgh, chased down an unarmed Black jogger, who he suspected may have just fired gunshots. Fetterman, who was armed with a shotgun, detained the man until police arrived. Fetterman has insisted he didn’t know the race of the person he pursued.

This month, a super PAC backing Fetterman’s rival, Republican Mehmet Oz, revisited the incident with a 30-second television ad intended to sow doubt with Black voters about the Democrat.

But, in interviews with a dozen Black leaders, strategists and voters in Philadelphia, no one brought up the nine-year-old story. Even state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a Philadelphia Democrat, who raised the issue when he was running against Fetterman in the primary and demanded an apology, said he wasn’t interested in looking backward. He criticized Oz and his allies for bringing it up.

“He is just throwing out anything he can throw out,” Kenyatta, who is Black, said. “He has no business being in a conversation about the Black community.

“What frustrates me, you cannot tell me that you care abut gun crime in this community and then oppose all the things that would actually deal with crime,” Kenyatta said, referring to GOP opposition to gun control. “That’s not a message to Black people, that’s a message to scare White people about Black communities.”

Earlier this week, Oz held a roundtable with Black Philadelphians and touted his “Plan to Fight for Black Communities,” which includes support for criminal justice laws. Oz and his campaign have attacked Fetterman over his work to release people from prison who were wrongfully accused, as well as some nonviolent offenders. The Oz campaign has specifically pointed to Fetterman’s role in the commutation of two brothers serving a life sentence for a murder they maintained for nearly 30 years they didn’t commit. When they were released, Fetterman hired them to work on his campaign.

Those brothers, Lee and Dennis Horton, flanked Fetterman at his Philadelphia rally, which drew a crowd of 600 people, about evenly divided between Black and White people, to the gymnasium of a recreation center. Fetterman, still recovering from a near-fatal stroke in May, spoke for a little more than 12 minutes. He spent much of that time mocking Oz as out of touch with Pennsylvania, delivering laugh lines to the friendly audience. He also touched on overhauling criminal justice laws, protecting abortion access, getting rid of the filibuster and raising the minimum wage as key issues.

The Horton brothers, who are Black, introduced Fetterman at the rally, sharing first how the Democrat was the first elected official to fight for them. Lee Horton said Fetterman told their sister, “I am going to fight to get your brothers out even if that means I lose every election after this.”

Fetterman, in his remarks, said he knew that this would be material for future opponents to use against him, but said, “I would never trade a title for my conscience.”

Fetterman is leading Oz in polls, although the race has tightened as both sides pour money into the race in the final weeks. Democrats see Fetterman as their best chance to flip a Senate seat, currently held by retiring Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, as they defend other seats around the country. Republicans need to gain only one more seat in the 50-50 Senate to take the majority.

Despite not having campaigned in the city during the primary, Fetterman narrowly won Philadelphia, beating Kenyatta and Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), who was the favorite of the Democratic establishment.

Several Black Democrats who attended the rally cited abortion and gun violence as issues motivating them to vote this year.

“Fetterman listens to women’s rights because if they take away women’s rights, what other rights are in store? Is it going to be voting rights? It’s already under attack,” said Verhonda Williams, 69, standing in the front of the line before the rally.

Other voters talked about Fetterman’s authenticity as driving their excitement about his candidacy. Dana Ancrum, 59, said she’s been listening to his ads and thinking, “he might just be the real thing.”

Asia Whittenberger, 23, and Alyvia Benson, 22, both doing a year with AmeriCorps, said they were excited to vote for Fetterman.

“I think, for me, I know I’m a very young voter, but I’ve never been more confident in a politician in my life or someone running,” Whittenberger said.

After the rally, Denise Smith, 64, stood outside with her brother, John Holmes, 54, and reflected on what they’d just experienced.

“His energy, his swagger, his vibe and his experience of knowing what it takes,” Holmes said, when asked why he’d be supporting Fetterman. “I’ll 100 percent back him up.”

Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee for Illinois governor, spent the summer bashing Chicago as “a crime-ridden, corrupt, dysfunctional hellhole.” But apparently, he’s had a change of heart. He recently admitted that he was living atop the city in the John Hancock Center, one of Chicago’s biggest skyscrapers.

Bailey’s persistent anti-Chicago rhetoric presents a political quandary for the candidate: His criticism of the city and its Democratic leadership is cheered by his hard-right supporters, but he also needs the support of voters in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs to win in November.

Bailey, 56, a state senator from largely rural downstate Illinois, is running against Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is seeking his second term. He represents a sharp contrast to the past three Republican Illinois governors, who have won by flexing fiscal conservative values and advocating for business-friendly policies, while remaining relatively moderate on social issues.

By contrast, Bailey, who has the endorsement of former president Donald Trump, frequently quotes Scripture in public and supports a total ban on abortion. He earned his reputation as a provocateur within his party for sponsoring legislation to separate Chicago from the rest of the state.

While his hard-right rhetoric and positions helped Bailey in the primary, they are unlikely to help in a general election where Republicans need to peel away voters from Chicago and its five collar counties. That region controlled by Democrats is denser in population and more racially and ethnically diverse than more rural regions of Illinois, where the population tends to be either stagnant or shrinking. President Biden only needed to win 14 of the state’s 102 counties to beat Trump by 17 percentage points in 2020.

John Jackson, a political scientist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, said Bailey needs to “appeal to independents and Republicans who are more moderate and not prone to getting on board automatically with him.” While Trump’s endorsement helped tip a contentious six-person primary in his favor, Jackson said “it’s not nearly enough” to win the general election.

Bailey, who operates a large family farm that produces corn, wheat and soybeans in downstate Xenia, located about 250 miles from Chicago, is more in his element when talking to voters far outside the city. Addressing a crowd of farmers in rural McLean County last month, Bailey described Chicago in almost apocalyptic terms. He compared it to “the O.K. Corral with shootouts and homicides every night.” At a campaign event this month, he called Democrats Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx “the Three Musketeers of crime, chaos and tragedy in the city of Chicago.”

This month, he also staged impromptu media events at sites of gun violence in an effort to suggest that Democrats don’t care about victims and to present himself as an outside catalyst for change. In one exchange with a reporter, however, he admitted to living in one of Chicago’s most prominent high-rises. He said he wanted to “immerse” himself in the city’s “culture.”

Pritzker has portrayed Bailey as too extreme for Illinois. During the primary, Pritzker and the Democratic Governors Association spent $30 million in ads attacking a moderate Republican mayor from the Chicago suburbs. Critics said the governor wanted to ensure that Bailey would be his general election opponent.

Bailey and Pritzker have agreed to two debates in October.

The governor has cited comments Bailey made in a 2017 Facebook video, in which he said the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to abortion, a comment that many faith leaders blasted as insensitive. In August, Bailey doubled down, telling a radio interviewer that “the Jewish community themselves” told him he was right, without specifying which congregations he consulted. Hours after a gunman killed seven people and critically injured two dozen others on the Fourth of July in Highland Park, a suburb north of Chicago, Bailey posted a Facebook video in which he praised law enforcement and told viewers to “move on and let’s celebrate the independence of this nation.”

Bailey’s defense of those remarks has dominated several news cycles since he won the primary in June and has made some top Republicans nervous. At a Republican gathering at the Illinois State Fair in August, state Rep. Jim Durkin, House Republican leader, would not say if he supported Bailey. Instead he emphasized the party’s goal of picking up seats to reduce the stark disadvantage to Democrats, who hold a 73-45 majority in the House and a 41-18 majority in the Senate.

Illinois Republican Party Chairman Don Tracy said Bailey is a “really genuine guy” who is “not a polished politician.” That image is also key to his appeal, especially downstate where Bailey is a member of the so-called “Eastern Bloc” of Republican state legislators who opposed Pritzker’s Covid-19 policies.

Bailey, who has served in the legislature since 2019, came to prominence in 2020 when he filed a lawsuit against Pritzker, claiming the governor had exceeded his legal authority when he issued a stay-at-home order at the beginning of the pandemic. When the Illinois General Assembly met in person in May 2020, Bailey was the lone holdout who refused to wear a mask, a decision that forced a vote to physically remove him from the proceedings.

The moment solidified Bailey as a fighter, said Tracy.

“For those of us who thought lockdowns without legislative involvement were either a bit excessive or overly wrong, he was one of the few people who was really willing to stand up and fight that,” Tracy said. “That gave him not just publicity, but a reputation for someone who was willing to speak truth to power.”

Bailey’s early momentum is tied to Trump, who appeared with him at a rally the weekend before the primary. But since then Bailey has largely avoided answering reporter questions about the former president. In a recent radio interview, however, Bailey said that the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort was “very upsetting” and made him “very concerned about the future of our country.”

Bailey is part of a wave of Illinois Republicans who scored primary wins over more moderate rivals. Kent Redfield, a professor emeritus with the University of Illinois and the Institute for Government and Public Affairs, said these victories are largely due to an energized base of grass-roots activism among Trump supporters and a moderate wing of the GOP “that’s been in decline” in recent years. Redfield said that top Republican leaders who supported moderate candidates are now concerned that their original goal of breaking their party’s super-minority status in the General Assembly has become even more of an uphill climb.

“The intention was to reestablish credibility, increase numbers in the legislature, and rebuild their funding base. I don’t think having Bailey on the top of the ticket is helping with that,” Redfield said. “Now, Republicans are in a place where instead of being in expansion mode, it may be survival.”

Tracy, the state GOP chair, said that Trump “is going to be a factor” in the election, but not as much as elsewhere in the country. He said that Illinois Republicans win when they focus less on Trump and more on what they perceive as failures of the Biden administration and “what happens when you walk away from common-sense” economic policies and toward “progressive socialist ideas.” Pritzker, he said, is vulnerable on issues voters care about like crime and high gas and grocery prices. He dismissed measures Pritzker instituted, like a gas tax freeze and suspension of the grocery tax, as “election-year gimmicks.”

Steve Boulton, chairman of the Chicago Republican Party, said Bailey’s opportunities are with minority communities in Chicago and its suburbs who tend to be more conservative on social issues and are those most affected by inflation and crime. This is especially true for Black Chicagoans, whose population has shrunk by nearly 33 percent since 1980. “The Democratic ethos is not working anymore for them,” Boulton said.

Bailey marched in a prominent South Side parade in August and his running mate, former conservative talk show host Stephanie Trussell, is Black and a Chicago native. She also has come under fire for recent anti-gay social media posts.

Boulton says voters shouldn’t be misled into believing Bailey is a Trump acolyte. “What’s emerging in the Republican Party is not anti-government, it’s smarter government,” he said. “Darren Bailey signs on with that.”

Donald Trump put his full force behind Ron DeSantis in 2018, rallying with the GOP gubernatorial candidate in his home state of Florida. “My great friend,” Trump said. “A tough, brilliant cookie.”

Four years later, Trump has yet to endorse DeSantis as he seeks a second term and is unlikely to campaign for him, according to Trump advisers with knowledge of the former president’s intentions. The two men once spoke regularly, a close Trump adviser said, but, “those days are gone.” The two haven’t talked since early in the summer, people familiar with the matter said, and DeSantis has not asked Trump to campaign for him.

A favorite to win reelection, DeSantis is trying to assert his national influence, appealing to Trump’s supporters and touring swing states to headline rallies for other Republicans on the ballot this fall, as he subtly distances himself from Trump in speeches, while not explicitly criticizing the ex-president.

Although neither has announced any firm decisions, Trump and DeSantis are widely seen in the Republican Party as potential rivals for the 2024 presidential nomination. The public contrasts and behind-the-scenes tensions reflect how formidable an emerging adversary the Florida governor has become to Trump, even as the 45th president polls far ahead of the pack in a hypothetical primary match-up.

At a recent gathering DeSantis had with a few dozen donors in Arizona, “everyone asked him about 2024,” according to Don Tapia, a donor who attended and who served as an ambassador in the Trump administration. DeSantis, Tapia said, “is building a base with the Trump people,” but, “right now the Republican base is Donald Trump’s base.”

In recently flying migrants from Texas to a liberal enclave, Martha’s Vineyard, DeSantis took a polarizing step that Trump considered as president but eventually scuttled. It drew attention and outrage from Democrats and human rights advocates and delighted the conservative base on an issue core to Trump’s political identity: immigration.

The former president tracks DeSantis’s public appearances and polling numbers, according to his advisers who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. He has also soured on DeSantis, repeatedly criticizing him and telling advisers: “I made him.”

“He’s ungrateful,” Trump has said, according to two people close to him. “I knew him from watching Fox, and he’d done a good job about me and other things. He’s an Ivy League baseball player,” Trump has said, explaining his 2018 endorsement, according to a person who has visited his Mar-a-Lago Club and heard him talk about DeSantis. “I don’t understand what happened here. I don’t understand why he doesn’t appreciate me more.”

Trump recently polled a room of visitors at his Bedminster golf club about what they thought of DeSantis, according to a person present for the gathering.

Much can change in two years, as reflected in recent presidential primaries in which early front-runners fizzled out, and the futures of DeSantis and Trump are clouded by several external factors, including the outcome of the Florida governor’s race and multiple legal efforts against Trump and his allies. For the moment, however, Trump is broadly regarded in the GOP as the favorite for the nomination, should he run, and DeSantis is seen as his most formidable prospective competitor.

Trump and his advisers widely expect DeSantis to take him on in 2024, multiple people in the former president’s orbit said. Yet Trump has not been adversarial to the current governor because he is favored to win a second term as a Republican in Florida, and advisers said they see little value in open animosity. Some Trump advisers said DeSantis has tapped into the conservative zeitgeist on cultural issues in a way that Trump did in 2016 but has struggled to do since leaving office. One Trump adviser said is it not in anyone’s interest for the two sides to be fighting right now.

Not long after DeSantis claimed credit for flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Trump took to social media to highlight an article in which a GOP strategist argued it would be risky for DeSantis to challenge the former president. DeSantis and his team took note, with one adviser scoffing that Trump was jealous he didn’t come up with the idea, according to a person familiar with the reaction. DeSantis advisers have said recently that they are willing to risk Trump’s ire, this person said.

DeSantis has declined to rule out running against Trump in 2024, annoying Trump. “Nice try,” he said on Fox News over the summer when asked. According to Tapia, DeSantis responded to 2024 queries at the Arizona gathering with: “I’m governor of Florida, and I’m running for reelection in Florida.”

Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, said in a statement that “Republican leaders everywhere continue to follow and advance President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda, including highlighting and addressing the crisis on America’s southern border.” He said “the media would rather focus on fake gossip, because the reality is President Trump is stronger than he has ever been.”

DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

DeSantis has cast himself as a combative conservative in Trump’s mold, denouncing the media and the political establishment. Running for governor as a congressman in 2018, he released an ad in which he encouraged his daughter to “build the wall” with blocks, and his wife declared, “People say Ron’s all-Trump.” He shot up in the polls after Trump endorsed him.

But since then, the former Navy legal adviser has built his own brand while swearing off coronavirus restrictions and vaccine mandates, championing legislation that restricts school discussions of gender and sexual orientation and battling with Disney over their face-mask mandates and other policies he has derided as “woke.”

Rather than focus solely on his reelection in Florida this fall, DeSantis has crisscrossed the country to rally with Trump-aligned candidates, visiting battleground states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Speaking to top Republican donors earlier this month at an Orlando Four Seasons, DeSantis questioned the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccine for which Trump has taken credit and said that while Trump and his administration had put up some “good fights” on cultural issues, liberals had been winning for the last “five or 10 years.” He raised concerns about the deficit growing in the last three years, some of which Trump was in office.

DeSantis surpassed Trump in fundraising during the first six months of the year, and with more than $177 million raised through early September, his political operation has broken records for a gubernatorial race, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political donations.

“He does not strike me as someone sitting around thinking, I’m not going to do this because it’s going to annoy President Trump,” said Republican strategist Rob Jesmer, speaking of DeSantis.

Trump and DeSantis’s social circles overlap — they were at a Mar-a-Lago wedding and made amiable small talk, according to a person who attended the wedding. So do their donors, adding another layer of complexity to their rivalry.

Billionaire businessman Phil Ruffin — a major Trump donor who shares ownership of a hotel with the former president — gave $100,000 this year to DeSantis’s political action committee. At the same time, DeSantis has attracted some donors critical of Trump, such as Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who has said he never donated to the former president.

“There are a lot of establishment Republicans that would come home for DeSantis,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who served with DeSantis and now identifies as an independent. DeSantis, he said, “has adopted Trump’s playbook in Florida and he does Trump-like things … but he’s actually arm’s-length from Trump.”

Republican operatives and donors who have interacted with DeSantis said he sometimes struggles to connect with people, and his speeches are often didactic — not dazzling the crowd. It is unclear how his insular orbit would exist in a sprawling presidential operation, some of the operatives and donors said. And some of Trump’s advisers said they expect him to lose his political luster over time.

Trump’s advisers said they see weaknesses in DeSantis that could inform their strategy against him, should they be pitted against each other in 2024. They argue that he’s not tested on a national stage and that he is not a compelling speaker. Some people who have met DeSantis earlier this year described the governor as a poor conversationalist with donors.

Shiree Verdone, a former finance co-chair for Trump’s campaigns in Arizona, said she talks to people “every day that say, ‘Wow I really like Ron DeSantis, I think he would be an excellent president, but you know, if Trump runs and we get the nomination, we’re all in for him.’”

DeSantis donor Dan Eberhart said many in the governor’s orbit are urging him to run in 2024. Eberhart added that advisers to DeSantis have told him the governor believes Chris Christie — the former New Jersey governor who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2016 after seizing the national spotlight years earlier — “missed his moment.”

Some Trump donors have said that, after donating to DeSantis, they received displeased phone calls from Trump urging them to stop supporting the governor and saying he may run against Trump, according to a person who works with donors. The person also said some Trump donors seeking a relationship with DeSantis prefer him as a presidential candidate.

Trump has been active on the campaign trail this year, choosing sides in contested primaries and hitting the trail in the general election. He campaigned for Rep. Ted Budd, the GOP’s Senate nominee in North Carolina, on Friday in Wilmington, N.C.

At rallies, Trump has repeatedly suggested he might run for president again, and he remains hugely popular with GOP voters. But a growing tangle of legal inquiries hangs over his plans: The Justice Department is investigating efforts to block certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and the attorney general of New York on Wednesday filed a lawsuit accusing Trump, three of his children and executives at his company of manipulating property valuations.

Still, Republican leaders — including DeSantis — rallied around him this summer when the FBI searched his Florida residence to retrieve classified papers, part of a criminal probe into possible mishandling of government documents that Trump kept after leaving office.

Once a regular Trump booster on Fox News, DeSantis has hardly mentioned the former president in his latest rallies. Joining Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels in Green Bay, Wis., last Sunday, DeSantis mentioned Trump once while touting the Martha’s Vineyard flights and criticizing liberal-leaning cities that call themselves “sanctuaries” for immigrants.

“That was a way to virtue signal against Trump and do all this other stuff,” he said. “They’re basically doing it so that they feel good, but they don’t want to actually have to deal with the consequences of the policies that they advocate for all of you.”

While the Martha’s Vineyard move drew widespread praise from Trump-aligned Republicans, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was critical, saying in a recent interview on Fox News he was troubled to see people “used as political pawns.”

Some GOP strategists said the decision to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard highlighted how successfully DeSantis has echoed Trump’s approach — and refined it.

“DeSantis is every bit as good as Trump is at creating earned media appearances, earned media moments that help him stay in the news and help him appeal to conservative voters,” said strategist John Feehery.

At a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, earlier this month, many staunch supporters said DeSantis should be Trump’s vice president first — and struggled to imagine the two running against each other. Some blamed the “left wing media” for hyping up a potential 2024 clash.

John Snyder, a 47-year-old rallygoer from Youngstown, said he would think less of DeSantis if he challenged the former president in 2024: “It ain’t his turn.” Connie Vanasdale, who was visiting from Florida, sang DeSantis’s praises but simply pointed to her embroidered hat when asked who should run for president. “Yes I’m a Trump 2024 Girl Get Over It,” it read.

The question was more complicated for Frank Natale, who stopped to buy Trump gear for his chihuahua named Killer.

“Don’t you bash me,” he told the woman selling the gear, preemptively, when asked who he wanted to run in 2024.

“DeSantis,” she guessed.

“Trump is my 100 percent favorite,” Natale assured her. “However, he has to dump that stolen election grift.” (At the rally that evening, Trump reiterated his false claims, echoed by many Republicans, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.)

“Even though we know it was stolen,” the woman replied.

Natale explained that his next two favorites were DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, another potential 2024 candidate who has made national headlines for rejecting coronavirus restrictions and first busing migrants to liberal cities. Then, Natale raised a possibility unthinkable to many Trump fans.

He would back DeSantis and Abbott if Trump doesn’t seek the GOP nomination — “or get the nomination,” Natale said.

Lawyers for former president Donald Trump have entered a high-stakes legal battle seeking to limit the scope of former top White House aides’ testimony to a federal grand jury that is investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, according to people familiar with the matter.

The action sets up a potentially precedent-setting struggle that could affect the Justice Department’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, and address the scope of a former president’s assertion of executive or attorney-client privilege to preserve the confidentiality of advisers’ communications.

The specific contours of the fight, reported first by CNN, are unclear. One person familiar with the matter said that the dispute concerned the testimony of two top aides to former vice president Mike Pence — his former chief of staff, Marc Short, and former counsel, Greg Jacob. The men appeared before the grand jury in July and answered some, but not all, questions, based on Trump’s assertion of privilege, people familiar with the matter said.

Grand jury matters are typically secret. However, the case spilled into light after Trump attorneys M. Evan Corcoran, John P. Rowley III and Timothy C. Parlatore were seen at federal court in Washington on Thursday with no publicly scheduled matters, along with a lead Jan. 6 federal prosecutor, Thomas Windom. A person with knowledge of the matter said Trump’s representatives were present for a Jan. 6-related proceeding.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation.

Trump’s attorneys and a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. said they could not comment on grand jury matters. Efforts to reach representatives for Short or Jacobs were not immediately successful Friday night.

A dispute over executive privilege and compelling a witness’s testimony before a grand jury would typically be heard by Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington. While Howell has in the past moved quickly, any appeal to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia would probably extend through the end of the year, and the arguments would be unlikely to be made public before then. A spokeswoman for Howell did not respond to a request for comment.

In most fights over executive privilege — which are often between Congress and the executive branch — both sides usually compromise and settle their differences rather than risk a precedent-setting defeat for either branch of government.

But the stakes of the criminal investigation into Trump’s actions during the presidential transition after he lost reelection in November 2020 may make negotiation more difficult.

The Justice Department is questioning witnesses about conversations with Trump, his lawyers and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, people familiar with the matter have said. Prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021 and his pressure on Pence to overturn the election. Those lines of inquiry are separate from the investigation into classified documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home — though that case, too, has produced legal fighting over issues of executive and attorney client privilege.

Both Short and Jacob have unique windows into those events. Both were with Pence on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. They testified with Pence’s approval before a House select committee conducting a parallel investigation, although the former vice president declined to do so himself. Jacob also told the committee that two days before the riot, private Trump attorney John Eastman conceded that the plot to have Pence help overturn the election was illegal.

In other legal proceedings, attorneys for Trump have defended executive privilege claims, warning that rulings to the contrary could damage the presidency by weakening the confidentiality afforded to the conversations of top presidential advisers. They have argued that allowing a sitting president to waive executive privilege of a predecessor unilaterally also could politicize and defeat the purpose of the privilege.

However, Trump’s legal options to withhold testimony may have been limited by a string of court decisions since Jan. 6.

Courts have long held that White House claims of executive or attorney-client privilege are easier to overcome when the information is sought in a criminal proceeding rather than by Congress. The standard for prosecutors is whether they can show a witness is likely to possess information important to the criminal probe not readily available otherwise.

And even though lawmakers must meet a higher bar, courts since January have sided with Congress and rejected an attempt by Trump to withhold thousands of pages of White House communications and records from the House Jan. 6 committee, and a similar effort by Eastman to do so claiming attorney-client confidentiality.

News that a former adviser to the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is publishing a book billed as a “behind-the-scenes” look at the committee’s work came as a shock to most lawmakers and committee staff when it was announced last week.

Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman, is set to publish “The Breach” on Tuesday, just one day before the final public hearing of the Jan. 6 panel, which has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent unauthorized leaks, as well as keep its sources and methods of investigation under wraps.

Riggleman’s book announcement came in the form of a tweet touting his upcoming appearance Sunday on “60 Minutes” as his first time speaking publicly about the book. Lawmakers and committee staff were largely unaware that the former staffer had spent the months since leaving the committee writing a book about his limited work on staff — or that it would be published before the conclusion of the committee’s investigation, according to people familiar with the matter who, like others interviewed by The Washington Post, spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.

Senior staff previously confronted Riggleman after rumors circulated that he was working on a book about his work for the committee, according to a person close to the panel. In one exchange, Riggleman told colleagues he was writing a book on a topic unrelated to his committee work. In a later conversation, before his departure from the committee staff, Riggleman said he had been approached about writing a book related to the committee but that it would not be published before the end of this year.

The ex-congressman gave notice in April after assisting the panel for eight months, saying he was leaving to work at an unspecified nonprofit related to Ukraine. Riggleman and his book agent did not respond to requests for comment.

Riggleman also bragged about the committee’s work publicly and gave interviews — an unusual move for a congressional staffer. Earlier this year, he told a crowd of “Never Trump” Republicans at the National Press Club that he would show through his committee work that the effort to overturn the election was “all about money,” and mocked several of the people under investigation.

He stood outside with a range of Trump critics and told them he had just gotten new phone records and that they would be “explosive.” He declined to say what they were, but his comments tantalized those around him.

“I wish I could tell you about it,” he said of the data he was reviewing for the committee. “If I did, you’d be more shocked than you could imagine.”

“It’s all about the money,” he said. “I’m going to rip apart their ecosystem.”

The appearances rattled others who worked with the committee, and Riggleman eventually drew some anger from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who had initially pushed for his hiring, according to people familiar with the matter.

Riggleman, who split his time between Washington and rural Virginia, where he owned a distillery, has described himself as being in charge of the committee’s work analyzing call records, texts and online activities of those involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. But people familiar with his role note that the phone records were just one small piece of the sprawling and comprehensive investigation. “The work of the committee is not built on the bedrock of Denver’s efforts,” said a person familiar with his role.

Committee staff members were infuriated by Riggleman’s cable news tour earlier this summer during which he revealed private details about the staff’s work, according to people involved with the investigation. In a committee-wide email, staff director David Buckley wrote that he was “deeply disappointed” in Riggleman’s decision to publicly discuss their work and that his appearance was “in direct contravention to his employment agreement.” “His specific discussion about the content of subpoenaed records, our contracts, contractors and methodologies, and your hard work is unnerving,” Buckley wrote at the time.

In one of his appearances on CNN, Riggleman detailed his team’s work to link names and numbers after receiving a cache of text messages from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Calling the messages “a road map,” he contended the data obtained from the messages allowed the committee to “structure the investigation.” The cache of Meadows’s texts was obtained by CNN earlier this spring.

Macmillan Publishers’ description of his forthcoming book, which Riggleman co-authored with journalist Hunter Walker, teases “previously unpublished texts from key political leaders,” along with “shocking details about the Trump White House’s links to militant extremist groups.”

In an excerpt released ahead of his interview on “60 Minutes,” Riggleman revealed that the White House switchboard connected a phone call to a Capitol rioter on Jan. 6, 2021. “You get a real aha moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter’s phone while it’s happening,” Riggleman told “60 Minutes.” “That’s a big, pretty big aha moment.”

Riggleman also addressed claims he made in the book that he pleaded with the committee to push harder to obtain specific White House phone numbers. “I was one of those individuals, sadly, at the beginning, you know, where I was very, very aggressive about these linked connections, getting those White House phone numbers,” said Riggleman.

A statement from the committee underscored Riggleman’s “limited knowledge” of the investigation and threw cold water on Riggleman’s suggestion that the committee was not pursuing evidence aggressively enough.

“He departed from the staff in April prior to our hearings and much of our most important investigative work,” wrote committee spokesman Tim Mulvey. “Since his departure, the Committee has run down all the leads and digested and analyzed all the information that arose from his work. We will be presenting additional evidence to the public in our next hearing this coming Wednesday, and a thorough report will be published by the end of the year.”

Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said on Sunday that the committee was “aware” of the call but could not say anything specific about it. “We are aware of lots of contacts between people in the White House and different people that were involved obviously in the coup attempt and the insurrection,” Raskin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And that’s really what all of our hearings have been about. You know, we’ve had more than 20 hours explaining that this was an organized, coordinated attempt to subvert the electoral process.”

The committee has yet to reveal the topic of its final hearing but is expected to reveal new information after resuming investigative efforts during August recess. The upcoming proceeding follows eight hearings held over June and July that laid out a gripping and detailed account of efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“Some of the information we have found to various issues we’ll be presenting to the public for the first time in the hearing coming up,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “It will be the usual mix of information in the public domain and new information woven together to tell the story about one key thematic element of Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election.”

Lawmakers on the panel had previously said they hoped to unearth more information around the Secret Service and Defense Department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack after the committee learned that the two agencies wiped communications from phones of former and current officials.

Investigators also interviewed some of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries — including Mike Pompeo, Steven Mnuchin, Robert O’Brien and Elaine Chao — regarding internal conversations following the insurrection about invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of a president on grounds of incapacitation, mental health or physical fitness.

Amy B Wang contributed to this report.

When Jose joined the migrants behind a McDonald’s on a sunbaked San Antonio street earlier this month, he was running out of options. The 27-year-old had survived the perilous trek from Venezuela and safely crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, but now he had no place to go.

Like the others behind the restaurant on Sept. 8, he’d been kicked out of a shelter after three days. Immigration officials had warned them they couldn’t work legally yet. No one had any money to get to distant cities where friends or family might help.

That’s when a smiling blond-haired woman in a cowboy hat approached. Her name was Perla, she said. And she could fix all their troubles.

It was a pitch Perla had been making to other newly homeless migrants huddled on San Antonio’s streets. She drove a rented white SUV and promised food, jobs and transportation.

Jose trusted her. For the first time since coming to the U.S., he felt safe. “We thought she was a good person,” he told The Washington Post.

Nearly two weeks later, though, Jose is one of dozens of migrants who now question Perla’s efforts to entice them onto a flight that unexpectedly ended on the wealthy island of Martha’s Vineyard — a political operation engineered by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to gin up outrage over America’s border crisis.

Much remains unknown about the effort. While DeSantis has embraced his role in staging the flight, arguing that it protected Florida from “negative ramifications” of a border crossing surge, his office has been less clear about the purpose of nearly $1.6 million paid to a contractor, according to state records, and the role of state officials in developing the plan.

But Post interviews with several migrants directly recruited by Perla, as well as court documents and state records, paint a picture of a carefully orchestrated, taxpayer-funded operation with little apparent concern for the interests of the migrants caught in the middle. Florida officials began researching Texas’s migrant situation weeks before the flights, and a contractor with ties to the DeSantis administration later handled the efforts. Some migrants, meanwhile, say they were misled into signing documents after being lured into the trip with food and hotel stays.

“I don’t like the way they treated us,” said Jose, who made the journey to the border with two stuffed animals given to him as a gift by his 5-year old son, whom he left behind with relatives. “We’re human beings.”

DeSantis has reaped political benefits, grabbing center stage on an issue that once helped propel Donald Trump to the White House and putting Democrats on defense over the nation’s chaotic and overstressed immigration system. Republican leaders have embraced his tactics and begun fundraising off pledges to fly migrants to other blue-state enclaves.

But DeSantis also faces legal challenges, including an investigation by a Texas sheriff, who called it a “predatory” operation, a federal class-action lawsuit by the migrants alleging a “premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme,” and a Democratic lawmaker’s state lawsuit challenging the governor’s use of a $12 million migrant relocation fund.

The governor has brushed off the claims, saying all of the migrants got on the plane voluntarily.

“It is opportunistic that activists would use illegal immigrants for political theater,” his office said in a statement. “Florida’s program gave them a fresh start in a sanctuary state.”

Days before the flight landed in Martha’s Vineyard, DeSantis had given not-so-subtle hints about his plans. Speaking to a room of major GOP donors at the Four Seasons hotel in Orlando, he mused about going to Texas to “help.” Border crossers might be rounded up and sent somewhere — possibly to the wealthy island of Martha’s Vineyard. “Who knows?” he teased.

An extraordinary plan had already been set in motion.

The backdrop was the record surge of migrants who have crossed the southern U.S. border this year, driven by soaring violence and poverty in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Last week, border authorities topped 2 million arrests for the year, the most ever.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has responded to the influx by dispatching thousands of migrants on buses to far flung, Democratic-rich locales. In August, Florida law enforcement officials traveled to the Texas border cities of Del Rio and Eagle Pass to meet with staff from two Texas agencies involved in the state’s migrant busing program.

Florida officials “reached out to better understand the mission, see how it is being carried out and learn more on efforts they may be able to replicate in their own state,” said Ericka Miller, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

A Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesperson declined to say whether the Texas trips were tied to the migrant flights this month, citing an ongoing grand jury investigation into illegal immigration.

Thousands of those who make it into the United States have ended up at the Migrant Resource Center in downtown San Antonio. The shelter can house 600 people and has served more than 24,000 migrants since it opened in July.

In early September, it was packed as usual with new arrivals. Yerkyn Torres, 36, had left behind his wife and two children in Venezuela to spare them the arduous journey. A 40-year-old woman named Estrella had come from Peru with her 7-year-old daughter. “All I wanted was for my daughter to have a better life,” Estrella, who asked not to use her last name for fear of retribution from those involved in the migrant flights, said in Spanish. “That’s all I was thinking as I got her across that river.”

As Jose gave his account in Spanish of what happened, accompanied by his lawyer Julio Henríquez, he asked to be identified only by his middle name because of fear of retribution against family in Venezuela and from the Americans who he says misled him.

Jose had been a petrochemical engineering student in Venezuela but dropped out when he couldn’t afford the tuition. Then in December, he said a criminal gang stabbed him in front of his aunt’s candy shop, where he worked, allegedly because his family was linked to anti-government groups.

He escaped in February, traveling by bus and on foot to Peru, where his grandmother had taken his son. But he said the gang was still after him, so in June, his family paid for a bus ticket to Colombia to begin the journey that finally brought him to San Antonio.

He described fording knee-deep mud in the jungles of the Darién Gap linking Colombia and Panama. He hiked past the corpses of migrants who died during the same journey, he said, and lost his phone in a river. Then he walked and hitchhiked through Central America and Mexico into the border city of Matamoros, across a bridge from Brownsville, Tex., where he surrendered to authorities and was detained for several days.

Like many other migrants, Jose lacked a plan when he was forced to leave the shelter after three days. Immigration officers had released him after an aunt’s friend in Philadelphia promised to take him in, but he had no money to get there. Immigration officers told him he had to check in with them on Sept. 28 in Philadelphia or face deportation.

For now, he slept on the street.

Enter Perla.

Perla never gave migrants her last name. But according to the migrants, she was as persuasive as they were desperate. Speaking in English and Spanish, Jose said, she offered them a 90-day stay in a “sanctuary” city that welcomes migrants. She said they had steady jobs for 50 people in fields such as cleaning and carpentry.

“We had been living on the street for two days, and we were getting desperate,” Estrella said of her encounter with Perla.

When Jose met her outside the McDonald’s, he told her he needed to reach Philadelphia, where an aunt’s friend had offered to put him up.

“I can take you where you’re going,” he said Perla told him. “She was very nice. It looked like everything she was saying was true.”

She left and didn’t come back for two days. Then, on a Saturday afternoon, she returned and offered to take eight people to a hotel. Jose jumped at the chance.

The La Quinta was a respite. There were real beds, a swimming pool and a breakfast buffet. Perla brought them pizza and hamburgers at night. “I could shower, I could get dressed,” Jose said. He swam in the pool.

Perla offered migrants $10 McDonald’s gift cards if they signed waivers in which “an entire paragraph about liability and transport” and “language specifying that the journey would take place from Texas to Massachusetts” was not completely translated into Spanish, according to the class-action suit. Jose said the forms he signed were in English and that he couldn’t read them.

Perla told them she would return early the next day, Jose said. About 50 people would board buses to the airport and then take two chartered planes to Massachusetts. “I just wanted to get to Philadelphia,” he said.

The next morning, Sept. 14, they were taken to an airport. There was no security, and no X-ray machine. It was Jose’s first time on an airplane and he began to feel uneasy. He turned, searching for Perla.

“I saw that she was saying, ‘Ciao!’ ” he said. “I said, ‘You’re not coming with us?’ ” She said no, but others, someone of Cuban descent and Puerto Rican or Dominican descent, would guide them.

There was confusion about where they were going. One migrant asked if they could go to New York and was told they were headed to Washington, D.C., or another “sanctuary state,” according to the class-action suit. Perla told Jose they were headed to Massachusetts, he said.

First, though, the planes stopped in Crestview, Fla. The small Panhandle town is near the Destin, Fla., offices of Vertol Systems, a politically connected aviation company. Larry Keefe, DeSantis’s “public safety czar” who heads his immigration crackdown, previously represented Vertol in a dozen lawsuits, the Miami Herald found. Neither Keefe nor a Vertol executive immediately responded to requests for comment.

Under the “relocation program for unauthorized aliens,” the state Department of Transportation paid Vertol $615,000 on Sept. 8, and then another $950,000 on Sept. 19, public records show. The payments exceed the typical cost of a charter flight, experts said, but the governor’s office and the company have not responded to questions about how exactly the money was spent.

One of the pilots was of Colombian descent, Jose said, and the staff served sodas and crackers.

Some migrants worried they were being taken to a remote location. Would it be safe? Just a few minutes before landing, the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker: The destination was Martha’s Vineyard. “That was the first time we found out where we’d be going,” Torres said. Many had never heard of the island known as a summer sanctuary for the well-to-do.

The passengers were handed shiny red folders. Among the contents: a brochure titled “Massachusetts Refugee Benefits” imprinted with a proposed redesign of the state flag that a resident uploaded to the internet on a whim, according to The Boston Globe, and a rudimentary U.S. map with an arrow drawn from Central Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. “YOU ARE HERE… ESTA AQUI.”

There was also a “Welcome to Massachusetts” map that identified landmarks irrelevant to the migrants’ urgent needs, including Lucy Vincent Beach and the Featherstone Center for the Arts.

The planes landed around 3 p.m. “Unannounced, except at most, for the flights’ notification to the local air traffic controller,” according to the class-action suit.

When the migrants arrived, a black van was waiting for them outside, Jose said. It dropped the migrants off outside of the nonprofit Martha’s Vineyard Community Services. A woman who answered the door didn’t speak Spanish, and her look of surprise sent the group into a panic, Jose said. She had not been expecting them. They were not supposed to be there.

“People wanted to run away,” Jose said. But when they looked at the map in the red folder, he said, they realized, “we were surrounded by pure water.”

Torres started to think he had been tricked by the government into missing his upcoming immigration date in Texas. “I just want to start working so I can find a place to sleep,” he said in Spanish.

“If I tell you how I felt, I want to cry,” Jose said. “I felt destroyed inside, tricked, frightened. I didn’t know if they were going to put me in jail, if they’d deport me. I just wanted to get to Philadelphia.”

Migrants tried to reach Perla, but they said she didn’t pick up. So they tried the Venezuelan man who had been recruiting them alongside her. He forwarded a recorded voice message from Perla urging the migrants not to worry.

“They have to take charge of you,” she said. “Stay calm. They will take care of you. You have the numbers of the churches. Call the churches.”

Jose and other migrants were furious at the betrayal, but he said the people on Martha’s Vineyard quickly assuaged their fears. A man who spoke Spanish told them not to worry. “He said don’t despair. We didn’t expect you, but you’re here. We’re going to help you,” Jose recalled.

Lisa Belcastro, coordinator of a homeless shelter at a nearby church, began mobilizing dozens of volunteers. Local residents donated food, clothing and suitcases. Belcastro made sure there were enough beds. Belcastro wanted to make sure the group got a good night’s sleep, so she stayed overnight. Lights out at 10 p.m. “They aren’t just refugees or numbers,” she said. “They’re human beings that we care about.”

Lawyers worked to make sure migrants could update their addresses, to prevent being punished for missing immigration appointments and to pursue asylum claims.

Shortly before midnight, a deputy press secretary for DeSantis, Jeremy Redfern, tweeted a picture of former president Barack Obama’s home on Martha’s Vineyard: “7 bedrooms with 8 and a half bathrooms in a 6,892-square-foot house on nearly 30 acres. Plenty of space.”

At a news conference the next morning, DeSantis was put on the spot. “Gov. DeSantis, can you elaborate on reports of deploying dozens of migrants over to Martha’s Vineyard?” asked a television reporter, as the crowd cheered.

DeSantis owned up. “If you have folks that are inclined to think Florida is a good place, our message to them is we are not a sanctuary state,” he said. “And yes, we will help facilitate that transport for you to be able to go to greener pastures.”

Rachel Self, a Boston lawyer aiding the migrants, said they had been told “there was a surprise present for them” upon arrival. “This was obviously a sadistic lie,” she said.

Meanwhile, recruiters were again looking for migrants outside the San Antonio shelter, witnesses said.

Rev. Gavin Rogers of Travis Park Church in San Antonio said his staff was contacted by migrants last week who had been recruited by a woman calling herself “Perla” and sent to another La Quinta hotel. They were waiting for a flight to Delaware that was ultimately canceled, the Miami Herald reported, in a hotel room booked in Perla’s name. Rogers said a bus took some of the migrants back to the shelter. “Some reached out to us, and we did offer them a place to be,” Rogers said. “Some decided to go their own ways.” DeSantis’s office has not said whether the canceled Delaware flight was part of the state’s operation.

After two nights at the church shelter on Martha’s Vineyard, it was time to get on another bus. This one would take the migrants to a ferry on their way to a nearby military base. Many cried. Migrants filed out of the parish to hugs from volunteers and new cellphones. Donors had provided underwear, purple T-shirts and hats from the local high school and Boston Red Sox apparel. They cheered as each person boarded.

“Without these people here, I don’t know where we’d be,” Eliomar Aguero, 30, said. “Now, we just want to find jobs. But we are just so relieved to be here.”

On the base, Jose said he is meeting with lawyers and attending medical appointments. He said he is eager to learn English and pursue his immigration case. “We feel free,” he said.

But he is upset with DeSantis and the “remote control” team of Perla and other recruiters who he said tricked them into getting on the planes. The lawyers helped him switch his court case from Philadelphia to Boston. The friend who was going to take him in has moved away, so he is hoping to find a permanent place to live in Massachusetts.

“The fear I have is that these are political problems, you know,” he said. “We’re not objects so that they operate us this way.”

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Alice Crites and Lori Rozsa contributed to this report.

A month ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said out loud what many Republicans were undoubtedly feeling. Effectively, the message was: We’ve got a shot at a good 2022 midterm election, but some of these Trump candidates could screw it all up for us.

At the time, there was evidence of a GOP candidate problem — especially in the lagging poll numbers of some key Senate candidates.

Today, there’s considerably more.

An increase in public polling at the tail end of the primary season reinforces McConnell’s point — and not just in the races he and others might have had in mind. While it doesn’t count the GOP out of potentially winning the House and Senate and some key governor’s races, candidate popularity presents a significant and unnecessary hurdle in what should, historically speaking, be a good election for Republicans.

Where it’s perhaps most evident: when you look at the image ratings for the candidates — i.e. whether people view the candidate favorably or unfavorably.

The Washington Post reviewed more than 20 recent polls across the most competitive states in the 2020 presidential election, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And in most cases, the Trump-aligned candidates that observers have pegged as being potential liabilities in those states look like exactly that.

Oftentimes, the polls show voters in these states will be pretty evenly divided on which party they want in power when it’s presented as a generic choice — but then they’ll side with the specific, more popular Democrat.

Here are some big races where these popularity gaps could come into play in November.

The gap is perhaps most pronounced in Pennsylvania, where both GOP Senate nominee Mehmet Oz and gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano have trailed consistently in the polls.

Oz was broadly unpopular during the GOP primary, and he doesn’t appear to have improved his standing too much. In three recent polls — from Muhlenberg College, CBS/YouGov and Monmouth University — the percentage of people who viewed him unfavorably was double-digits higher than those who viewed him favorably. The Muhlenberg poll showed 29 percent of people liked him, while 53 percent disliked him. And the CBS/YouGov poll shows even 36 percent of Trump voters dislike him.

Oz’s opponent, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), has middling approval numbers. But in each poll, Fetterman’s net favorability (i.e. positive views vs. negative ones) is more than 20 points higher than Oz’s, which helps explain Fetterman’s consistent edge in the race, which stands at around nine points in the FiveThirtyEight average.

The story is similar in the governor’s race, where Mastriano’s image ratings are about as bad as Oz’s; he’s also double-digits underwater in all three polls. (Monmouth, his best of the three polls, puts him at 36 percent favorable and 48 percent unfavorable.) And thanks to running against a Democrat who’s more popular than Fetterman, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Mastriano’s net image rating is consistently more than 30 points worse than his opponent.

Mastriano’s current average deficit is more than 10 points.

Perhaps the other two Senate races where this really comes into play are Ohio and Arizona.

Two recent polls show Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) with a net image rating 12 and 20 points better than Republican J.D. Vance. One of them — from Marist College — shows Democrats view Ryan by a favorably by a 76-point margin (79-3), but Republicans view Vance favorably by just a 45-point margin (58-13).

Ohio, unlike other states we’re focused on here, is increasingly a red state. But for these reasons, it’s looking like a headache for the GOP to win a race that should be in its column. The race is neck-and-neck.

In Arizona, there’s less quality public polling. But GOP nominee Blake Masters’s net favorability in a recent bipartisan AARP poll is minus-17 (37 percent favorable to 54 percent unfavorable), while Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is slightly popular. In both that and another poll, Masters’s net image rating is around 20 points worse than Kelly’s.

A McConnell-linked super PAC pulled out of the race this week, canceling $10 million in ad buys. Kelly leads by an average of 7.5 points.

Another nominee some have suggested could hurt the GOP is Kari Lake in the Arizona governor’s race. The evidence on that is less clear, and the race is polling tighter than the Senate race. But the same AARP poll showed Lake 10 points underwater (43 percent favorable to 53 percent unfavorable), while her opponent, Democrat Katie Hobbs, was slightly popular.

This popularity gap could also be important in a few other races.

One is the Michigan governor’s race, where Trump-backed Tudor Dixon was double-digits underwater in two recent polls — including an EPIC-MRA poll that pegged her favorable rating at just 24 percent and her unfavorable rating at 44 percent. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) remains popular, with a majority approving of her job performance. In both polls, her net image rating is 28 points better than Dixon’s, and she leads by double digits in the head-to-head matchup.

Another is the Wisconsin Senate race, where both a recent Siena College poll and a Marquette Law School poll showed fewer than 40 percent of voters like two-term incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes’s (D) net image ratings are nine and 15 points better. But the race is very tight.

In the similarly tight Wisconsin governor’s race, Trump-endorsed GOP nominee Tim Michels is less popular than Gov. Tony Evers (D) by similar margins.

In the final two races we’ll spotlight, the gap is less pronounced — but still exists in a way that could matter.

Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker is consistently both underwater and less popular than Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), but the gap is usually between five and 10 points — which might help explain why he’s not underperforming as much as some of these other candidates, despite running a very uneven campaign. (Walker does lag behind GOP Gov. Brian Kemp’s performance in various polls, though. And the CBS/YouGov poll found a much larger gap in which candidate people like personally.)

And in New Hampshire, new GOP nominee Don Bolduc is 17 points underwater in a new University of New Hampshire poll (26 percent favorable to 43 percent unfavorable), compared to Sen. Maggie Hassan’s (D-N.H.) minus-nine image rating. Hassan led in that poll by eight points and has led Bolduc in every poll.

One thing we’ve alluded to — and which you’ll notice if you dig into these polls — is that these popularity gaps are often bigger than the margins in the actual head-to-head matchups. And there’s one main reason for that: partisanship.

As The Post’s Philip Bump recently wrote, the CBS/YouGov poll showed Fetterman led Oz on several key issues when it comes to voters’ decisions, often by double digits. Yet Fetterman led by just five points on the ballot test. That’s because party often wins out on voters’ decisions.

Even more telling: The same pollster showed that, in both Pennsylvania and Georgia, a majority of people supporting the Democrat said they were doing so primarily because they liked their candidate. But 8 in 10 supporters of the Republican said their vote was primarily about supporting their party or voting against the other candidate.

That’s undoubtedly in part because those Republican candidates aren’t exactly setting the campaign trail on fire. But those numbers also show that how much voters like a particular candidate is hardly their only consideration at the ballot box — and often, nor is it the most important one.

Indeed, what these polls suggest is that if Republicans can win in these states — and by extension win the Senate — it’ll be in large part because of a favorable environment and the ever-present pull of partisanship.

And it will apparently be in spite of some of the candidates they’ve put forward.

One Republican commercial casts Mandela Barnes as a “different” Democrat, and points out his push to end cash bail. Another shows his face on a wall with his last name sprayed in graffiti-style script and highlights a comment he made about reallocating police funds. A third labels him “dangerously liberal on crime.”

Republicans have said the ads are part of a broader strategy of calling out Democrats on crime, an argument they believe will be potent in the closing stage of this year’s midterm elections. But some allies of Barnes, who would be Wisconsin’s first Black senator, have derided the attacks as racist messages that feed on stereotypes. As he faces a torrent of negative ads, Barnes has launched spots seeking to assure voters he will fight crime and support law enforcement. Yet some Democrats said they fear his response has been ineffective.

The tensions playing out in Wisconsin mark one of the starkest examples of a trend that has swept across the midterm landscape with about six weeks left until Election Day: Republicans are increasingly centering their pitch to voters on crime, casting Democrats as weak and ineffective buffers against violent criminal conduct. As Republicans advance that argument, they are drawing growing accusations from Democrats that they are engaging in a pattern of stoking racial divisions, a charge they reject.

At the same time, Democrats worry the attacks could resonate amid the rise in violent crime that has taken place with their party in power at the federal level and in many cities. Some candidates are scrambling to distance themselves from slogans such as “Defund the police” that were popular among left-wing activists after a reckoning on racial justice and policing two years ago but have complicated the party’s image more broadly since that time, according to strategists across the political spectrum.

Homicide rates in the country’s cities have spiked over the past two years, with officials pointing to pandemic-related changes to the criminal justice system and, in some cases, less stringent policing policies. Now, from the Senate battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to key House races across the Midwest and beyond, Republicans are ramping up attacks highlighting incidents of deadly violence, sometimes in grisly detail, in ads and speeches.

“I have been trying to be quiet about it for a long time because I would hate for the Democrats to figure it out, but I think the cat, it’s out of the bag,” said Curt Anderson, a top strategist for National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Rick Scott (R-Fla.) “For the last eight or nine months I could just see it [crime] coming as the worst issue for the party in power.” He signaled that Republicans would attempt to hit on the issue more sharply in Georgia, where there is another battleground Senate race.

The rationale for the strategy is apparent in public polling. Republicans have a 22-point advantage on handling crime, with 56 percent of registered voters saying they trust Republicans more while 34 percent say they trust Democrats more on the issue, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Just as Democrats have put many Republicans on defense over abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe v. Wade, the GOP is now seeking to go on offense over crime. After spending much of this election cycle with a clear advantage in the midterms, the GOP appeared to lose some ground over the summer in the battle for Congress, and party strategists hope running on crime will help them regain their footing in the final weeks.

During the first three weeks of September, the Republican candidates and allies aired about 53,000 commercials on crime, according to AdImpact, which tracks political spots on network TV. That’s up from the 29,000 crime ads they aired in all of August. Nearly 50 percent of all Republican online ads in battleground states have focused on policing and safety since the start of the month, according to data from Priorities USA, a group focused on electing Democrats.

The Republican messaging often seeks to tie Democratic candidates to calls to defund the police and abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as most nominees do not subscribe to those views. In other cases, Republicans single out policies promoted more directly by Democratic candidates, including limiting or redirecting police funding and changing the way bail regulations work.

One ad from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with the House GOP leadership, asserts that Democratic candidate Liz Mathis, running in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, is “not an ordinary Democrat” and associates her with the defund-the-police movement, saying she once marched with a group that supports the cause and employed a campaign staff member who has backed it.

In an interview, Mathis said she anticipated the attacks that she’s soft on crime even though she has voted repeatedly to increase funding for law enforcement, and prerecorded a rebuttal advertisement that features two local sheriffs vouching for her and rejecting calls to defund the police. The ad went up the day after the attacks began, she said.

In the Senate race in Florida, incumbent Marco Rubio (R) launched ads featuring local law enforcement officers who claim that his opponent, Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), “turned her back on law enforcement.” Before she was elected to Congress, Demings served as chief of the Orlando Police Department.

She retorted with her own ads that highlight her nearly three decades working in the police force. “In the Senate, I’ll protect Florida from bad ideas like defunding the police. That’s just crazy,” Demings says in the spots.

While the crime attacks are not wholly new, to an extent, the GOP emphasis on the issue marks a reorientation of the party’s predominant midterm message beyond the economy and inflation. Rising costs remain part of the GOP pitch, but several Republican strategists noted that falling gas prices makes the issue less urgent and pointed to the topic of crime as highly effective, particularly in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Republicans said they believe they can use the issue to motivate their base and persuade undecided and independent voters to cast ballots for GOP candidates. Some Democrats said they see a more sinister strategy reminiscent of past elections, involving racial stereotypes and playing on voters’ worst instincts.

In Wisconsin on Wednesday, a group of activists and lawmakers called on the GOP to remove its ads targeting Barnes on crime. “We’re out here standing up for the truth demanding that these divisive, racist ads be taken down,” said state Sen. Chris Larson (D), describing them as “a blatant attempt to gin up fear.”

Some of the ads, including from the Senate Leadership Fund super PAC, seek to connect Barnes’s authorship of a measure to end cash bail to the driver of a vehicle who killed six at Christmas parade in Waukesha. The man charged in that case had been released on a $1,000 bond before driving an SUV through the crowd. The trial in that case is set to begin in early October.

Barnes rejects the assertion that his plan would have freed the suspect, noting that his initiative would require judges to hold defendants if there is “a substantial risk” that the defendant could “cause serious bodily harm” to people in the community.

Cornell Belcher, who was a pollster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and watched some of the ads against Barnes, said they play “in the continuum of the politics of victimization.”

“This is Willie Horton 2.0,” Belcher added, referring to a 1988 GOP ad intended to paint then-Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. It featured a Black man who was released from a Massachusetts prison on a furlough program and went on to rape a White woman.

When shown a different ad from the NRSC attacking Barnes that features his name scrawled in graffiti, Belcher, who is Black, was uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “The imagery of that ad to me is just as important as the words in that ad,” Belcher said. “They’re attempting to ghettoize him.”

Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the NRSC, rejected that the advertisements play on racial tropes. “Crime destroys all people, regardless of race,” Hartline said in a statement. “And Mandela Barnes has supported a radical, soft-on-crime agenda.”

The crime ads, and other attacks against Barnes, ramped up in the end of August. As they’ve hit the airwaves, the share of voters with an unfavorable impression of Barnes has risen, according to polling from Marquette Law School.

Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, said the ads against Barnes have come “fast and furious” and have probably contributed to the worsening of his numbers.

In a statement, Barnes spokeswoman Maddy McDaniel said Sen. Ron Johnson, the GOP incumbent, and his allies “have resorted to lying” about Barnes’s record. She characterized the Republican ads as “desperate attacks and outright lies.”

Barnes has tried to counter some of the GOP ads more directly with his own commercials. He recently released one that features a retired law enforcement officer vouching for him. In another, Barnes stands in a kitchen unloading groceries and says Republicans are lying when they say he wants to “Defund the Police” and “Abolish ICE.”

Barnes was once photographed posing with a red T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Abolish ICE” and subsequently distanced himself from the slogan. In the past he has suggested using money from what he called “over-bloated budgets in police departments” to pay for neighborhood services, though his campaign maintains he does not support defunding the police.

Still, some Democrats with ties to the state said privately that Barnes should have been more prepared for the attacks and criticized him for repeating the words “defund the police” and “abolish ICE.” One Wisconsin Democratic operative who spoke on the condition of anonymity to more candidly discuss the race called the latter a “baffling choice.”

In Pennsylvania, Republicans have also turned their focus to crime in the Senate race — portraying Democratic nominee John Fetterman as “dangerously liberal on crime.” Republican Senate nominee Mehmet Oz has called on Fetterman to fire two brothers working on his campaign who were convicted of murder and later released.

“There’s a racial component here. It’s even less than dog whistling, it’s a horn,” said Joe Calvello, a spokesman for the Fetterman campaign, responding to the attacks Fetterman has faced.

The brothers, Dennis and Lee Horton, are Black. Fetterman invited the brothers to stand with him at a rally in Northwest Philadelphia on Saturday. Fetterman said he knew his advocacy for them would be used to attack him in future elections but that “I would never trade a title for my conscience.”

The choice in this election, Fetterman told supporters Saturday, is someone who will “fight to make sure innocent men will die in prison versus a man who will fight to make sure they can get back with their families.”

Fetterman has also aired an ad in which he says Oz “would not last two hours” in the town of Braddock, Pa., where Fetterman oversaw a drop in murders as mayor. In the spot, Fetterman shows how he tattooed the dates of homicides on his forearm to keep himself focused on the issue.

Republicans have defended Oz’s strategy and argued that it is helping him gain traction after he struggled over the summer. “People are increasingly concerned about their families’ safety,” said Charlie Gerow, a longtime Republican strategist who was a GOP candidate for governor this year. “I think the message has to be pretty straightforward: Support law enforcement that fully funds police and a system that enforces the law, while Democrats have more empathy for perpetrators than victims.”

Democrats have long seen crime as a political vulnerability and have sought to protect themselves against attacks. In his State of the Union address, President Biden stressed his support for police. Biden has also touted money from the American Rescue Plan he signed that can fund police departments. And the president has touted a gun-control law as evidence of the party’s commitment to fighting violent crime.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) proposed law enforcement pay increases of roughly 20 percent, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) sent tens of millions in new funding for various police efforts.

Former president Donald Trump has leaned heavily into the issue of crime, calling for drug dealers to face the death penalty and describing violent offenses in vivid detail. “Right here in Ohio, our once-great cities are now scenes of horror riddled with bullet holes and soaked in blood,” Trump said at a recent rally in Youngstown, Ohio.

Republicans, including Trump, are also increasingly seeking to connect crime with their immigration message, making the argument that lax security at the southern border is a threat to national security and also fuels the illicit drug trade. “It is a natural fit and is out there quite a bit and will happen more,” said Anderson, the GOP strategist.

Itkowitz reported from Philadelphia. Hannah Knowles in Youngstown, Ohio, and Emily Guskin in Washington contributed to this report.

Heading into the final weeks of the midterm election campaign, Americans are split nationally in their vote for Congress, with Republicans holding sizable advantages on the economy, inflation and crime and Democrats far more trusted to handle the issues of abortion and climate change, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

With control of the House and Senate possibly shifting from Democrats to Republicans in November and the country deeply divided, 2 in 3 registered voters see this election as more important than past midterm campaigns. That’s the same percentage that said this in 2018 when turnout surged to the highest in a century.

At this point, both sides are highly motivated to turn out in November. Among registered Democratic voters, 3 in 4 say they are almost certain to vote compared with about 8 in 10 Republicans. Independents are less motivated. Four years ago, Democrats were about as mobilized as Republicans and had a clear lead in overall support. Eight years ago, when Democrats suffered losses, Republicans were more motivated.

Historical trends have favored Republicans throughout this election year, and political forecasters still rate the GOP as likely to win the House. Earlier predictions of big GOP gains have been clouded by the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, spurring on abortion rights supporters, especially younger women. Legislative victories by Democrats and the defeat of a Kansas antiabortion referendum over the summer also appeared to boost morale among some Democrats.

The poll also surveyed Americans on their attitudes toward the ongoing investigations of former president Donald Trump by the Justice Department. A slim 52 percent majority says the former president should be charged with crimes for his handling of classified documents, his fundraising or for his actions related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

President Biden continues to be a drag on Democratic candidates this fall. The Post-ABC survey pegs his approval rating at 39 percent, with 53 percent disapproving, including 41 percent strongly disapproving. The share of Americans saying Biden has accomplished “a great deal” or “a good amount” has grown from 35 percent last November to 40 percent today, although a 57 percent majority still says he has not accomplished much or anything.

Still, the fight for control of Congress is an intense one, with Democrats finding themselves competitive among critically important independent voters. But in the most competitive congressional districts, the poll finds Republicans with the advantage.

Among registered voters, 47 percent say they would vote for the Republican in their House district in November while 46 percent say they would vote for the Democrat. That finding is about the same as it was in April. In February, Republicans held a seven-point advantage. Democrats’ standing is weaker than in 2018, when they led by seven points in national House support before winning control of the chamber.

Political independents narrowly favor Republicans, 47 percent to 42 percent, in the vote for Congress. In 2018, the final Post-ABC poll found Democrats holding a seven-point advantage among independents. Democrats’ competitiveness with independents is perhaps notable, given that independent voters disapprove of Biden by 60 percent to 31 percent. More than 9 in 10 self-identified Democrats and Republicans support their party’s candidate for Congress.

Among voters who disapprove of Biden, 79 percent support Republicans for Congress but 13 percent support Democrats. The smaller number of voters who approve of Biden are more united behind Democrats, favoring them 91 percent to 7 percent over Republicans. In some past years, there has been more uniformity in voting intentions among those approving and disapproving of a president’s performance.

On a related question, 49 percent of registered voters say they prefer that the next Congress be controlled by Republicans to act as a check on Biden while 45 percent say they favor Democratic control to support the president’s agenda. By 51 percent to 40 percent, independent voters say they prefer Republicans be in charge.

The latest poll finds a significant gender gap, continuing a trend from previous cycles: Democrats’ support margin for Congress is 18 points better among women than men, similar to 2018 when Democrats fared 15 points better among women than men in a final Post-ABC national poll. Democrats hold a 10-point advantage among women under age 50, down from a 32-point lead ahead of the 2018 election.

On the other hand, Democrats’ support among non-White registered voters appears weaker than before the 2018 election, with 58 percent favoring Democrats, down from 69 percent in the final Post-ABC poll. Meanwhile, 54 percent of White voters favor Republicans, similar to 52 percent in 2018. Black, Asian American and Hispanic voters are a critical voting bloc that typically votes Democratic in large numbers.

These findings shed light in particular on the battle for control of the House. In past years, Republicans have been able to score gains in House races even when narrowly trailing on the question of people’s voting preference. This year Republicans need only modest gains to win the majority in the House, and most forecasts continue to show them on a course to do that.

The battle for control of the Senate, which is currently split 50-50 with Vice President Harris able to cast tiebreaking votes, will turn on both the overall political climate and on the quality of the candidates. Many of the key races remain close, according to public polls.

The state of the economy looms as a major issue over the election. About 3 in 4 Americans say the economy is either “not so good” or “poor” while about 1 in 4 say it is “good” or “excellent.” In the spring of 2021, 42 percent rated the economy positively, but for the past year, perceptions have soured significantly amid rising prices and stock market declines.

Voters say inflation and the economy are two of the most important issues in their decision, along with abortion and education. Republicans hold a 17-point advantage among registered voters on trust to handle the economy and an 18-point advantage on trust to handle inflation. But Democrats answer with a 17-point advantage on trust to handle abortion.

On other issues, Republicans hold a 22-point advantage on handling crime while Democrats hold a 21-point advantage on climate change. Democrats and Republicans are about even on handling education and schools.

Among those who say the economy is the single most important issue in their vote, 64 percent say they would vote for the Republican in their congressional district, while 58 percent of those who cite inflation as their top issue say they would vote Republican. Among those who cite abortion as the single most important issue, 66 percent say they would vote for the Democrat in their district.

Americans have different reactions to the costs of food, gasoline and other products and services. Not quite half (48 percent) say they are concerned but not upset about the rate of inflation, while 45 percent say they are upset. But there is a clear partisan division on those perceptions, with more than 6 in 10 Republicans calling themselves upset and nearly 7 in 10 Democrats saying they are concerned but not upset.

Neither party holds an advantage on the issue of immigration, though Republicans have sought to make it a central issue in their messaging. Republican governors in Florida and Texas have elevated the issue by sending immigrants to blue states and cities, which has inflamed the debate in recent days.

Overall, when voters are asked which party they trust to handle the main problems facing the country over the next few years, they are split down the middle, with 42 percent citing Democrats and 43 percent citing Republicans. There is a predictable partisan split on this, with about 9 in 10 Republicans and Democrats favoring their party, while independents are roughly split.

The two parties are running almost parallel campaigns, with Republicans focused on inflation, crime and immigration and Democrats targeting abortion and Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

The impact of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision continues to affect many campaigns. The Post-ABC poll finds that 64 percent of Americans oppose the ruling, including 53 percent who say they are strongly opposed. More than 8 in 10 Democrats oppose the decision while 56 percent of Republicans support it. Almost 7 in 10 independents are opposed.

Majorities of women and men oppose the court’s ruling, but more women (69 percent) disapprove than men (58 percent). Younger Americans are significantly more likely to say they are opposed than those age 50 and older.

Republicans have pushed for more restrictive laws in states where they control the legislatures, and some Republicans have called for Congress to enact a national ban on abortion. Meanwhile, some Republican candidates have tried to temper their language on the issue in the face of the opposition to the court decisions.

When the positions of the two parties are weighed on the issue, 50 percent of Americans say Republicans favor too many restrictions, while 29 percent say the GOP’s posture is about right and 10 percent say Republicans favor too much access to abortion. About 3 in 10 say Democrats favor too much access while 45 percent say Democrats’ positions are about right and 13 percent say Democrats favor too many restrictions.

The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has motivated younger women. The poll finds that women under age 40 are now just as likely to say they are certain to vote as men under 40, with about half of each saying the same. In July, shortly after the decision, men under 40 were far more likely than women under 40 to say they were certain to vote (45 percent to 32 percent). Both, however, are still less certain of voting than older Americans.

The investigations of Trump, both by the Justice Department and the House select committee looking into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, have inserted the former president into the campaign discussion, to the chagrin of Republican elected officials who prefer that Trump not be at issue in November.

Both men and women lean toward saying Trump should be charged in connection with the investigations, but there is a decided difference between them, with 48 percent of men saying yes, compared with 43 percent saying no, while 56 percent of women say he should be charged compared with 34 percent who oppose.

The November election will determine the direction of Biden’s next two years in office and will serve as a prelude to the 2024 election, when voters could see a rerun of the 2020 election between Biden and Trump. Both have signaled a desire to seek their party’s nomination.

At this point, a 56 percent majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they would prefer to nominate someone other than Biden, who would be 82 years old at the beginning of a second term. Younger Democrats overwhelmingly (75 percent) want someone else.

Republicans are split almost evenly on the desirability of Trump as their nominee, with 47 percent saying they prefer him as their standard-bearer compared with 46 percent who prefer someone else as the nominee. The clearest division within the GOP on this question is based on education, with 56 percent of Republicans without college degrees favoring Trump as the nominee and 64 percent of those with college degrees saying they prefer someone else.

And if the 2024 race is again between Biden and Trump, 48 percent of registered voters say they would support Trump while 46 percent would support Biden, a difference within the poll’s margin of error.

This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted Sept. 18-21, 2022, among a random national sample of 1,006 U.S. adults, with 75 percent reached on cellphones and 25 percent on landlines. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is four points among the sample of 908 registered voters.