Trump Tires of Economic Message and Returns to Attacks Amid Florida Duel With Biden
Democrats braced on Thursday for what promised to be a rare good-news cycle for President Trump in the 2020 homestretch: the release of a report showing gross domestic product grew about 7 percent in the third quarter, or 30 percent on an annualized basis.
But Mr. Trump, campaigning in Tampa just hours before Joseph R. Biden Jr. was set to appear at a rally across town, spent only about 10 minutes on the economy, calling the increase the “biggest event in business” of the last 50 years.
He quickly moved on, mocking Republicans who have repeatedly advised him to focus on his economic record instead of lashing out at enemies and harping on the issue of Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
“I get a call from all the experts, right, guys that ran for president six, seven, eight times, never got past the first round, but they’re calling me up. ‘Sir, you shouldn’t be speaking about Hunter,’” he said, his voice hoarse and raspy. “‘You shouldn’t be saying bad things about Biden because nobody cares.’ I disagree. You know, maybe that’s why I’m here and they’re not.”
He added: “They say, ‘Talk about your economic success. Talk about 33.1 percent, the greatest in history.’ Now, look, if I do, I mean, how many times can I say it?”
It is not just random former presidential candidates who are counseling him to focus: Mr. Trump’s own campaign advisers want him to hit on broader political themes, and steer away from personal attacks that will further alienate women and suburban voters.
Mr. Biden currently has a small edge in Florida, according to polling averages, but a huge turnout on Election Day by Trump supporters could be enough to offset the former vice president’s expected advantage from mail-in ballots.
The rally in Tampa kicked off on a disciplined note, perhaps because another Trump was at the podium.
Melania Trump, the first lady, who has been mostly absent from campaign events, introduced her husband by reading a carefully drafted speech praising his ability to counter the coronavirus pandemic, save the economy and improve the tenor of political discourse.
Mrs. Trump condemned the “hate, negativity and fear” that she said “the media streams into our homes,” stopping several times to acknowledge riotous applause from the president's supporters, before sitting down in a folding chair next to the stage.
After touting the G.D.P. numbers — which revived the country only partway out of its pandemic-induced swoon — Mr. Trump offered a rambling and confessional speech that began with vitriolic attacks on the media, a takedown of Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security official who penned an anonymous anti-Trump op-ed in The New York Times, and then segued into his typical wisecracks about Mr. Biden’s mental acuity.
Mr. Trump predicted a massive “red wave,” that would sweep him to victory in Florida and elsewhere, and questioned the accuracy of polls showing him facing a possible defeat.
At other moments, Mr. Trump mused about a less positive outcome.
“Could you imagine losing to this guy?” he asked about Mr. Biden, peering down at his wife who was quietly watching him behind sunglasses.
Midway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, several attendees received medical attention because of the heat — it was 87 degrees and humid, according to pool report filed by reporters traveling with Mr. Trump. In all, 13 people were transported to local hospitals complaining of heat-related problems, none of them life-threatening, according to a spokesman from Tampa Fire and Rescue, which operated a pump truck that sprayed the crowd with cooling water. It was not clear how many, if any, needed to be hospitalized, the spokesman said.
At one point, the president stopped to remark on the hose truck. “Let’s find out if they’re friend or foe,” he said. “And if they’re foe, let’s take care of” them, he added, using a vulgarity.
As President Trump rallied in Tampa, Joseph R. Biden Jr. held a drive-in campaign event on the other side of Florida in the Democratic stronghold of Broward County, making an explicit pitch to Hispanic voters five days before the election.
Recent polls suggest that while Florida is effectively tied, Mr. Trump has made inroads with Latinos, a crucial demographic in Florida and other battleground states. In South Florida, the president has especially consolidated his popularity among Cuban-Americans, including newer Cuban immigrants.
“Cuba is no closer to freedom and democracy today than it was four years ago,” Mr. Biden, in shirt sleeves and sunglasses, said at Broward College’s North Campus in Coconut Creek. “In fact, there are more political prisoners and secret police are as brutal as ever, and Russia once again is a major presence in Havana.”
In promising to reverse Mr. Trump’s more hard-line Cuba policy, Mr. Biden also reiterated that he considers Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s left-wing president, to be a “thug.” Though Venezuelan-Americans have tended to lean Democratic, the president’s tough rhetoric and sanctions against Mr. Maduro’s government have endeared him to some Venezuelan voters.
“President Trump can’t advance democracy and human rights for the Cuban people or the Venezuelan people, for that matter, when he has praised so many autocrats around the world,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Trump later struck back on Twitter, writing, “Our opponents want to turn America into Communist Cuba or Socialist Venezuela.”
Florida, the biggest presidential battleground state, is expected to report its results relatively quickly on Tuesday night, which could set the tenor for how Americans view the early outcome of the presidential race.
“If Florida goes blue, it’s over,” Mr. Biden said.
Later on Thursday, at a drive-in rally in Tampa, Mr. Biden mounted a multifaceted rebuke of Mr. Trump.
Noting the death toll from the virus in Florida — which stands at more than 16,000 — he laced into the president for his response to the coronavirus and castigated him for holding a crowded rally in Tampa earlier in the day despite rising coronavirus cases.
“Donald Trump just had a superspreader event here again,” Mr. Biden said angrily. “They’re spreading more than just coronavirus — he’s spreading division and discord. Mr. Biden also appealed directly to older voters, attacking Mr. Trump over social security.
And he made an impassioned plea for racial justice.
“Donald Trump doesn’t believe that systemic racism is a problem. He won’t say Black Lives Matter. We know they matter,” Mr. Biden said, as he called out by name recent Black victims of police brutality.
“The names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake will not soon be forgotten, not by me, not by us, not by this country,” he said.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that Minnesota election officials must segregate any ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. on Election Day, reversing the state’s seven-day grace period that had been in place for ballots postmarked by Election Day.
The ruling, which comes just five days before Election Day, could have a significant impact on voting in the state if any late arriving ballots are eventually not counted. As of Thursday night an estimated 578,000 absentee ballots that had been requested in the state had not been returned, based on figures from the U.S. Elections Project. Many of those ballots could already be in the mail, and voters can still return those ballots in person.
In a 2-to-1 ruling, the court said that the Minnesota secretary of state “extended the deadline for receipt of ballots without legislative authorization” and therefore the ballot extension did not have the proper legal authority.
“The consequences of this order are not lost on us,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion. “We acknowledge and understand the concerns over voter confusion, election administration issues, and public confidence in the election.”
But, the court said, “we conclude the challenges that will stem from this ruling are preferable to a postelection scenario where mail-in votes, received after the statutory deadline, are either intermingled with ballots received on time or invalidated without prior warning. Better to put those voters on notice now while they still have at least some time to adjust their plans and cast their votes in an unquestionably lawful way.”
Judge Jane L. Kelly, in a dissenting opinion, said that the decision “will cause voter confusion and undermine Minnesotans’ confidence in the election process.” She said it also risks disenfranchising voters in Minnesota.
Elections officials in the state have been instructing voters who had not mailed their ballots by Oct. 27 to return them by drop box or to vote in person. But the decision still puts the fate of an unknown number of ballots at risk.
The court instructed elections officials to segregate and maintain all ballots that arrive after the 8 p.m. deadline.
Democrats in Minnesota decried the decision.
“In the middle of a pandemic, the Republican Party is doing everything to make it hard for you to vote,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, the senior senator from Minnesota and a Democrat, said on Twitter. “Stand up for YOUR rights: Vote in-person or take mail-in ballot directly to ballot box”
A judge in Florida resigned on Thursday as the acting chairman of the Duval County canvassing board — the panel charged with inspecting and tabulating mail-in ballots — amid criticism that he had made political donations to President Trump and displayed his campaign signs at his home.
The resignation of Brent D. Shore, a county judge who is a Republican, was confirmed by the county’s supervisor of elections, Mike Hogan, in an email to The New York Times. Mr. Hogan also serves on the board, which is made up of three members, one of whom must be a county judge, and two alternates.
Judge Shore was one of the alternates and had been filling in as the chairman of the panel, which has come under intense scrutiny in this year of record numbers of mail-in ballots. It was not the first time that the panel was in the glare of publicity. Twenty years ago, in 2000, the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to Florida.
The judge presided as the board’s chairman then, when many Black voters in the county complained that their ballots had not been counted. This time, Judge Shore faced criticism for restricting photography and video recordings of the board’s counting and checking signatures on mail-in ballots. Efforts to reach the judge were not immediately successful.
Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, Florida’s largest city, could play a significant role in which presidential candidate wins this battleground state and its 29 electoral votes. Mr. Trump won the county by fewer than 6,000 votes in 2016. Both he and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic candidate, visited the state on Thursday.
Judge Shore had made at least six small-dollar contributions to Mr. Trump’s campaign this year totaling less than $200, federal campaign finance records show. This year, he has also contributed nine times to WinRed, a fund-raising platform created by the Republican National Committee, for a total of less than $200.
His resignation was first reported by The Florida Times-Union, which published photos of Trump campaign signs and stickers in the judge’s yard.
Under Florida’s Code of Judicial Conduct, judges are barred from contributing to candidates or political organizations.
A spokesman for the Florida Division of Elections did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday but told The Times-Union that “displaying a candidate’s campaign signs” would disqualify someone from serving on a canvassing board.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThis weekend, after 25 days of waiting for an absentee ballot that never arrived, Laura Ruch, 30, will leave her medical fellowship in Atlanta, board a plane to Ohio against her better judgment and fly home to vote in person amid the pandemic.
“It’s really frustrating,” said Ms. Ruch, who has called and emailed repeatedly without receiving satisfactory answers from local elections officials about her ballot’s fate. “If this is happening to me, it’s probably happening to lots of people.”
In the final week of voting in the 2020 campaign, the worst fears about the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to handle the crush of election-season mail have not materialized, according to interviews this week with secretaries of state in battleground jurisdictions and election experts. “Generally speaking, we’re pleased with the service,” said Steve Simon, a Democrat who is the secretary of state in Minnesota, where he expects as many as 40 percent of voters to cast ballots by mail.
But the Postal Service’s record of getting mail-in ballots to voters and then returning them to elections authorities on time has been spotty and inconsistent enough to leave some voters anxious and looking for last-minute ways to assure their votes will be counted.
The nationwide figure for on-time delivery of mail ballots has bounced around this week, from 89 percent on Tuesday to 97 percent on Wednesday, amid wide variations in individual regions. The Postal Service, which has cautioned against reading too much into daily fluctuations in performance, has designated election mail as its highest priority and defines on-time delivery as arriving within one to three days.
Mail service in general in about 60 of 67 postal districts across the country remains consistently worse than it was before cost-cutting measures carried out in July by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy substantially slowed service. And in 10 districts — including ones crucial to the election’s outcome, such as Philadelphia, Detroit and northern Ohio — first-class mail performance is particularly slow, with more than 20 percent of it delivered late.
J. Remy Green, a lawyer representing 17 mail-in voters in a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York, said that the Postal Service was performing much better than its low point this summer, but that figures this week showing more than 10 percent of ballots on a given day not being sorted in a timely way are troublesome.
“In that regard, 89 percent is quite shocking,” Mx. Green said. “You knew these were ballots and you only got them in 89 percent of the time? That’s wild.”
Senator David Perdue of Georgia withdrew on Thursday from the final debate in his tight re-election race, a day after his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, called him a “crook” and accused the vulnerable Republican of trying to profit from the coronavirus pandemic.
The rivals had been scheduled to face off on Sunday on the Atlanta television station WSB, the third debate in one of two pivotal Senate races in Georgia that could determine which party controls the chamber. The candidates had committed to the debate in September, according to Mr. Ossoff’s campaign.
The news first broke Thursday evening when Mr. Ossoff wrote on Twitter that Mr. Perdue had canceled on him.
“At last night’s debate, millions saw that Perdue had no answers when I called him out on his record of blatant corruption, widespread disease, and economic devastation,” Mr. Ossoff wrote. “Shame on you, Senator.”
A spokesman for Mr. Perdue confirmed that he would not be at the debate and said in a statement that the senator had better uses of his time.
“As lovely as another debate listening to Jon Ossoff lie to the people of Georgia sounds, Senator Perdue will not be participating in the WSB-TV debate but will instead join the 45th president, Donald J. Trump, for a huge get-out-the-vote rally in Northwest Georgia,” the spokesman, John Burke, said.
Mr. Ossoff’s stinging comments about Mr. Perdue’s conduct came during a bruising debate that underscored the bitter partisan divide in what was once a safely Republican state. Mr. Perdue, 70, said he had done nothing wrong, and accused Mr. Ossoff, 33, of pursuing a “radical socialist agenda” that would result in higher taxes.
Mr. Perdue, a wealthy former corporate executive, bought stock in DuPont de Nemours, which sells personal protective equipment, on Jan. 24, the same day he received a classified briefing on the threat posed by the coronavirus, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“It’s not just that you’re a crook, Senator,” Mr. Ossoff said, turning to face his socially-distanced opponent as Mr. Perdue’s eyes remained fixed on the camera. “It’s that you’re attacking the health of the people that you represent. You did say Covid-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio.”
Mr. Perdue has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, and said any transactions he made were executed by a financial adviser without his knowledge.
“The thing I’m most upset about,” Mr. Perdue said of Mr. Ossoff, “is that he’ll say and do anything to my friends in Georgia to mislead them about how radical and socialist” his agenda is.
Recent polls have found Mr. Perdue and Mr. Ossoff in a dead heat. If neither candidate hits 50 percent of the vote, they will compete in a runoff election in January.
Mr. Ossoff — echoing a national Democratic strategy of focusing on health care — went on to criticize Mr. Perdue for voting repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act and attempting to gut Obama-era safeguards for patients with pre-existing conditions.
Mr. Perdue pointed to legislation he co-sponsored that he claimed offered “protection for pre-existing conditions.”
The senator’s bill, which went nowhere, does say that insurance companies can’t deny coverage based on “any pre-existing condition,” but it contains a major loophole, giving insurers the option of rejecting a patient if a provider does “not have the capacity to deliver services adequately.”
Georgia’s other Senate race is also close, though the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat and pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, has led in recent polls. He faces Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican who was appointed to her seat; Representative Doug Collins, another Republican; and several other candidates. That race will almost certainly result in a runoff. Ms. Loeffler has faced similar criticism over stock trades before Americans became aware of the magnitude of the virus.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTPresident Trump abruptly canceled a planned campaign rally in Fayetteville, N.C., Thursday afternoon, citing high winds, but traveled to Fort Bragg to meet with the Army special operations team that conducted the raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State terror group, a year ago.
About three hours before the North Carolina rally was set to begin, the president’s campaign put out a statement saying that “because of a wind advisory issued with gusts reaching 50 miles per hour and other weather conditions, the outdoor Fayetteville, N.C., rally has been postponed until Monday.”
But Air Force One continued on from Florida to North Carolina despite the high winds, landing around 5 p.m. Asked about the rally, Mr. Trump told reporters: “The wind was terrible” and said “we’re redoing it on Monday.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign gave no other explanation for the cancellation of the rally. Mr. Trump has complained about the cold or windy weather at several of his rallies in recent days, saying in Lansing, Mich., this week: “It’s 32 degrees out here, and it’s freezing, and it’s raining, and I’m just trying to keep up with the tough people of Michigan.”
The last time Mr. Trump cited the weather in his decision to cancel a rally was in July, when he was set to travel to Portsmouth, N.H. His aides cited safety concerns associated with an incoming tropical storm. But weather forecasts for Portsmouth indicated that the rain was supposed to stop there around noon; the rally was scheduled for 8 p.m.
In an interview with Axios on H.B.O., Mr. Trump later conceded that the event had been canceled because of his concern about having a big enough crowd.
After discussing the challenges he had with the infamous rally in Tulsa, Okla., where the campaign bragged about millions of ticket requests and where Mr. Trump ended up speaking to a mostly empty arena, he said the same issues prevented him from speaking to supporters in New Hampshire. “I had to cancel it,” he said. “We were going to have a great crowd in New Hampshire, and I canceled it for the same reason.”
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said Thursday that Mr. Trump met with members of the team that conducted the nighttime raid that killed Mr. al-Baghdadi for about an hour. The visit was closed to the news media.
“It was a really special moment,” Ms. McEnany said. “It meant a lot to the president. He was with our heroes for about an hour, just having casual conversation, taking their questions, just talking to them and then he ended the visit by paying his respects to the special forces memorial.”
Mr. al-Baghdadi, the black-clad and mysterious leader of the Islamic State, had built a global terror network that drew recruits from around the globe as he sought to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq. He detonated a suicide vest during the raid by United States forces.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a small but durable lead over President Trump in North Carolina, where fully 64 percent of likely voters say they have already cast their ballots, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Thursday.
And in a North Carolina race crucial to the control of the Senate, the Democratic challenger, Cal Cunningham, maintains a 46 to 43 percent edge over Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, despite a late-breaking scandal over romantic texts Mr. Cunningham sent to a woman who is not his wife.
Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump 48 percent to 45 percent in the survey, which was conducted after the final presidential debate last week. Nearly seven in 10 voters said they had watched the debate. Mr. Trump’s performance received mixed reviews in North Carolina, with voters split nearly evenly on who they thought won.
The New York Times /
Siena College poll
Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by three points in North Carolina, a battleground state that Mr. Trump won in 2016.
Sept. 11–16
Oct. 9–13
Oct. 23–27
Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,034 likely voters in North Carolina from Oct. 23 to Oct. 27.
Mr. Trump was set to make his ninth campaign visit to the state since early September Thursday night with a rally in Fayetteville, a sign that his campaign was worried about a state the president won by nearly four points in 2016. But the campaign announced Thursday afternoon that the rally had been postponed.
This week, North Carolina reported its second-highest number of patients hospitalized with the coronavirus in a day, 1,214, since the pandemic began. At a North Carolina rally on Saturday in Lumberton, Mr. Trump had dismissed the virus threat as overblown and driven by political enemies. “Covid, Covid, Covid,” he said. “On Nov. 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.”
The margins in both the presidential and Senate races in the state were nearly identical to those in the previous Times/Siena poll, in mid-October, which found Mr. Biden and Mr. Cunningham both ahead by four points. North Carolina is one of several states Democrats hope to flip in their bid to gain three seats and win back the Senate.
The poll of 1,034 likely voters has a margin of error of about four percentage points.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAd Watch
Now that the recommended deadline for returning mail-in ballots has passed, the Biden campaign is running a new series of ads directing voters to cast their ballots by drop box.
The Message
In an effort to symbolize the power of the vote, the ad opens with a cartoonish animation — a black oval on a white background morphing like the outline of a mouth to the audio of President Trump’s comments. As the ad clips together disparaging remarks the president made, pronouncements about the coronavirus and supportive calls to the Proud Boys, a ballpoint pen slowly enters the frame, and begins filling in the black oval.
The audio slowly fades as the oval turns completely black and the camera zooms out to reveal the shape as a filled-in paper ballot cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr. The folding of an envelope and creaking sound of a ballot drop box provide the only audio at the end, as the screen says “Silence him. Vote by drop box.”
Fact Check
In a letter sent to state elections officials in August, the United States Postal Service said that Oct. 27 was the latest that it would recommend putting ballots in the mail to reach elections officials by Nov. 3. There has since been a major push to remind voters that they can safely put their ballots in drop boxes in the days leading up to Election Day.
Where It’s Running
Nationally.
The Takeaway
Across the country, Democrats are requesting mail-in ballots at a greater rate than Republicans, including in key states like Pennsylvania. With some court decisions shortening the deadlines by which ballots must reach local officials, the Biden campaign is using its vast paid media operation to remind voters to use drop boxes now to make sure their votes count.
Seizing on one of the most emotional issues of the campaign — the Trump administration’s immigration policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border — Joseph R. Biden Jr. pledged Thursday to create a federal task to try to reunite the families of 545 children who were separated and whose deported parents cannot be located.
The new task force, which Mr. Biden said he would create on his first day in office, was announced in a new television commercial that the campaign said would run in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Nevada.
The parents of 545 of the separated children still have not been found, according to court documents filed this month in a case challenging the practice, though attempts to find them have been going on for years. About 60 of the children were younger than 5 when they were separated, the documents show.
The Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before President Trump abandoned it amid global outrage.
The new Biden campaign ad contains excerpts from one of his debates with Mr. Trump, in which he decried the policy. “Their kids were ripped from their arms and separated, and now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents, and those kids are alone,” Mr. Biden said. “Nowhere to go. It’s criminal.”
And the ad included part of Mr. Trump’s answer. “They’re so well taken care of,” he said. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMany voting rules have changed this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, making it harder than usual to figure out how to cast your ballot. So we did the work for you, in hopes of helping to make sure your vote is counted.
If you still have questions about the voting process or the election process in general, check out our frequently asked questions.
The Biden campaign announced Thursday that “a non-staff flight crew member that traveled on a support plane” for Doug Emhoff — the spouse of Senator Kamala Harris, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate — had tested positive for Covid-19. But it said that Mr. Emhoff had not been in close contact with the crew member, and that he had tested negative for the virus on Thursday.
“Mr. Emhoff was not on the plane with this individual,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign manager, said in a statement. “He was not in close contact with this individual, and did not even have passing contact with them at any point. Therefore he is not required to quarantine.”
The statement did note that “other members of the flight crew as well as two members of Mr. Emhoff’s support staff had been in close contact with this individual” and that they were quarantining.
Mr. Emhoff has maintained an intense travel schedule on behalf of the campaign. He was tested for the virus on Thursday, the campaign said, and it was not detected.
“He will continue to Ohio today and with his campaign itinerary through Election Day,” the statement concluded.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTJoseph R. Biden Jr. will make a stop in Minnesota on Friday, his campaign announced on Thursday, a rare instance in which the Democratic nominee is playing defense in the final days of the election.
Minnesota is one of the few states that President Trump has targeted as a pickup opportunity, and it narrowly eluded him in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton won there by only 1.5 percentage points, though Mr. Biden is in a stronger position this time around, with a nine-point lead over Mr. Trump in an average of polls.
Friday is shaping up to be one of Mr. Biden’s busiest days of the general election, with planned visits to three states in the Midwest. In Minnesota, he will hold a drive-in rally in St. Paul in the afternoon. He is also slated to campaign in Iowa and Wisconsin, two states that Mr. Trump won in 2016.
In the final days before Tuesday’s election, Mr. Biden’s travel schedule has been focused on states that he is trying to pry away from Mr. Trump. On Thursday, the former vice president is campaigning in Florida, and he is scheduled to appear with former President Barack Obama in Michigan on Saturday. Earlier in the week, Mr. Biden made visits to Pennsylvania and Georgia, two other states Mr. Trump is defending.
Climate change is on the ballot this year, and not just in the presidential race.
Nowhere is that more evident than in Texas, where Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, poured $2.5 million into a Texas Railroad Commission race this week.
Contrary to its name, the 130-year-old regulatory body actually oversees the state’s oil and gas industry. Chrysta Castañeda, a Democrat, is vying for a spot on a platform of reducing methane flaring and other policies to address climate change.
“The industry acknowledges that climate change is real and that it is caused by human activities, including oil and gas extraction,” Ms. Castañeda, an engineer and lawyer, says on her website. “Yet our Texas Railroad Commissioners refuse to acknowledge this reality and do the things that would help us mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.”
Her opponent, Jim Wright, a Republican businessman, is running on securing the border to protect infrastructure and on bolstering the oil and gas industry. He also has espoused some fringe theories about both climate change and renewable energy, according to an interview recently uncovered by the watchdog group Documented.
“There are a lot of documents out there, but nobody’s proven to me exactly, and pinpoint what, what is really hurting our atmosphere,” Mr. Wright said in an interview this month on the Oil and Gas Startups podcast. “What I do know about our Earth is we have evolved and continue to evolve. And I can tell you that summers are going to get hotter whether we had flaring or we had cars because the Earth is evolving.” Wind and solar power, he maintained, are more environmentally harmful than fossil fuels.
According to the congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment, human activity accounts for all of the warming over the last 50 years, when the majority of changes occurred. Mr. Wright did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Bloomberg ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination last year and has spent millions of dollars to shutter coal plants across the country. In a statement, he called Ms. Castañeda a “champion” for Texas.