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Washington GOP hopeful slams Seattle, Seahawks and Starbucks

In her first political campaign, Republican Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley is going after Washington state’s most well-known institutions.

For one, Patty Murray, the Democratic senator who has held the seat for the last 30 years and is seeking a sixth term. The Seattle Seahawks, Starbucks and The Seattle Times, home-grown, big-name organizations that she dismisses as “woke corporations” for not wanting her to use their logos in her ads. The city of Seattle, which she’s denounced as liberal and crime-ridden.

Smiley’s broad range of targets illustrates the combative approach she has brought to her campaign, a strategy that may at first seem counterintuitive to her efforts to draw in support from enough voters to oust Murray.

Murray has also run a slew of negative ads against Smiley, saying the Republican’s anti-abortion stance could threaten women’s rights and also trying to tie her to extremist elements within the GOP.

Cornell Clayton.
Clayton

Cornell Clayton, a political scientist at Washington State University and director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Service and Public Policy, said while people say they dislike it when campaigns go negative, such ads work.

“Attack ads provoke stronger emotional responses from voters and are more effective at motivating behavior,” Clayton said in an email.

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Washington Post

Election 2022: What Colorado candidates have spent on advertising ahead of the general election

Heidi Ganahl is the only Republican to advertise on television

As ballots head out to voters across the state this week, Coloradans can expect a continued flurry of campaign advertisements to hit their televisions, streaming services and internet browsers as candidates for statewide office push their messages.

It is an industry that involves tens of millions of dollars in Colorado. Colorado Newsline analyzed political television advertisement contracts filed with the Federal Communications Commission from the eight major party candidates for statewide offices across seven channels. The broadcast channels included are CBS4, 9NEWS, Denver 7, FOX31, KWGN, KRDO and KKTV.

That analysis did not include outside advertising spending, which accounts for many more millions of dollars spent by third-party groups supporting or opposing certain candidates.

Across the board, however, candidates widely try to advertise during local news in the morning and evening and during the shows immediately after.

Travis Ridout.
Ridout

“Traditionally, local TV news has been important because you get a lot of high-information people and people who are likely to turn out to vote. There’s a lot of undecided voters and persuadables,” Travis Ridout, a professor at Washington State University who also works with the Wesleyan Media Project, said.

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Colorado Newsline

Small-town Nebraska has a poverty problem. Three Nebraska towns are trying to solve it.

Since the 1960s, census data has shown higher rates of poverty in non-metro regions of the country.

Twenty Nebraska counties had a child poverty rate higher than the national average in 2020. All 20 counties have populations under 40,000, according to U.S. Census data collected by The University of Omaha’s Center for Public Affairs research.

Jennifer Sherman.
Sherman

An emphasis on work ethic and stigma around aid in small towns can add a barrier for those experiencing poverty in rural communities, said Jennifer Sherman, a Washington State University sociology professor.

Another difficulty: The loss of high-paying jobs. People with the most resources are often encouraged to leave smaller towns, Sherman said.

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Lincoln Journal Star
News Channel Nebraska Central
Flatwater Free Press
Sioux City Journal

We the People: The Senate was designed for compromise and stability, but is it still playing that role?

Each week, The Spokesman-Review examines one question from the Naturalization Test immigrants must pass to become United States citizens.

This week’s question: How long is a term for a U.S. senator?

Control of the Congress is up for grabs in November. Some political scientists are worried for the state of American democracy, which is showing intense polarization even in an institution – the U.S. Senate – designed to be more deliberative and open to compromise.

Cornell Clayton.
Clayton

“I am worried that we have a significant faction within a political party today that continues to cast doubt on election outcomes,” said Cornell Clayton, a professor of government at Washington State University and the director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service. “Several candidates have already announced that they will not accept election results if they don’t win.”

In the current political climate, there is intense partisan polarization, and political views more often veer from the center and toward ideological extremes.

“The Senate used to be much more bipartisan, but in recent years partisan polarization has allowed for the Senate to be just as divisive as the House of Representatives,” Clayton said. “Partisan polarization will only lessen if one party gains a significant majority, consistently.”

Every two years, one-third of the Senate is open for re-election. In November, 34 of the 100 Senate seats are being contested.

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Spokesman-Review

Why Growing Parts of the Christian Right Are Convinced It’s the Apocalypse

Even after Dobbs, the end times are dominating bestseller lists.

There’s no denying that the apocalypse is currently having a moment, culturally and politically. It could be driven partly by the pandemic and fears of climate change. Those are actual, frightening apocalyptic scourges. Russia’s war has also set off alarm bells for certain evangelicals, as there was a Cold War tradition of identifying the country, variably, with Gog or Magog.

But it seems an odd time for doomsday fervor, given the ascendancy of the religious right in American politics and the current makeup of the Supreme Court. Why, at this moment, when the Christian right should be feeling more empowered, would the end of the world be so trendy?

Matthew Avery Sutton.
Sutton

Matthew Avery Sutton, a history professor at Washington State University and author of American Apocalypse, noted that Donald Trump, knowingly or not, tapped into a century of end-times beliefs by quarreling with NATO and criticizing the FBI and the “deep state.” In the Left Behind book series, which was published in the ’90s and early 2000s and which has had an enormous impact on how many Christians conceptualize the apocalypse, the Antichrist turns out to be a politically savvy secretary-general of the United Nations, which is then converted into a single world government. Trump didn’t frame his isolationist America First policies or his anti-FBI rants as a fight against the Antichrist, but his distrust of European governments and of his own intelligence and security agencies maps onto these cultural tropes and other long-held evangelical suspicions about the threat of satanic forces. “It’s all about fighting one world government and the coming dominance of the Antichrist so we can stand against evil,” Sutton said.

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Slate