Elections

Jesse Gutierres believes only one Republican candidate will restore confidence in the economy.Kelly Nieuwenhuis wants to move beyond the chaos.Shannon Demastus wants a president she can be proud of.Will You Vote for Trump Again?It’s the question weighing on Republicans across the country. But Iowans get to decide first. We listened as they grappled with their choices.Jan. 11, 2024There is no way around it: The Iowa caucuses on Monday, the kickoff of the 2024 presidential election, are not really about competing visions for the future of the Republican Party. They are not a battle between dueling ideologies or policy priorities or America’s role in the world.They revolve around one man, the gravitational center of Republican politics for nearly a decade: the former — and perhaps future — President Donald J. Trump.Republicans are in the throes of deciding whether they want Mr. Trump to continue his total dominance over their party. Do they want four more years of his brand of personality-driven, divisive and combative politics? Do they see him as a victim, or as a demagogue? Are they willing to risk nominating a candidate facing 91 charges and who could be a felon come Election Day?Polling shows Republicans are preparing to take the leap; Mr. Trump appears to likely win in Iowa. But the numbers don’t capture the ambivalence and anxiety weighing on many as they grapple with their decisions.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?  More

President Biden has yet to benefit from moderating inflation, and data set for release on Thursday could complicate the White House’s attempts to show progress on rising prices.The Consumer Price Index is expected to show that overall inflation climbed slightly more quickly in December than in November on a yearly basis.Yet “core” inflation — a key measure that strips out volatile food and energy prices — is expected to have climbed 3.8 percent over the year through December, down from 4 percent in November. If that happened, it would be the first time that the core index had dropped below 4 percent since May 2021.But that moderation has not stopped Mr. Biden’s rivals from using high prices as a cudgel to criticize his economic stewardship.This week, former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, blamed Mr. Biden for rising prices as he campaigned in Iowa before Monday’s caucuses there.“Our Middle Class is being crushed by Biden’s crippling inflation,” Mr. Trump said on the website Truth Social.Polls have shown that voters have a downbeat view of Mr. Biden’s economic record. Despite a strong labor market, higher costs and interest rates have left Americans feeling poorer.The politics of inflation have also infiltrated the Republican primary race, with Mr. Trump’s leading rivals, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s big spending policies when he was president set the stage for higher prices.“When it comes to our economy and getting inflation under control, the first thing we need to do is claw back the over $100 billion of unspent Covid dollars that are still out there,” Ms. Haley said during a town hall hosted by CNN this week.Mr. DeSantis, at a Fox News town hall this week, blamed lawmakers from both parties for borrowing too much money during the pandemic, but said rising incomes in his state were helping people cope with “Biden inflation.”Senior Biden administration officials are hopeful that as inflation moderates, voters will feel better about the economy.“The Biden administration is doing everything it can to lower costs that affect Americans,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen told reporters at an event in Virginia on Monday. “I think sentiment will improve over time.” More

Quien se impone en las primarias republicanas de Iowa no siempre gana la nominación presidencial del partido. Los candidatos intentarán derrotar a sus oponentes y superar las expectativas.Pareciera haber pocas dudas sobre quién probablemente ganará el caucus presidencial republicano en Iowa el lunes.Pero en Iowa, lo inesperado puede ser lo esperado y una victoria no siempre es una victoria. El resultado podría moldear el futuro del Partido Republicano en un momento de transición, así como el futuro de los caucus de Iowa después de una década difícil. Podría ayudar a determinar si Nikki Haley, quien fungió como embajadora de Estados Unidos, representa un obstáculo serio para el regreso de Donald Trump al poder o si Ron DeSantis, el gobernador de Florida, se verá obligado a abandonar la contienda.A continuación, una guía de algunos resultados posibles y lo que significan para los contendientes:Una victoria de TrumpTodas las suposiciones que anticipan una gran noche para Trump significan que el mayor contrincante que el expresidente tendría que vencer podrían ser las expectativas y no sus dos principales rivales en las boletas, Haley y DeSantis. Trump y su campaña han puesto el listón muy alto. Trump se ha postulado como si fuera el presidente en funciones, sin siquiera debatir con sus oponentes. Sus asesores dicen que creen que puede establecer un récord para una contienda abierta si termina al menos 12 puntos por delante de su rival más cercano.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?  More

I wish Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis had shown a quarter as much contempt for Donald Trump as they did for each other.Oh, they faulted Trump for not appearing onstage in Des Moines on Wednesday for the final Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses. He arrogantly skipped it, just as he’d arrogantly skipped all the others.When pressed, Haley and DeSantis made clearer than they did in the past that he indeed put himself before the Constitution when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was no beautiful display of patriotism. It was a shameful act of disorder.And they had scattered other criticisms of the former president. DeSantis listed many of the promises that Trump didn’t keep. Haley blamed Trump for the depth and breadth of the divisions in America and for creating a degree of chaos that forbids meaningful progress.But those complaints all but receded behind their furious, puerile and relentless attacks on each other. And that made neither political nor moral sense.Haley and DeSantis are the only candidates other than Trump who qualified for the debate. They are the only candidates with any chance of beating him in the Republican primaries and getting the party’s presidential nomination. But that chance is meager, the clock is ticking, and Trump, to go by polls, has held on firmly to his enormous lead. They need to take him down.And for all their considerable flaws, all their embarrassing flubs and all their elaborate fudging of their records, both Haley and DeSantis have infinitely less to account and apologize for than Trump does. He’s the necessary target of their wrath, the rightful recipient of their disdain, an urgent threat to American democracy. But you wouldn’t have known that from the small fraction of their attention that he received, an inadequate measure that distills the Republican Party’s disgrace. It won’t own or slay the monster it created. It’s just too damned terrified.Instead, Haley and DeSantis engaged in a rubber-glue back-and-forth about who was the bigger liar. I can recap almost the entire debate in just a few lines of loosely (but not all that loosely!) paraphrased dialogue.Haley: Stop lying about me!DeSantis: No, you stop lying about me!Haley: You’re the liar!DeSantis: I know you are, but what am I?Haley: You’re so desperate. You’re just so desperate.Haley actually said those last two sentences. And they were strangely refreshing inasmuch as they weren’t one of her endlessly repeated instructions to go to the website desantislies.com. She mentioned that site seemingly every 30 seconds, regardless of what question the debate’s moderators had put to her. She was like a broken GPS system. No matter where you asked her to take you, she directed you to the same old place.DeSantis wasn’t any more high-minded. He banged on and on about what a sellout Haley was, about how she was constantly caving to big business or “the woke mob” or the Chinese. He was especially and inexplicably fond of a line that he used in various ways at various times — that she embodied the “pale pastels” of “warmed-over corporatism.” Was he upset that her corporatism wasn’t freshly sautéed? Was he claiming a sartorial edge and asserting some parable in the contrast between his red tie and her muted pink dress? Color me unimpressed.Except for when DeSantis, whose scripted lines were mostly clichés, delivered one of anomalous cleverness. Referring to Haley’s recent string of highly publicized gaffes, he said, “She’s got this problem with ballistic podiatry — shooting herself in the foot.”Funny as that was, it was even sadder because it was an example of how and where these two candidates lavished their energy: not on sounding the alarm about Trump that needs sounding (and re-sounding), not on holding themselves up as inspiring alternatives to him but on cutting each other down. That was clearly what they’d practiced most. Scorn was their comfort zone.So when they were asked, in the final minutes, to name something about the other that they admired, they lapsed into babble and incoherence.After a few compulsory words about Haley’s service as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, DeSantis said: “I also appreciate the state of South Carolina. My wife is a College of Charleston graduate.” So Haley is admirable because she’s proximal to Casey DeSantis’s alma mater?Haley’s answer — “I think he’s been a good governor” — made even less sense, because she had just spent the better part of two hours talking about all the ways in which he’d been a terrible leader for Florida and how awful it would be if he molded America in his state’s image.They did indeed engage in specifics like that, providing details about their own and each other’s records, establishing an important divergence in their views on aid to Ukraine, forecasting the future of Social Security and promising to fortify the country’s southwestern border. From time to time, the two of them engaged in something not all that dissimilar from a constructive old-fashioned debate.But that was the exception to the rule and to the rancor, and what stood out more than any policy discussion was a depressing paradox: Both of them said that America needed to turn the page, but both modeled the negativity, mockery and spite of the country’s current chapter.“How did you blow through $150 million in your campaign, and you were down in the polls?” Haley asked DeSantis. She visibly relished her dig. Where was that ridicule for Trump?Chris Christie, we miss you! Hours before the debate, which Christie hadn’t qualified for, he dropped out of the race, and he was caught in a hot mic moment, apparently dismissing Haley as “not up to this” and saying that DeSantis was “petrified” about the trajectory of the race. Their performances on Wednesday night bore Christie out. Send him to Delphi and put him in a cave. He’s an oracle.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Facebook, Threads and X (@FrankBruni).The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

After about 30 minutes of debate featuring repeated promotions of campaign websites and dozens of permutations of the word “lie,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley diverged on actual policy: the war in Ukraine.Foreign policy is a topic Ms. Haley has seized on in previous debates, showcasing a fluency with international issues from her time as ambassador to the United Nations and often trampling over the provocations of isolationist candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy.She took a similar tack Wednesday night in drawing a stark contrast with Mr. DeSantis over military aid to Ukraine. Ms. Haley qualified that she did not support putting American troops on the ground but said it was important to help Ukraine in order to prevent a wider global conflict, assist “a pro-American, freedom-loving country” and prevent the further march of Russia.“This is about preventing war — it’s always been about preventing war,” Ms. Haley said. “If we support Ukraine, that’s only 3.5 percent of our defense budget.”Mr. DeSantis, who has been much more critical of American support for Ukraine, depicted Ms. Haley’s position as in line with President Biden’s, decrying what he described as an unending commitment to what could be a lengthy conflict.“They will not tell you when they’ve achieved their goal, and this is going to go on maybe hundreds of billions more into the future,” Mr. DeSantis said, claiming that Ms. Haley cared “more about Ukraine’s border than she does about our own southern border.”Ms. Haley denounced that as a false choice, jumping in without prompting from the moderators after Mr. DeSantis finished.“This is the lie they’re telling the American people over and over again,” she said. “They’re saying you have to choose between Ukraine or Israel, Israel and securing the border.“It is so wrong to say this,” she said. More

Nathan Wade has stayed silent since a legal filing said he was chosen for the job because he was romantically involved with the Fulton County district attorney.Before he became the special prosecutor leading the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump, Nathan Wade was working as a private defense lawyer and a judge for a municipal court in the Atlanta suburbs.Now, Mr. Wade is accused of being romantically involved with the district attorney who hired him in 2021, Fani T. Willis. A court filing this week suggested their relationship was the reason she chose Mr. Wade for the high-paying job.The filing, from a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, said that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade had then used some of his earnings, which so far total more than $650,000, to vacation together in places including Napa Valley and the Caribbean.Mr. Wade was largely unknown when Ms. Willis selected him to lead one of the highest-profile prosecutions in American history.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?  More

Listen to and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | AmazonCaitlin O’Keefe and Cheney Orr/ReutersEditor’s note: This article was published prematurely. Audio for this episode will be available at 5 a.m. Eastern on Jan. 11.At the start of the 2024 Republican primary campaign, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was considered by many in his party to be the biggest threat to Donald Trump. He was seen as someone who could win over the voters who were tired of Trump’s antics, and also bring along the MAGA movement. But it didn’t work out that way. And as Mr. DeSantis has struggled, one main opponent, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, has seen her star — and her standing in the polls — rise.Still, as the Trump alternatives crisscross Iowa and New Hampshire trying to appeal to voters, polling averages put the former president ahead by an average of 35 points.Now, with just days to go until the Iowa caucuses, we ask: Did anti-Trump Republicans rally around the wrong candidates? And have they run out of time to fix it?On today’s episode:Nicholas Nehamas, a campaign reporter, focusing on the candidacy of Ron DeSantis. Jazmine Ulloa, a national politics reporter, covering the candidacy of Nikki Haley. About ‘The Run-Up’“The Run-Up” is your guide to understanding the 2024 election. Through on-the-ground reporting and conversations with colleagues from The New York Times, newsmakers and voters across the country, our host, Astead W. Herndon, takes us beyond the horse race to explore how we came to this unprecedented moment in American politics. New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

Chris Christie closed out his second presidential campaign much as he began it, with a blistering and personal takedown of Donald J. Trump designed to prompt a reckoning in his party.Anticipation had been building all day for the remarks from Mr. Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, after news had spilled out hours earlier that he was telling close allies about his decision.With all three major cable news networks airing the speech live, Mr. Christie used the rare spotlight — something that had largely eluded his campaign — to make an urgent appeal to the better angels of his party. He framed his animosity toward Mr. Trump in sweeping, historical terms and cast himself as the experienced party elder warning of the possible dangers ahead.“Imagine just for a moment if 9/11 had happened with Donald Trump behind the desk,” Mr. Christie said. “The first thing he would have done was run to the bunker to protect himself. He would have put himself first before this country, and anyone who is unwilling to say that he is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.”Mr. Trump’s campaign responded with a memo from his pollster, John McLaughlin, who said Mr. Christie “was going to be embarrassed” by the results of the Iowa caucuses on Monday and that he was “widely disliked” by voters in New Hampshire, which will hold its primary on Jan. 23. Mr. Christie had focused his campaign on New Hampshire, but struggled to make himself a contender.Mr. Christie also grappled with his own role in Mr. Trump’s rise, acknowledging that he had capitulated to ambition when he ended his 2016 presidential bid and surprised much of the political establishment at the time by backing Mr. Trump. Mr. Christie described his second campaign as something of a redemption tour.“I would rather lose by telling the truth than lie in order to win, and I feel no differently today, because this is a fight for the soul of our party and the soul of our country,” he said.Mr. Christie paced the stage as he spoke and at times appeared emotional, including when he talked about the supporters who had urged him to remain in the race. His voice cracked when he quoted Benjamin Franklin’s warning that Americans had been given “a republic, if you can keep it.”“Benjamin Franklin’s words were never more relevant in America than they are right now,” Mr. Christie said. “The last time they were this relevant was the Civil War.”Mr. Christie didn’t spare his rivals in the race, saying in public what he had expressed to others in private: that neither Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida nor former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina was going hard enough at Mr. Trump.He said that if Mr. Trump became the nominee, his win would be traceable to the first Republican debate. Mr. Christie was the only candidate on the stage who indicated that he would not support the former president if Mr. Trump were convicted of one of the 91 felony charges he is facing.“I want you to imagine for a second that Jefferson and Hamilton and Adams and Washington and Franklin were sitting here tonight,” Mr. Christie said. “Do you think they could imagine that the country they risked their lives to create would actually be having a conversation about whether a convicted criminal should be president of the United States?”But Mr. Christie’s speech is unlikely to move the needle inside the Republican Party. Many of the party’s most towering figures have tried in recent years without success.In 2016, Mitt Romney used his stature as Republicans’ previous presidential nominee to denounce Mr. Trump as a “fraud” whose promises were “worthless” and who was “playing the American public for suckers.” Mr. Trump won the nomination, and the White House.After the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, spoke from the Senate floor to say Mr. Trump’s supporters involved in the attack had been “fed lies” and “provoked by the president.” Mr. Trump was later acquitted in an impeachment trial in the Senate, a decision supported by Mr. McConnell.Two years ago, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, speaking from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, said Mr. Trump was “attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic” and had “gone to war with the rule of law.”She was unseated by a Trump-backed primary challenger months later.Alyce McFadden More