In Wyoming, Likely End of Cheney Dynasty Will Close a Political Era

He was elected to the Senate in 1978, the same year that Mr. Cheney won Wyoming’s at-large House seat, and they worked closely together, two Republicans battling on behalf of the country’s least populated state in an era when Democrats always controlled at least one chamber of Congress.

It’s not mere clout, however, that traditional Wyoming Republicans are pining for as they consider their gilded past and ponder the state’s less certain political and economic future. Before Tuesday’s election, which is likely to propel Harriet Hageman, who is backed by former President Donald J. Trump, to the House, the nostalgia in the state is running deeper than the Buffalo Bill Reservoir.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Simpson were not only in the leadership of their respective chambers in the 1980s; they, along with Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Yale-educated cold warrior whose grandfather served in both the British House of Lords and the Wyoming Legislature, got along well and often appeared together as a delegation in a sort of road show across the sprawling state (“A small town with long streets,” as the Wyoming saying goes).

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Even headier was the administration of President George Bush. Mr. Cheney became defense secretary, and his wife, Lynne, served as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, while Mr. Simpson was both the second-ranking Senate Republican and one of the president’s closest friends. On top of that, the secretary of state at the time, James A. Baker III, spent summers on his Wyoming ranch, meaning two of the country’s top national security officials could be found doing unofficial promotional work for the state’s tourism industry.

“You’d have Army choppers snatching Cheney and Baker from fishing holes,” recalled Rob Wallace, who was Mr. Wallop’s chief of staff.

As conservative as the state was on the national level — Lyndon B. Johnson is the only Democrat to carry Wyoming in the past 70 years — the Wyoming Republican delegation worked effectively with two well-regarded Democratic governors in that same period, Ed Herschler and Mike Sullivan.

Now, Ms. Cheney hardly even speaks to the two other Wyomingites in Congress — Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, both Republicans — and has little contact with Gov. Mark Gordon. Ms. Lummis has endorsed Ms. Hageman. But Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon, who are mainline Republicans in the Cheney tradition, have sought to maintain neutrality in hopes of avoiding Mr. Trump’s wrath.

“They’ve got to make their own choices and live with the choices that they make,” Ms. Cheney said about the two men, before adding: “There are too many people who think that somebody else will fix the problem, that we can stay on the sidelines and Trump will fade.”

Asked about the Cheney legacy in Wyoming, Mr. Barrasso and Mr. Gordon both declined to comment.

Mr. Gordon, though, has surely not forgotten that when he ran for governor in 2018, in a primary that included Ms. Hageman, Ms. Cheney did not support him.

“Everything is political in Wyoming except politics, which is personal,” Mr. Simpson likes to say. What alarms some longtime Wyoming Republicans more than campaign season tensions is what the combination of Trump fear and fidelity will ultimately mean for the strength of the delegation — and for the state’s future. Wyoming has neither a state income tax nor a corporate tax, having long relied on severance levies on oil, natural gas and coal.

With growing national support for clean energy — and a large federal bill promoting climate-friendly power soon to become law — that pillar of Wyoming’s economy could face an uncertain future.

“Wyoming has to fight to redefine itself with the decline of fossil energy,” said Mr. Wallace, who also served as a senior official in the Interior Department under Mr. Trump. “We need a strategy at the state and federal level to figure out how Wyoming will grow and prosper for future generations.”

Ms. Cheney’s detractors, though, believe her overwhelming focus on Mr. Trump and her detachment from other House Republicans, after she was ousted from party leadership, would render her ineffective, particularly should Republicans claim the House majority in November.

“She’s not a true Republican in the sense of our Republican values here in Wyoming,” said Gina Kron, who works in Casper for the federal Agriculture Department, arguing that Ms. Cheney should be less consumed with the former president and “all about fossil energy.”

To those with deep roots in Wyoming’s institutions, however, Ms. Cheney’s apparent demise symbolizes something just as troubling as any debates about the future of energy.

“There are a lot of good people with good intentions on both sides of the aisle who don’t want anything to do with politics today, and that’s a frightening fact,” said Marilyn Kite, a Laramie native who was Wyoming’s first female state Supreme Court justice.

Like many multigeneration Wyomingites, Ms. Kite blames the influx of “a lot of unpleasant people” into the state for its changing politics. Attracted by the lack of an income tax, conservative politics and renowned “high altitudes and low multitudes,” the transplants have, she said, changed the perception of the individualistic Cowboy State, which was well chronicled by John Gunther in his acclaimed midcentury book “Inside U.S.A.”

“There is no boss in Wyoming, no rule by machine,” wrote Mr. Gunther, adding: “Here we are still in the wide-open spaces where a man tries, at any rate, to think for himself.”

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What Ms. Kite didn’t mention is that Ms. Hageman grew up on a ranch near Fort Laramie and that a significant number of Ms. Cheney’s voters will be transplants themselves, whether in what passes for a liberal college town here, the community around the University of Wyoming in Laramie, or amid the soaring Tetons and soaring home prices near Jackson Hole.

Still, there’s an undeniable sense that Tuesday represents an end-of-an-era moment in Wyoming politics.

Even after Mr. Cheney left the vice presidency, the gentlemanly former Senator Michael Enzi was still leading Wyoming’s delegation, said Cat Urbigkit, an author and self-described sheep “shepherdess” near Pinedale.

“It was a different kind of leadership in the Republican Party at that point,” Ms. Urbigkit said.

This election is particularly poignant for Cheney admirers.

Dick and Lynne Cheney both grew up in Casper, high school sweethearts at Natrona County High, where the football stadium is now called Cheney Alumni Field. Living in a cook tent and reading Churchill’s history of World War II by a Coleman lantern, Mr. Cheney worked for a power line crew across the state after being twice thrown out of Yale — and before claiming a pair of degrees at Wyoming’s flagship university.

That he’d rise to the vice presidency, the closest Wyoming has come to the Oval Office, and his daughter would eventually succeed him in the House is “a point of pride” for the whole state, Ms. Kite said.

The Simpsons, however, are not sure the Cheney story is quite complete.

After the ceremony in July at Heart Mountain — where the Cody-raised Mr. Simpson famously first struck up a friendship with Mr. Mineta, his fellow Boy Scout — Ann Simpson, the former senator’s wife, approached Mr. Cheney. She said she thought Ms. Cheney should run for president.

“Dick just nodded at that,” Mr. Simpson recalled his wife telling him later. “He just said, ‘I’m very proud of her.’”

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In the fallout of the ruling, Democrats see the potential to upend the typical dynamic of midterm elections in which voters punish the party in power. In this case, although Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, it is one of their top policy priorities — access to abortion — that has been most visibly stripped away.

“Rarely has an issue been handed on a silver platter to Democrats that is so clear-cut,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster working with multiple 2022 campaigns. “It took an election that was going to be mostly about inflation and immigration and made it also about abortion.”

In the roughly 50 days since the Supreme Court’s ruling, Democrats have flooded the airwaves in many of the nation’s most closely watched contests, spending nearly eight times as much as Republicans have on ads talking about abortion — $31.9 million compared with $4.2 million, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm. And in the closest Senate and governor’s contests, Republicans have spent virtually nothing countering the Democratic offensive.

By contrast, in the last midterms four years ago, Democrats spent less than $1 million on ads that mentioned abortion-related issues in the same time period.

The 2022 advertising figures do not include money spent on the recent anti-abortion rights referendum in Kansas. The landslide defeat of that measure, particularly in a traditionally conservative state, has only further emboldened Democratic strategists and candidates.

There are risks to focusing so heavily on abortion at a moment when Americans are also expressing intense anxiety over the economy. But Democrats are plowing ahead, particularly in key Senate races.

They have spent more than $2 million on ads targeting Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, for his position on abortion; $1.6 million on ads against Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania; and $1.8 million on Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada who recently wrote an op-ed defending his stance on the issue.

More abortion ads have aired in the Senate races in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Arizona and Washington — and even in Connecticut and Maryland, two states with secure Democratic incumbents.

“I clearly believe abortion is going to matter because I think it cuts across demographics and it really does get into many voters, including Trump voters and independents, and their concept of personal freedom,” said J.B. Poersch, the president of Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super political action committee that has already funded abortion commercials in multiple states.

But Republicans say Democrats risk ignoring the economic concerns that polls have shown are paramount.

“They’ve got a lot of bad news, and they think that’s the only good news they’ve got,” said former Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, who led the House Republican campaign arm during the 2018 midterm elections. “If they want to be a single-issue party, that’s on them.”

If Democrats do focus overwhelmingly on the issue of abortion at the expense of other matters, Mr. Stivers suggested, “they’ll get smoked on the economy, where they’re already losing ground.”

For months, Democrats have been bracing for a Republican wave this fall, prompted by President Biden’s diminished popularity, high gas prices and inflation, and they still face a difficult political environment. But Mr. Biden is expected to sign a sweeping legislative package soon that addresses climate change and prescription drug prices. In addition, gas prices are declining, and there are at least some tentative signs that inflation may be slowing.

Those developments, combined with the backlash to the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion, have raised Democrats’ hopes of maintaining power after November. Certainly, they plan to advertise their legislative achievements while making other attacks on Republicans, whom they argue are a threat to democracy.

For now, new abortion-focused Democratic advertisements are popping up seemingly daily, including in Alaska, Iowa and Virginia.

Some abortion ads use the specific words and positions of Republican candidates against them. Some are narrated by women speaking in deeply raw and personal terms. Some use Republicans’ unyielding stances on abortion to cast them more broadly as extremists.

And some, like one early ad hitting Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, do all three. “Doug Mastriano scares me,” a woman declares at the beginning of the spot.

One particularly emotional spot came from Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, who used a montage of women to target Gov. Brian Kemp’s stance on abortion.

“He supports a total ban,” one woman says in the ad. “Even if I’m raped,” another says. More women continue, one after another: “A victim of incest. Forced pregnancy. Criminalized women. Women with jail time.”

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Democrats aim to connect abortion messaging to the broader argument that hard-line Republicans are seeking to strip away fundamental freedoms.

“The arguments Democrats are using in those ads don’t stay contained to the abortion space,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the former White House communications director under President Barack Obama and a longtime party strategist. “You’re telling them something about their temperament, their judgment and their values.”

In at least five states, Democrats have used the phrase “too extreme” to call out Republicans, using abortion as the example.

Often, abortion is the Democrats’ opening gambit at the start of general election ad campaigns. Just this month, ads have targeted Tudor Dixon in the governor’s race in Michigan and Kari Lake in the governor’s race in Arizona. And a day after Minnesota’s primary for governor, Democrats began airing an ad calling Scott Jensen, the Republican nominee, “too extreme” on abortion.

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The next major test of abortion’s political power comes in a special election on Aug. 23 in New York.

County Executive Pat Ryan in Ulster County, N.Y., the Democratic candidate in that race, has made abortion the focus of his campaign, even in a state where access remains protected. In a new ad this week, Mr. Ryan featured a carousel of national Republicans arguing that the party would pursue a nationwide ban.

A Democratic super PAC is spending $500,000 to promote Mr. Ryan, a veteran, with an abortion message. “He sure didn’t fight for our freedom abroad to see it taken away from women here at home,” the narrator says.

The election is being closely monitored as a barometer of the issue’s power. Democrats have overperformed — even in defeat — in two other special elections since Roe v. Wade was overturned, in Minnesota and Nebraska.

Meredith Kelly, a Democratic strategist and ad maker, said one factor that made abortion “extremely powerful” was the idea that “Republicans are taking something away.”

Research has shown that the notion of losing rights can be galvanizing for voters, which Ms. Kelly saw firsthand in 2018 when she guided the messaging for the House Democratic campaign arm. The party took over the House in part by bludgeoning Republicans for their repeated efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“When you take something away from voters, especially something as cherished and crucial as health care, which is what this is, that is a really politically perilous decision,” she said of Republicans’ approach to abortion rights.

Some Republicans are trying to backpedal or soften their stances.

In Arizona, ads are hammering Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate, for calling abortion “demonic,” talking about punishing doctors who perform the procedure and opposing exceptions for rape and incest during the primary. In a post-primary interview with The Arizona Republic, Mr. Masters called the state’s 15-week ban “a reasonable solution” and expressed his desire to “reflect the will of Arizonans.”

On the airwaves, though, few Republicans have had an answer. One notable exception has come in the New Mexico governor’s race; Mark Ronchetti, the Republican nominee to take on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, has been under fire over his stance on abortion.

“I’m personally pro-life, but I believe we can all come together on a policy that reflects our shared values,” Mr. Ronchetti said in a campaign spot that detailed his position on the issue.

Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general and Democratic nominee for governor, opened his first ad of the general election by hitting Mr. Mastriano on abortion.

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In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said voters were especially attuned to the issue because the state’s Republican-led Legislature had passed strict abortion limits that he would veto and that Mr. Mastriano would sign.

“There is an intensity around this,” he said. “They know the next governor of Pennsylvania is going to decide this.”

The evening before, Mr. Shapiro said, he met a Republican woman in the Lehigh Valley who told him that she was voting for him — her first Democratic ballot — because of abortion.

“It has brought people into our campaign and brought people off the sidelines to get engaged unlike any other issue,” Mr. Shapiro said of abortion’s influence after the Supreme Court’s ruling. “We just saw an explosion.”

This year alone, the court’s 4-to-3 conservative majority has upheld the most aggressive partisan gerrymander of state legislative districts in the country, prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters returning absentee ballots, and blocked Mr. Evers from making appointments to state agencies.

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And three of the four conservative justices on the court voted to hear Mr. Trump’s objections to the 2020 election, which could have led to overturning Wisconsin’s results. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 20,000-vote victory in the state stood only because Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, sided with the court’s three liberals.

Electing a liberal justice to replace the retiring conservative, Justice Patience D. Roggensack, would give Wisconsin Democrats an opportunity to enact a host of measures that currently have no shot at passing in the Republican-led Legislature. Bringing new lawsuits through the courts, they could potentially undo the gerrymandered legislative districts; reverse the drop box decision; and overturn the state’s 1849 law criminalizing abortion, which went back into effect in June when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

Wisconsin’s next two elections are inexorably linked. Mr. Michels has said that he will seek to change the state’s voting laws on his first day as governor. If he is indeed elected and moves quickly, new voting procedures could be in place before a new justice is elected to a 10-year term in April — and the court combined with Mr. Michels would have wide leeway to set voting rules for the 2024 presidential election, when Wisconsin is widely expected to again be a central presidential battleground.

“If they’re going to cherry-pick things that they know will depress a Democratic vote, it will absolutely impact every Democrat, including Joe Biden,” Mr. Evers said in an interview on Thursday. Referring to Mr. Michels, he added, “His election certainly would focus on depressing the vote of Democrats, no question about it.”

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During the primary campaign, Mr. Michels promised to replace the Wisconsin Elections Commission with an agency that would effectively be under the control of Republicans. And while he never explicitly endorsed decertifying Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election, Mr. Michels did not rule it out, either, saying enough to appease Mr. Trump — who has repeatedly demanded such a move.

At campaign stops and during primary debates, Mr. Michels invoked films about the 2020 election that propagate conspiracy theories falsely suggesting that Mr. Trump was the real winner. He claimed without evidence that there had been fraud in the state and pledged to prosecute the perpetrators.

“I’ve seen the movies ‘2000 Mules’ and ‘Rigged.’ And I’ll tell you, I know that there was a lot of voter fraud,” Mr. Michels said at a recent rally in Kaukauna, a small industrial city in the state’s politically swingy Fox Valley. “When I am sworn in as governor, I will look at all the evidence that is out there in January and I will do the right thing. Everything is on the table. And if people broke the law, broke election laws, I will prosecute them.”

Since winning the primary on Tuesday, Mr. Michels has spent less energy highlighting his support from Mr. Trump and his focus on election issues. On Wednesday, he removed a declaration about his Trump endorsement from the home page of his campaign website. After this New York Times reporter pointed it out on Twitter, the Michels campaign resurrected the line on his site.

Mr. Michels’s campaign aides did not respond to requests for comment.

In perhaps the best illustration of Mr. Michels’s general-election swivel, he promised attendees at a Trump rally a week ago that “my No. 1 priority is election integrity” — but in his victory speech on Tuesday night, he said, “Jobs and the economy are going to be my No. 1 priority.”

During a Thursday morning interview on a conservative radio show in Milwaukee, his first media appearance since winning the nomination, Mr. Michels also did not mention the 2020 election or his plans to change how voting works in Wisconsin.

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Instead, he has sought to remind listeners of what they liked about Mr. Trump while tethering Mr. Evers to Mr. Biden, whose approval rating in Wisconsin was at 40 percent in June, according to a Marquette University Law School poll. In his first post-primary TV ad, Mr. Michels calls Mr. Biden and Mr. Evers “two peas in a pod.”

“Donald Trump was a successful businessman, Donald Trump was tough,” Mr. Michels said in the radio interview. “I’d gladly compare Joe Biden to Donald Trump.”

To what degree Mr. Michels might change Wisconsin’s election system would be determined in large part by the Republicans who control the Legislature — most of whom supported his opponent in the Republican primary, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch.

State Senator Kathy Bernier, a rare Republican state legislator in Wisconsin who has publicly declared that Mr. Trump fairly lost the state’s 2020 election, said in an interview last week that during Mr. Michels’s primary campaign, he had displayed an ignorance about the administration of Wisconsin elections that reflected his lack of government experience.

“Mr. Michels is a fish out of water,” said Ms. Bernier, who announced her retirement in January after calling for Republican investigations into the 2020 election to end. “When I ran for the Assembly, I, too, had some ideas that weren’t workable, but good ideas. He needs some advice and training in all sorts of issues.”

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election is one of several in coming months that will effectively determine which party controls the high courts in Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio. But nowhere are the stakes as high as in Wisconsin, given how close its court came to supporting Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election.

“The State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin next year is crucial to maintaining a free and fair election system in Wisconsin, and also imperative for maintaining a representative democracy in our national elections,” said Jake Faleschini, the legal director for state courts at the Alliance for Justice Action Fund, a liberal organization that focuses on state court elections.

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While Mr. Evers has presented himself as a human guardrail against a Republican takeover of the state’s election system, the Supreme Court election in April will affect the state’s voting laws for years.

Two liberal candidates, Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, and Everett Mitchell, a county judge in Madison, have already begun their campaigns. Former Justice Dan Kelly, a conservative appointed by Gov. Scott Walker who lost re-election in 2020, is considering running again but has yet to announce a bid. The candidates will all run together in a single nonpartisan primary in February, with the top two advancing to a general election in April.

“If the more conservative candidate wins, you will have a court that looks a lot like the court now at its most conservative,” said Rick Esenberg, the president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the conservative legal organization that brought the case that led to the court’s ruling prohibiting drop boxes. “If you had a legal progressive win that seat, then obviously there would be significant ramifications there, with the court moving to the left.”

Wisconsin Democrats are already envisioning, if they win the election in April and take a 4-to-3 majority, a political transformation of the state.

“In terms of the ability to change Wisconsin in two years, this could be an utterly different state,” said Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator from Madison. “That is our real opportunity to not just stop the bad stuff from happening, but actually restore real democracy and accountability to Wisconsin, things like abortion rights and fair elections where your candidate might actually win.”

While this welter of events may feel disparate, occurring at different times and places and to different types of people, scholars who study political violence point to a common thread: the heightened use of bellicose, dehumanizing and apocalyptic language, particularly by prominent figures in right-wing politics and media.

Several right-wing or Republican figures reacted to the search of Mar-a-Lago not only with demands to dismantle the F.B.I., but also with warnings that the action had triggered “war.”

“This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying for a very long time,” Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington State, said on a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief political strategist. “We’re at war.”

On Thursday, a 42-year-old Ohio man, identified as Ricky W. Shiffer, showed up at the Cincinnati field office of the F.B.I. with an AR-15-style rifle and was subsequently shot to death after firing multiple times at the police during a standoff. There is no evidence of what prompted Mr. Shiffer to act. But Mr. Shiffer’s social media posts later revealed that he was full of rage about, among other things, the search at Mar-a-Lago — and that he wanted revenge.

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“Violence is not (all) terrorism,” he wrote — on Mr. Trump’s own social media app, Truth Social. “Kill the F.B.I. on sight.”

Despite that threat, one day later, when the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News published the warrant underlying the Mar-a-Lago search, it did not redact the names of the F.B.I. agents on the document. Almost immediately afterward, posts on a pro-Trump chat board referred to them as “traitors.”

According to the F.B.I., there are now about 2,700 open domestic terrorism investigations — a number that has doubled since the spring of 2020 — and that does not include lesser but still serious incidents that do not rise to the level of federal inquiry. Last year, threats against members of Congress reached a record high of 9,600, according to data provided by the Capitol Police.

Nonetheless, it is exceptionally rare for most adults to willfully inflict harm on other people, especially for political reasons, said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Still, Ms. Kleinfeld said, there are ways of encouraging the average person to accept violence.

If political aggression is set in the context of a war, she suggested, ordinary people with no prior history of violence are more likely to accept it. Political violence can also be made more palatable by couching it as defensive action against a belligerent enemy. That is particularly true if an adversary is persistently described as irredeemably evil or less than human.

“The right, at this point, is doing all three of these things at once,” Ms. Kleinfeld said.

There is little evidence that Republicans and right-wing media figures have tempered their rhetoric, even as Congress and the Justice Department investigate the Jan. 6 attack. Several defendants charged in the riot have said they were moved to act by Mr. Trump’s words. Still, many Republicans have sought to minimize his role.

Even before the search at Mar-a-Lago this week, some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters had been casting the political stakes as existential, suggesting that the country was already embroiled in an end-of-times clash between irreconcilable foes.

“This is truly a battle between those who want to save America and those who want to destroy her,” Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for the governor of Arizona, told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas in early August. “That’s where we are at the moment. My question to you is: Are you in this fight with us?”

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After the search of Mr. Trump’s residence, Ms. Lake declared: “Our government is rotten to the core. These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the patriots who are working hard to save America.”

“If we accept it,” she added, “America is dead.”

Ms. Lake’s campaign spokesman, Ross Trumble, said that any suggestion that her rhetoric created conditions that could lead to violence was a “tired game of dishonestly blaming Republicans.”

But the use of violence and violent language is not solely a problem on the right.

Some recent studies have found that a roughly equal percentage of liberals and conservatives agree that violence against the government is either “definitely” or “probably” justifiable. Others have shown that while support for political violence has doubled among Republicans since Mr. Trump took office, it has also increased — albeit more slowly — among Democrats.

There have also been some high-profile recent criminal cases involving political violence by left-leaning defendants, including one filed against a California man who was charged with attempted murder for showing up armed with a pistol, a knife and other weapons near the Maryland home of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in June.

Republicans have often criticized Democrats for paying scant attention to the Kavanaugh incident, and for only caring about aggression when it comes from the right. Some have pointed to a string of episodes — not all related to political violence — that reach back to 2017.

“Dangerous rhetoric from the left led to an assassination attempt on a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a shooting at a congressional baseball practice, Molotov cocktails at pregnancy centers, rampant crime in major cities and an open border. Call out the left on their threatening hyperbole, then we will talk,” said Emma Vaughn, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman.

Still, the F.B.I. has repeatedly said that extremist violence from right-wing actors is one of the biggest threats confronting the bureau. Moreover, many Republican office seekers have directly incorporated violent language and imagery into their campaigns, including Eric Greitens, who ran an advertisement in his Missouri Senate race showing himself racking a shotgun, accompanied by men armed with assault rifles as they stormed — SWAT team-style — into a home in search of “RINOs,” or “Republicans in name only.”

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The party’s more established leaders have often used a different tactic, casting longstanding policy disputes over abortion, gun rights and immigration as more than the usual political tussling by depicting them as dire conflicts, with the future of the republic hanging in the balance.

“Anger is a really productive emotion for politics,” said Lilliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “It helps motivate people to participate in democracy by doing things like putting signs in their yard, vote, or get others to vote, but can easily spill over into violence.”

Ms. Mason added: “It’s a powerful electoral tool that can be easily misused.”

After the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, one of the most common Republican responses was an effort to stoke fears by suggesting that if federal agents could enter the private domain of a former president, then no one on the right could possibly be safe.

“Trump Targeted by Biden Administration, and They Can Do It to You, Too,” read the headline of an opinion article by Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, that was published on the Fox News website two days after the search took place.

After condemning the F.B.I. for using “third-world tactics” — despite the fact the search had been authorized by a court-approved warrant — Ms. McDaniel listed a litany of purported actions taken by Democrats, each of them suggesting the party was out to get ordinary Republicans.

Last October, Ms. McDaniel wrote, the Justice Department “labeled parents concerned about their kids’ educations as ‘domestic terrorists.’” (In fact, the F.B.I., including its counterterrorism section, began tracking threats against school administrators, teachers and board members to assess the extent of the problem.)

Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, put it more bluntly.

“They hate us,” Ms. Boebert wrote in a tweet on Aug. 11. “They don’t just want to eliminate conservative ideology. They want to eliminate conservatives.”

Experts note that rhetoric does not have to directly reference violence to contribute to threats. Dehumanizing language also plays a role.

They point to efforts to label immigrants as invaders and people who support teaching about transgender and gay rights as “groomers.” That term, which connotes the sexual indoctrination of underage children, is a reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which baselessly holds that Democrats and other liberals are Satan-worshipping pedophiles who traffic children.

Mr. Shiffer’s social media posts suggest that he opposed the movement for transgender rights. In one of the posts, he said he was prepared for “war against the communists who chemically neuter prepubescent children and call it gender transitioning.”

Adam Graham, who was one of fewer than half a dozen L.G.B.T. elected officials in Oklahoma, said that repeated threats forced him to resign.

His tires were slashed, he said. He was harassed by residents at a council meeting, called a homophobic epithet and followed near his home.

“Being followed while walking your dog,” Mr. Graham said. “That’s very scary. I was afraid what would they do next if I don’t step down.”

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Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, has conducted half a dozen nationwide polls since the Jan. 6 attack and has repeatedly found the same results: that between 15 million and 20 million American adults believe that violence would be justified to return Mr. Trump to office.

This kind of “community support,” Mr. Pape said, can normalize violence.

“Community support lowers the threshold at which volatile people will take action,” Mr. Pape said, “because he or she will tell themselves that people in the community actually support them. Maybe it’s only 10 percent of the community, but that’s still a large group.”

Mr. Pape and other violence researchers often compare conditions in the United States to those of dry forest with lots of combustible material on the ground. All it takes is a spark, like the search of Mar-a-Lago, to ignite the tinder.

With Mr. Trump facing multiple investigations even as he considers yet another run for office, there are many possible sparks that could flare up in the days and weeks ahead.

“We’re in wildfire season,” Mr. Pape said, “and will be for quite some time.”

Reporting was contributed by Neil Vigdor, Frances Robles, Mark Walker and Alyce McFadden.

Ms. Pelosi, 82, has avoided discussing her plans past November and declined to be interviewed. A spokesman, Drew Hammill, issued the same, terse statement he has offered previously: “The speaker is not on a shift,” he said. “She’s on a mission.”

Some clues to Ms. Pelosi’s future may be found closer to her home in San Francisco — where the tantalizing possibility of the city’s first open congressional seat since the fall of the Soviet Union has become the political talk of the town.

Would-be candidates, labor leaders, political strategists, donors and activists are already busily plotting what a race to succeed her would look like — albeit almost entirely in secret, to avoid antagonizing Ms. Pelosi, who has made plain she wants to retire on her own terms.

“This is very much the campaign that shall not be named,” Dan Newman, a San Francisco-based Democratic operative, said of the early jostling. “Nancy Pelosi is a force of nature, and no one wants to appear in any way disrespectful or dismissive.”

In interviews, more than a dozen officials said local Democrats were preparing for the possibility that Ms. Pelosi could resign rather than stay and hand the gavel to a Republican. That would trigger a snap special election in San Francisco, held within 150 days — a sprint for what, given the city’s politics, could amount to a de facto lifetime appointment to Congress.

Adding to the intrigue: One potential successor is Ms. Pelosi’s daughter Christine Pelosi, a party activist and Democratic National Committee executive committee member who serves as an adviser to her mother, has written a book about her and often accompanies her to local union halls, speeches and parades. She slings her opinions online from a Twitter handle, @sfpelosi, that could at a glance be confused for one her mother might use.

Wrapped up in the elder Ms. Pelosi’s decision and its timing are intertwined questions of power, legacy and dynasty, and how fully a barrier-breaking, notoriously competitive public figure can stage-manage her exit.

There is also Washington politics: Ms. Pelosi called herself “a bridge to the next generation of leaders” four years ago, signaling her desire that her departure coincide with those of her fellow-octogenarian lieutenants, Representatives Steny Hoyer, 83, and James Clyburn, 82. Neither has agreed.

In San Francisco, similarly, the Pelosi name remains beloved, but there is no guarantee of a controlled succession.

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A popular state senator, Scott Wiener, whose district overlaps Ms. Pelosi’s, is widely seen as laying the groundwork for a campaign. Mr. Wiener spent nearly $2.5 million on his re-election and has been wooing supporters under the guise of good politics, though his ambitions to become San Francisco’s first openly gay congressman are an open secret.

In an interview at a Brazilian pastry shop, the 6-foot-7-inch Mr. Wiener refused even to broach the possibility of a post-Pelosi era. “The longer she stays, the better for our country,” he said. “I’m on Team Nancy.”

It was a comment befitting what Tony Winnicker, a longtime local Democratic strategist, called “the first rule of wanting to run for Nancy Pelosi’s seat.”

“You never talk about it in a way that suggests Nancy will ever leave,” he said.

Christine Pelosi, too, declined to comment.

As former chair of the women’s caucus of the state Democratic Party, the younger Ms. Pelosi, 56, has been outspoken in fighting sexual harassment.

Increasingly, she and Mr. Wiener, 52, are crisscrossing at local events, like a Pride breakfast where he and the elder Ms. Pelosi both delivered speeches. “This has been a family affair for us for more than 30 years,” Nancy Pelosi said, recognizing her daughter’s presence. (She also acknowledged Mr. Wiener.)

Just as she has in Washington, where she has outlasted a generation of potential male successors — Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Joseph Crowley among them — Ms. Pelosi has kept an array of ambitious local officials on ice since 1987.

Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor, said that those planning House campaigns were smart to get started, even if somewhat premature. In an interview over lunch, he speculated that Ms. Pelosi would prove a powerful ally to her daughter, eventually.

“If her mother is not around, Christine would be a formidable candidate,” Mr. Brown said. “Because her mother would make her a formidable candidate.”

Few expect the speaker to reveal her intentions until November. Doing so any sooner could reduce her sway over the razor-thin House Democratic majority, not to mention her power as a fund-raiser. She hosts a major donor retreat in Napa next weekend.

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Whenever her House seat opens up, it will be a chance to not just succeed the first female speaker in United States history but to also represent a city that has long punched above its weight in national politics, despite a population smaller than that of Columbus, Ohio.

Today, the No. 2 and No. 3 officials in the presidential line of succession — Vice President Kamala Harris, once the city’s district attorney, and Ms. Pelosi — both cut their teeth politically in San Francisco. Democrats who emerge in the city’s notoriously cutthroat liberal politics, from Gov. Gavin Newsom to Senator Dianne Feinstein to Ms. Pelosi, have found ways to placate the oft-warring factions of the Democratic Party.

“The fight gives you muscle,” said Debra Walker, an artist and activist who has served as the president of the Harvey Milk L.G.B.T.Q. Democratic Club. Ms. Walker was appointed in June to the San Francisco Police Commission, as Mayor London Breed sought to defuse a blowup between the police department and the city’s annual Pride Parade organizers, who had sought to bar officers from marching in uniform.

Even among Ms. Pelosi’s friends and allies, some have wondered if Christine Pelosi, who wrote a book on campaigning but has never run for office herself, is sufficiently prepared.

“I would rather see Christine start at a state level rather than Congress,” said Joe Cotchett, a major Democratic donor and family friend.

Mr. Cotchett expected Nancy Pelosi to support her daughter, up to a point. “Do I think that Nancy will push her? Emotionally, she’s her daughter,” he said. “But I don’t think Nancy is the type of person who would step in and attempt to block anyone from running.”

If the elder Ms. Pelosi is known for her deft relationship management, that has been less true for Christine, whose years as an activist have included pressing for D.N.C. resolutions — trying to ban corporate contributions, demanding a 2020 climate debate — sometimes to the exasperation of party officials.

Her last name has insulated her from public criticism, but hidden frustrations have mounted, according to a half dozen officials on both coasts.

She antagonized the Newsom team, for instance, when she suggested during the 2021 recall that Mr. Newsom should step down if he looked likely to lose. Publicly, she sought to undercut Mr. Newsom’s central strategy of labeling the recall as a Republican power grab. Privately, she was directly texting Mr. Newsom to complain about his tactics, according to two people briefed on the messages she sent.

Mr. Newsom defeated the recall in a landslide.

In a city where politics is often personal and fractious, Mr. Wiener has accumulated critics, too.

“People talk about it all the time,” Mike Casey, president of the San Francisco Labor Council, said of the race to succeed Ms. Pelosi. “But mostly, like, who don’t we want. Like Scott Wiener has really gotten on the trades’ and a number of our bad side.”

And while Mr. Wiener and Ms. Pelosi are progressives by any national metric, neither would necessarily satisfy the city’s ideological purists, a wing that could field a candidate, too. “I haven’t ruled it out,” said Jane Kim, a 45-year-old former supervisor and executive director of the California Working Families Party.

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Jen Snyder, a San Francisco-based strategist who works with progressives, could summon little enthusiasm for a Pelosi-Wiener contest.

“It will be Mothra versus Godzilla,” Ms. Snyder said. “I guess I will be on the sidelines eating popcorn.”

Another possible candidate is Ms. Breed, the first Black woman to serve as mayor. She has indicated she is uninterested in a congressional run, according to people close to her.

“I can tell you as a friend of hers, she’s not,” said Lee Houskeeper, a local public-relations veteran, who joined Mr. Brown for the lunch interview.

“I can tell you as a friend of hers, she better be,” Mr. Brown interjected.

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Clint Reilly, who managed Ms. Pelosi’s 1987 congressional campaign and has known her family since, declined at first to talk. “Leave me alone!” he insisted. “They won’t be happy with anything I say!”

But Mr. Reilly, an investor who now owns The San Francisco Examiner, agreed to talk, including about how Ms. Pelosi won that first race, defeating a gay rival, Harry Britt, who ran to her left, in a multicandidate scrum.

Her prophetic slogan: “A voice that will be heard.”

If Democrats lose in November, Mr. Reilly said, “most people would call it at that time.” But not necessarily Ms. Pelosi. “She loves the game,” he said. “She hates to lose.”

“How it ends?” he mused. “I don’t think even she knows the answer.”

But the main focus of the Democratic primary was housing. Hawaii’s comparatively low infection rate drew many wealthy remote workers from the mainland, exacerbating the state’s existing shortage of affordable housing — a crisis that, like the pandemic, has hit Native Hawaiians especially hard. As of July, Hawaii was the most expensive state in the nation to live in.

Mr. Green’s housing plan includes easing regulations to speed up home construction, allowing development on more public land and targeting illegal vacation units.

Ms. Cayetano — a businesswoman who co-founded Hawaii’s largest laundry services company and whose husband, Ben Cayetano, was governor from 1994 to 2002 — campaigned on creating a state-funded pipeline for renters to earn ownership of their homes, and on eliminating state income taxes for people earning less than $50,000.

Mr. Kahele, a first-term congressman and former state senator, focused more on campaign finance and governance issues than on housing, arguing that reforms like banning corporate campaign contributions and imposing term limits for elected officials would “break the barriers that keep average voters from steering our state government.”

But his campaign suffered after he decided to rely on Hawaii’s public funding system and then failed to file a document required to receive the money.

More than a million dollars in spending by such groups gave Mr. Branco a financial advantage, even though Ms. Tokuda’s campaign raised more than three times as much as his in the most recent fiscal quarter, according to Federal Election Commission filings. In addition to the 2012 N.R.A. endorsement, pro-Branco ads attacked Ms. Tokuda for opposing a 2015 bill that would have banned pesticide spraying around Hawaii schools.

Beyond guns and abortion, Ms. Tokuda — who spent 12 years in the Hawaii Senate and rose to become the chairwoman of the Ways and Means Committee, before stepping down in 2018 to run unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor — has called for suspending the federal gas tax, expanding the earned-income tax credit and extending the more generous child tax credit that Congress recently allowed to expire.

In response to a questionnaire from The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, she emphasized the need for more federal funding for health care, education and housing in rural communities.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed her in June, saying in a statement at the time, “In Hawaii, Jill has led on affordable housing, education, women’s reproductive freedom and gun violence prevention, and she’ll do the same in Congress.”