Welcome to the beat. I am Ari Melbur, and these midterm campaigns are in high gear.

I think we'll be able to show you this scene in the crucial swing state of Ohio over the weekend.

This was a rally for one of the Republican Party's key candidates.

You see Jim Jordan talking. J.D. Vance was the star of this rally, the Wall Street investor and author, who spent years publicly

warning the Republican Party about what he said was the danger of Trump, who he once likened

to a potential fascist leader in America. Vance then recounted, he embraced Trump, he got his

endorsement, then he got the nomination for the Senate race. And that may all sound familiar for today's Republican Party.

What is different in this rally is how Vance, a Yale graduate, sat by as Donald Trump used

the Ohio midterm rally to go quite a bit farther than he has before in his cultish alliance

with this dangerous, sometimes

amorphous group called QAnon, which has consolidate its power on the extreme far right

by pushing lies that, frankly, might at times sound so bizarre and absurdist that you could

underestimate how serious they are and what a following their building.

I'm not going to try to repeat, let alone amplify all of them,

but among them is the claim that certain Hollywood actors and certain Democrats

are actually some sort of secret pedophile group aligned with the actual Satan

or that they are also cannibals who eat children.

It goes on like that.

I'm not going to do much more of it for you tonight.

But I'll tell you why this is the top story.

What does all that have to do with, say, these midterm campaigns other than maybe villainizing a few Democrats?

Well, one of the theories is that Trump

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