Aurelia Butler

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    The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election

    The Book That Predicted the 2024 ElectionThe G.O.P. pollster Patrick Ruffini’s book “Party of the People” outlined the realignments reflected in this year’s election results.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.You should be skeptical of anyone with a very detailed, confident take on the dynamics of the 2024 election right now. At the very least, you should be if they didn’t tell you before the election.But Patrick Ruffini, a longtime Republican pollster who is a founding partner at Echelon Insights, did tell you before the election. In 2023, he published a book called “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.”What he argued in that book is really two things: First, the educational divide reshaping American politics would continue, with non-college voters swinging right and college-educated voters swinging yet further left. But second, he argued that the 2020 election results, weird as they seemed to many, weren’t a fluke.Donald Trump performed a lot better in 2020 than the polls said he would. A major reason he performed so much better is that he did better among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. That was, to put it very mildly, not what Democrats expected. Trump was the xenophobe in chief. Democrats were appalled by the way he talked about immigrants, about Muslims, about China, about Black communities. The theory was that Trump was using racism and nationalism to drive up his margins among white voters.And then what actually happens after four years of his presidency is that Biden in 2020 does a bit better than Clinton did among white voters. And Trump in 2020 improves quite a bit among nonwhite voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Weighs Key Personnel Choices, Schooled by His First-Term Experience

    President-elect Donald J. Trump is not known for adherence to a disciplined and rigorous personnel selection process, but behind the scenes his advisers and allies have been preparing lists of candidates for the most important jobs in his administration.Three days after he decisively won a second term, Mr. Trump held his first formal transition meetings on Friday to turn his attention to the choices he faces.He is most keenly interested, aides and advisers say, in a handful of roles: attorney general, C.I.A. director, White House counsel and secretaries of Defense, State and Homeland Security. At one point during the 2024 campaign, he demanded the resignation of the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, whom he had appointed in 2017.He has put little focus so far on who will lead other cabinet departments, though he has told aides he wants to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “do whatever he wants” with the health agencies, and perhaps be secretary of Health and Human Services if he can be confirmed by the Senate.Mr. Trump is relying in part on the work done by Howard Lutnick, the billionaire chief executive of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who has spent months overseeing a team that has drawn up lists and done vetting for any red flags.But Mr. Trump, who is a mix of competing impulses, is also doing what he always does: calling around to friends and associates, asking them who they think he should pick.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    After Kamala Harris’s Loss to Donald Trump, Democrats Seek Answers

    The Democratic Party agrees it needs to figure out what went wrong. The question is how.After suffering what could shape up to be their biggest electoral defeat in more than 40 years, Democrats agree on one thing: They need to figure out what went wrong.The question is how.After Republicans failed to oust President Barack Obama and lost ground in the Democratic-held Senate in 2012, G.O.P. leaders produced a 100-page report on what had gone wrong, which has been known ever since as the “autopsy.”Democrats didn’t do that after Hillary Clinton’s narrow defeat by Donald Trump in 2016. But as my colleague Adam Nagourney and I dialed up Democrats all over the country today, we got the sense that a push for a similar exercise had begun in some quarters.It’s coming from party stalwarts like Donna Brazile, a former interim chair and current at-large member of the Democratic National Committee.“It’s vital that we learn why turnout disappeared from 2020 to 2024 and much more,” Brazile wrote in an email.It’s coming from left-leaning lawmakers like Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Long Global Trail of Resentment Behind Trump’s Resurrection

    As the Cold War wound down almost four decades ago, a top adviser to the reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, warned the West that “we are going to do the most terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.”In the celebrations of the triumph of Western liberal democracy, of free trade and open societies, few considered how disorienting the end of a binary world of good and evil would be.But when the spread of democracy in newly freed societies looked more like the spread of divisive global capitalism, when social fracture grew and shared truth died, when hope collapsed in the communities technology left behind, a yearning for the certainties of the providential authoritarian leader set in.“In the absence of a shared reality, or shared facts, or a shared threat, reason had no weight beside emotion,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French political scientist. “And so a dislocated world of danger has produced a hunger for the strongman.”A different Russia, briefly imagined as a partner of the West, eventually became an enemy once more. But by the time it invaded Ukraine in 2022, disillusionment with Western liberalism had gone so far that President Vladimir V. Putin’s tirades against the supposed decadence of the West enjoyed wide support among far-right nationalist movements across Europe, in the United States and elsewhere. Western allies stood firm in defense of Ukrainian democracy, but even that commitment is wobbling.The curious resurrection and resounding victory of Donald J. Trump amounted to the apotheosis of a long-gathering revolt against the established order. No warning of the fragility of democracy or freedom, no allusion to 20th-century cataclysm or Mr. Trump’s attraction to dictators, could hold back the tide.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    After California Mountain Fire, Residents Return to Find Homes Reduced to Rubble

    The Mountain fire has torn through more than 20,000 acres and destroyed more than 130 structures in Ventura County. “It’s just devastating,” one resident said.In the city of Camarillo, Calif., on Old Coach Drive, the smell of smoke lay heavy in the air. The fire that erupted this week had hopscotched around the neighborhood, leaving some homes relatively unscathed but reducing several to charred piles of wood and rubble.Kathleen Scott and her sister Tonia Wall surveyed what was left of their two-bedroom home: layers of ash and the metal outlines of what was once the washing machine and dryer.Bent over the earth where a bedroom would have been, the two used a small garden spade to dig through the remains. They hoped they might find some mementos belonging to Ms. Scott’s daughter, Jacquelyn, who died from a rare neurological condition at age 4.“We’re not expecting to find anything huge,” Ms. Scott, 57, said. “We’re just sifting through stuff, just to see, just in case, not to have any regrets.”“We’re not expecting to find anything huge,” Kathleen Scott, 57, said. “We’re just sifting through stuff, just to see, just in case, not to have any regrets.”Loren Elliott for The New York TimesMs. Scott holding some salvaged keepsakes that she found on her destroyed property.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Dorothy Allison, Author of ‘Bastard Out of Carolina,’ Dies at 75

    She wrote lovingly and often hilariously about her harrowing childhood in a working-class Southern family, as well as about the violence and incest she suffered.Dorothy Allison, who wrote with lyrical, pungent wit about her working-class Southern upbringing — and about the incest and violence that shaped her — and whose acclaimed 1992 novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” based on her harrowing childhood, made her a literary star, died on Tuesday at her home in Guerneville, Calif., in Sonoma County. She was 75.Her death, from cancer, was announced by the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, her longtime representative.Ms. Allison was flat broke in 1989 when she decided to try to sell “Bastard Out of Carolina,” the novel she had been writing for nearly a decade, to a mainstream publisher. “Trash,” a critically praised collection of short stories, had already been published by Firebrand Books, a feminist publishing house; so had her collection of poetry, “The Women Who Hate Me,” which she first published herself as a chapbook in 1983. In both books, she tackled lust, the scrum of feminist politics and her chaotic, beloved family. Feminism had saved her life, she often said, and she was certain that because of her political convictions, the mainstream press would not welcome her.“Bastard Out of Carolina” was published in 1992 to almost unanimous acclaim and made numerous best-seller lists.No creditMs. Allison liked to describe herself, as she told The New York Times Magazine in 1995, as a “cross-eyed, working-class lesbian addicted to violence, language and hope.”But at the time, she and her partner, Alix Layman, a trombone player who had been kicked out of the Army for being gay, were living on grits. Ms. Allison, who was legally blind in one eye, had numerous other health concerns and medical debt, and she could no longer support her writing with part-time clerical jobs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Will NYC Revive Congestion Pricing After Trump’s Victory?

    Gov. Kathy Hochul, facing pressure from supporters of the contentious tolling plan, is said to be exploring options for adopting it in some form.Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York is exploring options for reviving a congestion pricing plan for New York City before President-elect Donald J. Trump has a chance to kill it, according to four people familiar with the matter.Ms. Hochul’s move to salvage the contentious plan comes as she faces pressure from various corners, including a group that represents transit riders and is planning to start an advertising blitz on Monday in support of the tolling program.The plan that Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, is now exploring differs slightly from the one she halted in June. She is trying to satisfy opponents who had complained about the $15 congestion-pricing toll that most motorists would have had to pay as well as supporters who want to reduce car traffic and fund mass transit improvements.The governor has talked to federal officials about the possibility of a $9 toll and about whether such a change might require the lengthy, involved process of additional environmental review, according to a Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member familiar with the matter. The discussions were first reported by Politico.Mr. Trump, a Republican, has said he opposes congestion pricing, and his victory on Tuesday has apparently pushed Ms. Hochul to try to find a compromise.“The timing is everything,” said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for Riders Alliance, the riders’ group that is planning the ad blitz. If congestion pricing has not started by January, he added “it’s very unlikely it would start.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    San Francisco Mayor-Elect Plans to Declare Fentanyl Emergency on Day 1

    Daniel Lurie is a man in a hurry.He said in his first speech as San Francisco’s mayor-elect on Friday that he would declare a state of emergency on fentanyl on his first day in office in January.In brief, clipped remarks, he said he intended to shut down the open-air fentanyl markets that had proliferated in the city’s Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods and had infuriated many residents.“We are going to get tough on those that are dealing drugs, and we are going to be compassionate, but tough, about the conditions of our streets, as well,” Mr. Lurie, 47, said at a gathering in Chinatown that lasted just a few minutes.Fentanyl, a cheap opioid, is responsible for most of the 3,300 drug deaths that have occurred in San Francisco since 2020, killing far more people in the city than Covid-19, homicides and car crashes combined.Mr. Lurie, a 47-year-old heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who has never held elected office, appealed to an electorate that was tired of rampant drug use and property crime in the city and was looking for a mayor who could revitalize the struggling downtown area. He was effective in getting his message out to voters, spending $8.6 million of his own money on his campaign and receiving another $1 million from his mother, the billionaire Mimi Haas.Mr. Lurie, a Democrat, addressed reporters the morning after Mayor London Breed, also a Democrat, called him to concede. He did not provide additional details about what his emergency declaration would do.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More