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Sam Bankman-Fried is testifying in his own case. He has the chance to tell his side of the story—something he’s historically been very good at—but now the former FTX executive is having trouble explaining himself.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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A Nearly Impossible Interlocutor

On the witness stand in a Manhattan federal courtroom yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried gave off the impression that he was not accustomed to being grilled. For years, that was true: No investors sat on FTX’s board of directors, and people clamored to give him money without doing proper due diligence. But even if people had tried to question Bankman-Fried about the integrity or process of his company, it seems he would have proved a nearly impossible interlocutor. On the stand, he eagerly explained complicated tech concepts such as the blockchain. But when tougher questions about seemingly straightforward topics were brought up—such as whether or not a payment agreement authorized Alameda Research, FTX’s sister company, to spend customer funds, and whether he got permission from lawyers to destroy messages—he deflected, reframed, apologized, and changed the subject.

The question of whether Bankman-Fried would testify in his own defense has been hanging over his trial since it began nearly four weeks ago. Testifying allows a defendant to tell his own story, but it also opens him up to self-incrimination. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers announced on Wednesday that he would testify, and he was expected to start yesterday. Instead, the judge made the unusual decision to hold an evidentiary hearing, in order to decide what parts of Bankman-Fried’s testimony would be permissible to include before the jury. This surprise hearing was effectively a dry run of Bankman-Fried’s testimony, which began in front of jurors this morning. (A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.)

With the confident, at times slightly condescending manner of a special-interest-podcast host, Bankman-Fried first answered a series of easy questions from the defense, arguing that FTX’s lawyers were to blame for many of the company’s failures, and claiming that he had followed their guidance in good faith. For a short while, he appeared at ease. He famously used to play video games during important calls—with investors, with Anna Wintour, with journalists—and some of that weary insouciance came through while he was on the stand. “Yep,” he sometimes chirped in the middle of his lawyer’s questions, as if he was already bored of the question.

But during cross-examination, conducted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, Bankman-Fried began to flounder. I watched as he rotated through a number of tactics in quick succession. He repeatedly said that he didn’t remember a lot of aspects of running his company. He used passive voice excessively, describing a business that was apparently operating itself around him. That was unsurprising; his lawyers have been signaling that other people were to blame for FTX’s failures throughout the trial. More unusual was the way that he began to attempt to gain the upper hand in the cross-examination: At some points, he condescended to Sassoon, or adopted the rhetoric of the lawyers. “Once again, I will give a specific answer, but if this is not scoped correctly, tell me,” he said at one point (as if it was his job, not that of the lawyers and judge, to worry about scope). At another point, Bankman-Fried conveyed his apologies that “because of the order we’re doing this in, this [response] will be a somewhat substantial digression.” Sassoon didn’t blink at this implicit critique of how she was doing her job. Bankman-Fried is used to being on the side of people like elite lawyers. (His parents, both Stanford law professors, were sitting in court, jotting down notes or doodles in legal pads.) Facing off against lawyers in court, he alternated between presenting himself as a collaborator who was just trying to help and offering word-salad answers that did not help at all.

Bankman-Fried also subtly attempted to erode Sassoon’s authority by suggesting that her questions were unclear: “I wouldn’t phrase it that way. But I think that the answer to the question I understand you to be trying to ask is yes,” he said, in response to a question—of central importance to the case—about whether a payment agreement allowed Alameda to spend customer deposits. When Sassoon pulled up an exhibit and asked Bankman-Fried to point out where in the agreement it said that Alameda was allowed to spend customer funds, he paused for well over a minute, casting his eyes downward. Then, at last, he broke the silence: “So I should preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer,” he said, before delivering such a long and convoluted answer that Sassoon got the judge’s approval to repeat the question and try to get him to answer it again. In front of the jury this morning, Bankman-Fried stuck to the narrative his lawyers had set up in recent weeks, portraying himself as a hard-working entrepreneur who got in over his head.

Bankman-Fried has always been a good talker, and it’s that skill that helped him not only to make money, but to gain power. Telling his side of the story is his specialty. A big part of this story is that FTX was never really about getting rich. Bankman-Fried did, of course, come to be worth billions of dollars. But he justified his profitable gambits by saying that he was using his money to make the world a better place. Through his millions of dollars of donations to the effective-altruism movement, he devoted himself to a goal no less lofty than saving the future of humanity, focusing large portions of his philanthropy on artificial intelligence and preventing future pandemics.

Through prolific additional donations (many of which are now under legal scrutiny), he also attempted to reshape politics; Bankman-Fried was one of the biggest donors of the 2022 campaign cycle. He also made repeated trips to Washington and lobbied consistently for the crypto industry. Before FTX collapsed, Bankman-Fried’s money, and his power, was in fact beginning to change the world—in part because no one questioned him in the way that government prosecutors have done in court. After watching him yesterday, I’d guess that even those who might have tried questioning him didn’t get very far; Bankman-Fried’s rhetorical gymnastics were exasperating (especially to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who kept admonishing him to just answer the questions). Bankman-Fried is a numbers guy; his lawyer called him a “math nerd” in court. But he’s also long been a language guy, deft at using words to gain power. In court yesterday, under the harsh scrutiny of federal prosecutors, that rhetoric was falling flat.

Related:

The taming of Sam Bankman-Fried The journalist and the fallen billionaire

Today’s News

Judge Arthur Engoron ruled that Ivanka Trump must testify at her father’s New York civil fraud trial. The United States carried out two precision strikes on Iran-linked locations in Syria as retaliation for attacks on its bases and personnel in the area. Li Keqiang, the former premier of China, died at the age of 68.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Stop doomscrolling about Israel and Palestine, Gal Beckerman writes—read these books instead. Up for Debate: When should people try to better the world through their job? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers for their thoughts, and discusses university responses to the Israel-Hamas war.

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Why America Doesn’t Build

By Jerusalem Demsas

Here’s how wind-energy projects aren’t built in America. This particular story took place a decade ago but could easily have unfolded last year or last month. In 2013, a Texas-based company put forward a proposal to build two windmill farms in northeastern Alabama. The company said that the farms would generate enough power for more than 24,000 homes, eagerly projecting that it would break ground by the end of 2013. But local opposition swiftly defeated the project. Opponents also won stringent regulations that made future wind farms in the area extremely unlikely...

In the typical cultural script, a polluting corporation tries to crush the little guy; a pipeline threatens a defenseless fox; a faceless bureaucrat charts the course of a highway through a thriving neighborhood. Accordingly, American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without.

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Here’s how wind-energy projects aren’t built in America. This particular story took place a decade ago but could easily have unfolded last year or last month. In 2013, a Texas-based company put forward a proposal to build two windmill farms in northeastern Alabama. The company said that the farms would generate enough power for more than 24,000 homes, eagerly projecting that it would break ground by the end of 2013. But local opposition swiftly defeated the project. Opponents also won stringent regulations that made future wind farms in the area extremely unlikely.

“I think this is a great example of ordinary people with determination and a certain amount of political cooperation successfully standing up to defend their community,” one critic of the project told a local reporter. “It was literally a David versus Goliath thing,” another said.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Tress? Not in my backyard]

Americans have generally understood the transition to a clean-energy economy as a technological or an economic problem: Can renewables be reliable? Can they compete with cheap fossil fuels? Recent advances have answered these questions with a resounding yes. But climate change is also a democratic problem: Can our political institutions quickly and equitably facilitate 91,000 miles of transmission lines? The problem is not just that entrenched oil-and-gas interests reject the need to end reliance on fossil fuels; it’s also that the environmental playbook was written to stop rather than create change.

In the typical cultural script, a polluting corporation tries to crush the little guy; a pipeline threatens a defenseless fox; a faceless bureaucrat charts the course of a highway through a thriving neighborhood. Accordingly, American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without.

Five landowners filed a lawsuit against the wind developers in Alabama; two of them were well-connected local politicians. They alleged the following concerns: noise from the turning of the windmills; an “overwhelming” negative aesthetic impact; hypothetical harms to tourism, recreation, and home construction (again due to noise); the “flashing of the blades when the sun strikes at a particular angle”; harm to wildlife (unspecified); harm to nearby lakes and ponds; and “significant danger” that could occur from broken blades, lightning strikes, or collapsing towers. In sum, the property owners claimed that the two farms, containing eight wind turbines, would hurt property values as well as destroy “the way of life of the surrounding land owners.”

Another 32 property owners in the adjacent county had already filed a suit opposing the development on similar grounds. But neither lawsuit was ultimately necessary, because the state legislature granted broad authority to the two county governments at issue to oversee future wind permitting. The legislature also created stringent requirements for wind projects that make them legal in name only. So died a project meant to provide millions of dollars of local tax revenue and play a small part in the clean-energy transition.  

[Jerusalem Demsas: The great defenders of the status quo]

This case was not unusual. The UC Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes recently led a study looking into wind-energy opposition in North America from 2000 to 2016. She estimated that in the U.S., 17 percent of wind projects faced opposition, usually by a small number of people. (The median figure was 23.) As in Alabama, opposition was most likely to take the form of litigation and legislation, not mass protest.

Stokes’s research likely undersells how rampant opposition actually is. She relied on media coverage to measure it, which means that her data set doesn’t include nonpublic actions such as making calls to legislators or local elected officials, or lawsuits not covered by local newspapers. Nor can her research capture the cascading effects of opposition on renewable-energy development. Whether it kills a project or merely delays one, opposition has broad ramifications beyond the enterprise in question, because it raises the costs of development. Moreover, broad ordinances such as the ones in Alabama don’t just stop current projects; they prevent future projects as well.

Community opposition holds back the broader green-energy economy well beyond onshore wind projects. The Stanford researcher Michael Bennon studied 355 major transportation and energy-infrastructure projects from 2010 to 2018, and found that nearly two-thirds of proposed solar-energy projects were litigated. Fourteen percent of these projects were canceled, and fewer than half of them were in operation by the time the study was published this month. Transmission lines necessary to connect renewable-energy sources to the grid also face intense local opposition. And carbon-dioxide pipelines that seek to ferry the substance away to underground storage locations rather than releasing it into the atmosphere are also blocked by local opposition.

Rejecting clean power in your own backyard means accepting pollution in someone else’s. And the costs of that bargain are unevenly felt: Environmental-justice advocates have long pointed out that politically marginalized communities—those with less power usually due to their class or race—face the brunt of climate change’s negative effects, and they have successfully pushed legacy green organizations to recognize that pollution has disparate impacts.

Stokes brings a new phrase into the lexicon: energy privilege. It refers to her finding that in the U.S., whiter census tracts were more likely to oppose wind-energy projects. Opposition was also more intense in whiter tracts. This finding adds to a growing literature in political science showing that race, age, class, and homeownership status predict involvement in local government. The people who show up to land-use hearings, the people who vote in local elections, and thus the people aware of and equipped to fight changes in their community, are not reflective of the broader population. Relatedly, opposition tends to require access to lawyers, connections to local elected officials, and practice with lobbying.

I spoke with environmental-justice advocates about energy privilege and the broader issue of opposition privilege. At the center of my conversations was this question: Isn’t there a tension between pushing for a fast transition to a green economy and giving local objectors so much power to block renewable-energy projects? They all told me that I was focusing on the wrong problem: Instead of removing veto points from the clean-energy process, we should instead invest more in community input to ensure that projects get the necessary buy-in early.

Johanna Bozuwa, the executive director of the Climate and Community Project, wants to focus on integrating input early in the community process, to avoid easy pitfalls. Catherine Coleman Flowers, the vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, made a similar point. “I’m sure things would look very, very different if there was stakeholder engagement from the very beginning,” she told me, pointing to a finding in Stokes’s paper that opposition to wind-energy projects was less likely if those projects were community owned.

[Read: Floating wind farms are about to transform the oceans]

Flowers is right about this finding, but when I pressed Stokes about it, she ran the numbers and found that community-owned projects in her sample had a median of just two wind turbines, whereas non-community-owned projects had a median of 44. Giving local communities significant control over these projects may alleviate opposition, but at a significant cost.

Marion Gee, an executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, sees a problem with scale. She believes that instead of reforming our processes to speed up the development of large new projects, we should question whether we need them at all. “You’re probably setting up for conflict when you have such big projects,” she told me, recommending a focus on distributed energy rather than on “huge, concentrated wind farms or huge, concentrated energy installations near any community.” Gee thinks that the path forward looks like rooftop solar, energy-efficiency investments, and reduced demand for energy.

These are empirical questions: Can we do without big energy projects and large transmission lines? Is distributed generation enough? The answer is no. According to a 2016 assessment by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, even if the U.S. put rooftop solar on every single building where it was technically feasible, that would generate only 1,432 terawatt hours of energy annually. In 2022, the U.S. used more than 4,000 TWh of electricity. And our electricity needs will skyrocket as people switch over to electric cars, buildings switch to heat pumps, and industrial production switches away from fossil fuels. To reach net-zero emissions in 2050, the U.S. will need to generate nearly 11,000 TWh of electricity a year, according to one model. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, the best approach is to do it all. Yes to rooftop solar; yes to utility-scale solar; yes to wind; yes to carbon-capture technologies.

Flowers, Bozuwa, and Gee are united in their belief that local objections are inherently legitimate. There are good reasons to oppose a development, of course, even a renewable-energy one—if it blocks public access to a national park, for instance. But opposing a wind turbine because you think it might be ugly is not reasonable. Delaying a solar project because you have a vague notion that it might affect tourism is not reasonable. And the reality is that our legal and political systems are incapable of differentiating reasonable from unreasonable objections.

Let’s return to the Alabama wind-energy example. Many of the detractors’ objections were patently unreasonable. Wind farms simply aren’t particularly noisy, for instance. (Listen for yourself.) Nor do they really hurt property values. And even the top bird-conservation organization says that outdoor cats are a greater threat to birds than windmills are. But this is how the system works: Local opposition, even if it is unreasonable or narrowly held, can derail projects and slow the green-energy transition without ever proving any of its claims.

Highways that cut through downtowns were bad, because they destroyed vibrant neighborhoods, entrenched car dependency, targeted poor and minority communities, and locked in climate-unfriendly infrastructure. The problem with bad projects isn’t the local opposition; the problem is that they are bad. Local opposition can be a sign of that, but it can also just be a sign that people fear change. The green-energy transition rests on our ability to distinguish between the two. Right now, we can’t.

A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.

An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.

After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.

[Read: Abortion is inflaming the GOP’s biggest electoral problem]

With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

Virginia Republicans maintain that the 15-week limit, with exceptions, represents a “consensus” position that most voters will accept, even in a state that has steadily trended toward Democrats in federal races over the past two decades. (President Joe Biden carried the state over Donald Trump by about 450,000 votes.) “When you talk about 15 weeks with exceptions, it is seen as very reasonable,” Zack Roday, the director of the Republican coordinated campaign effort, told me.

If Youngkin and the GOP win control of both legislative chambers next month behind that message, other Republicans outside the core red states are virtually certain to adopt their approach to abortion. Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.

“Candidates across this country should take note of how Republicans in Virginia are leading on the issue of life by going on offense and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs at the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in an email.

But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”

These dynamics were all on display when the Democratic legislative candidates Joel Griffin and Joshua Cole spent one morning last weekend canvassing for votes. Griffin is the Democratic nominee for the Virginia state Senate and Cole is the nominee for the state House of Delegates, in overlapping districts centered on Fredericksburg, a small, picturesque city about an hour south of Washington, D.C. They devoted a few hours to knocking on doors together in the Clearview Heights neighborhood, just outside the city, walking up long driveways and chatting with homeowners out working in their yards.

Their message focused on one issue above all: preserving legal access to abortion. Earlier that morning, Griffin had summarized their case to about two dozen volunteers who’d gathered at a local campaign office to join the canvassing effort. “Make no mistake,” he told them. “Your rights are on the ballot.”

The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.

The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.

These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C., notes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the center’s political newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In that way, they are typical of the mostly college-educated suburbs that have steadily trended blue in the Trump era.

Such places have continued to break sharply toward Democrats in other elections this year that revolved around abortion, particularly the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election won by the liberal candidate in a landslide this spring, and an Ohio ballot initiative carried comfortably by abortion-rights forces in August. In special state legislative elections around the country this year, Democrats have also consistently run ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the same districts.

“There’s this idea that Democrats are maybe focusing too much on abortion, but we’ve got a lot of data and a lot of information” from this year’s elections signaling that the issue remains powerful, Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.

Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory. When Tara Durant, Griffin’s Republican opponent, debated him last month, she also tried to link the Democrat to Biden’s policies on immigration and the “radical Green New Deal” while blaming the president for persistent inflation. “What we do not need are Biden Democrats in Virginia right now,” insisted Durant, who serves in the House of Delegates.

Griffin has raised other issues too. In the debate, he underscored his support for increasing public-education funding and his opposition to book-banning efforts by a school board in a rural part of the district. Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”

Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. Each side can point to polling that offers encouragement for its abortion stance. A Washington Post/Schar School poll earlier this year found that a slim 49 to 46 percent plurality of Virginia voters said they would support a 15-week abortion limit with exceptions. But in that same survey, only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.

In effect, Republicans believe the key phrase for voters in their proposal will be 15 weeks, whereas Democrats believe that most voters won’t hear anything except ban or limit. Some GOP candidates have even run ads explicitly declaring that they don’t support an abortion “ban,” because they would permit the procedure during those first 15 weeks of pregnancy. But Democrats remain confident that voters will view any tightening of current law as a threat.

“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”

In many ways, the Virginia race will provide an unusually clear gauge of public attitudes about the parties’ competing abortion agendas. The result won’t be colored by gerrymanders that benefit either side: The candidates are running in new districts drawn by a court-appointed special master. And compared with 2021, the political environment in the state appears more level as well. Cole, who lost his state-House seat that year, told me that although voters tangibly “wanted something different and new” in 2021, “I would say we’re now at a plateau.”

The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.

Beyond his financial help, Youngkin is also an asset for the GOP ticket because multiple polls show that a majority of Virginia voters approve of his job performance. Republicans are confident that under Youngkin, the party has established a lead over Democrats among state voters for handling the economy and crime, while largely neutralizing the traditional Democratic advantage on education. To GOP strategists, Democrats are emphasizing abortion rights so heavily because there is no other issue on which they can persuade voters. “That’s the only message the Democrats have,” Roday, the GOP strategist, said. “They really have run a campaign solely focused on one issue.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The abortion policy most Americans want]

Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.

Next month’s elections will feature other contests around the country where abortion rights are playing a central role, including Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky, a state-supreme-court election in Pennsylvania, and an Ohio ballot initiative to rescind the six-week abortion ban that Republicans passed in 2019. But none of those races may influence the parties’ future strategy on the issue more than the outcome in Virginia.