Conservatives Pour Millions Into ‘Stop the Steal’ 2.0
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Technology shouldn't just answer questions, but help you ask better ones. That's Claude by Anthropic. Claude is your AI partner in innovation, turning ideas into actionable strategies. Explore the future of work at anthropic.com slash enterprise. Budget Airlines Frontier and Spirit revive merger talks. Plus, Apple stands by what's likely to be a less flashy than expected rollout of iPhone AI features next week.

And we'll look at the network laying the groundwork to stop the steal of the presidential election if it doesn't go Trump's way. There is serious questions about whether this will impact just getting the election done, whether people who do this all year round are going to be able to work through the chaos and confusion in order to get

the results that everybody wants to have answers to. It's Wednesday, October 23rd. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

We are exclusively reporting that Frontier Airlines is exploring a renewed bid for fellow budget carrier Spirit Airlines, and the two have recently held discussions about a merger. While talks remain at an early stage and could fall through, we report that a potential deal would likely happen as part of Spirit restructuring its debt and other liabilities in bankruptcy.

Journal Markets reporter Caitlin McCabe has more. The airline is currently in the midst of discussions with bondholders over the terms of a potential bankruptcy filing after its attempt to merge with JetBlue was blocked earlier this year. And when that happened, it really walled off a potential option for Spirit to turn its fortunes around.

This is all coming at a pretty critical time for Spirit. You know, this airline is really synonymous with the ultra discount carrier model, but we've seen bigger and more mainstream competitors doing a better job in the last few years at competing for passengers who like to travel with bargains.

And meanwhile, the airline's also dealing with higher costs. But in a lot of cases, they haven't been able to pass those along to their price-sensitive customers. Spirit Airlines shares jumped more than 20 percent in off-hours trading.

In other news from the air travel industry, American Airlines has been fined $50 million after the Transportation Department found that the carrier for years has provided unsafe and undignified assistance to wheelchair users. It is the largest penalty the regulator has ever imposed on an airline for violating disability protections. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says the department has active investigations into other U.S. airlines regarding this issue. A

American said it invested $175 million this year to address challenges faced by passengers with disabilities and that it increased spending on wheelchair accessibility before the fine. McDonald's quarter-pounders have been linked to an E. coli outbreak that's made at least 49 people sick across 10 states and killed one, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

McDonald's says some of the cases may be linked to onions used in the burger and has told local restaurants to remove them. It's also temporarily pulling the quarter pounder from restaurants in Colorado, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, though it says other menu items aren't affected. McDonald's shares fell sharply in off-hours trading.

And in other markets news today, shares in Tokyo Metro rallied in its stock market debut, closing 45 percent higher than their listing price. The subway operator's IPO is Japan's largest in almost six years. Starbucks stock is down in off-hours trading after the coffee chain warned it's facing big setbacks in key markets, with its CEO Brian Nicol saying yesterday that the company needs a fundamental strategy rethink, including reviewing its prices and marketing.

And all eyes today are on earnings, with results from beleaguered jetmaker Boeing due out before the bell, along with AT&T and Coca-Cola. Results from Tesla and IBM are set to drop this afternoon, and existing home sales figures are due out at 10 a.m. Eastern.

Coming up, how Donald Trump and his allies are preparing to contest the election outcome if it doesn't go their way. And why the first release of Apple intelligence won't be that smart. Those stories after the break.

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Unleash your team's potential at anthropic.com/enterprise. When Donald Trump and his allies led an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, their efforts to do so were chaotic, leading some conservatives at the time to lament that Trump hadn't been more effective in contesting the vote.

Well, four years later, a secretive network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires has helped to lay the groundwork for a far broader effort to contest the election should it not go Trump's way. And Journal of National Legal Affairs reporter Mariah Timms is here to discuss it.

Mariah, you and your colleague Rebecca Ballhaus have been combing through a bunch of documents, FEC filings, tax filings, other records, and you have come to understand that there's a group of prominent figures here building an election integrity effort, as they call it. It's sprawling, pretty well funded. Tell us what you've learned. Well, we've learned that there is a lot of money, as you said, moving. We found more than $140 million going to these so-called election integrity groups.

What's notable about these groups is that they're very much tied to people who were prominently involved in the Stop the Steal movement in 2020 and have been involved in efforts since then in the intervening four years to do similar things. So if you follow these stories, there are some familiar names in these groups. There's Kalita Mitchell, who was involved in the Georgia call. There's Mike Flynn, a former national security advisor on Trump's team. People who have been in these spaces for a while and are repeating some of the same claims they have been since 2020, incorrectly or falsely disputing the results.

And Mariah, we should note here that Mitchell told us she's very proud of the Election Integrity Network and those working on the effort, while Flynn didn't respond to a request for comment. But just to get a little bit more specific here, tell us about the kinds of groups receiving this money and what exactly they're doing. These conservative groups are funding...

Interesting new ways of getting poll watchers in the space. They are trying to train up people to be poll watchers, to funnel people into more formal poll worker work in the states, trying to get people to analyze voter rolls, check voter registration processes, really dig into the election administration in their states on a much more granular level than I think we've seen most people care about before this.

We've been seeing conservative groups trying to get 200,000 poll watchers, poll workers, and legal experts. Groups have created their own apps that allow people to report what they think is election fraud to the conservative groups or the people receiving this funding and not directly to election officials, which is the usual way you would do that.

Some groups are trying to give money to people who report election fraud from a $5 million fund that could come from. And some of these actual payouts, we've got questions about how that would actually work. And of course, people caring about their elections isn't a bad thing. What we're seeing, though, is that these are the people who get in the way often when you talk to election officials, talk to election administrators who are trying to do their jobs differently.

These people are connected to the groups that in 2020 showed up at counting centers and were banging on windows or chanting outside of them. The Mariah, we should note when you spoke to these groups, they said, look, we're just following the law, trying to be good citizens here. That is the position of a lot of these groups. Groups really frame this as we are just trying to make sure that every legal vote is protected.

Some of these groups are creating training programs for poll watchers and poll workers ahead of getting them into their state official training. They are organizing these mass challenges to voters. They are looking at places that they can jump in and try to change how states certified do these basic administrative policies in getting the election out the door. And so there is serious questions about whether this will impact just getting the election done, whether people who do this

all year round are going to be able to work through the chaos and confusion in order to get the results that everybody wants to have answers to.

Mariah, I think we should note the Harris campaign is going to have tens of thousands of poll watchers out on Election Day as well, very likely its own army of election lawyers, too, which maybe begs the question how much is really likely to be different this year compared to 2024. And yet, as you report, election officials are going into this election strapped for resources in some cases. How are they preparing for all of this?

Right. We're not seeing the sort of outside donations, say from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that went into election administration during 2020. We've seen huge amounts of overturn in career election administrators. We've seen states across the country struggling to get poll workers.

It's ongoing. They've tried interesting things to make that easier. They've hired teenagers in states where they can do that. In many states, it's a paid position. Some states have hiked up the money that you can get to do this work. And at the same time, poll watchers are normal too. In some states, they've beefed up the cameras or the watching facilities where people can watch these. In some, they've decided to train their hired poll workers on what all of the rules are for observers so that they're more comfortable with people being in the space to try to de-escalate anything before it becomes stressful.

We can sort of expect that everybody's as prepared as they can be on that front with the amount of time and effort they've put into preparing for this. I have been speaking to Wall Street Journal National Legal Affairs reporter Mariah Timms. Thanks, Mariah. Thanks so much.

And finally, Apple is set to roll out the latest version of its mobile operating system next week, a move that will bring its much-anticipated artificial intelligence tools to its newer iPhone models. There's a lot riding on the success of Apple intelligence, as the company's calling it, an AI pivot that comes after it saw its market value stagnate as rivals rushed to inject generative AI into their products.

So how does Apple Intelligence stack up? Journal personal tech columnist Joanna Stern says anyone expecting AI fireworks should lower their expectations, with a number of flashy features teased by the company months ago not contained in next week's release. But in conversation with Apple head of software Craig Federighi, she learned that the company is OK that Apple Intelligence isn't very smart just yet. When we think about the road for

any of our features, but certainly Apple intelligence, this isn't a one and done

kind of situation. This is a many year, honestly, even decades long arc of this technology playing out. And so we're going to do it responsibly. But on the other hand, you also are marketing this. You launched the iPhone, you marketed this. Which makes sense. We want customers who are excited about what's to come to know, okay, if I buy this phone, is this the right phone that's going to do those things? And yes, it is. And so I think we're communicating that while trying to make sure everyone understands that this is going to be coming, you know,

you know, over the coming months, not all today. And to watch the full version of that interview on the future of iPhone AI, we've left a link to it for WSJ subscribers in our show notes. And that's it for What's News for Wednesday morning. Today's show was produced by Kate Boulivant and Daniel Bach with supervising producer Christina Rocca. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. And until then, thanks for listening.

Did this podcast spark any ideas? Maybe some questions? Talk about it with Claude by Anthropic. Claude is more than a tool. It's your AI partner, turning ideas into actionable strategies. Join the groundswell of people that use Claude. Visit claude.ai.