Elections

Growing political polarization is a problem that keeps me up at night. Not because I think it’s bad to have strong opinions, but because of what social scientists call affective polarization: polarization beyond political disagreement, when “ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.” At its worst, affective polarization can lead to hate and dehumanization.When my colleague Thomas Edsall wrote about affective polarization earlier this year, he quoted Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth, who said that part of what’s behind today’s intense partisan divide is that “Politicians, instead of focusing on the large list of issues where there is broad agreement in the American public, endlessly re-litigate social divides like gay rights and abortion to mobilize a base they fear will stay home if they focus on the mundane details of pragmatic governance.”I see this play out when I hear activists suggest that you can’t talk to them about climate change if you don’t agree with their stance on the Israel-Hamas war, or when I see politicians tying approval of military appointments to abortion access. The attitude seems to be: You have to agree with me about everything or you’re my enemy and we can’t work together on anything. It leads to a whole lot of nothing.Because I cover family policy, the lack of movement on areas of “pragmatic governance” where there is “broad agreement” drives me bonkers. A prime example is federal paid leave, which is popular among voters across the spectrum, yet remains in legislative purgatory, and has for decades. Though there’s a bipartisan working group in Congress on the issue, we’re still a long way from any change, leaving us out of step with most wealthy nations and creating a lot of stress and economic hardship for people just trying to make ends meet while also caring for children or sick family members.But there’s a group of people of all ideological backgrounds — social conservatives, progressive activists, budget wonks and lots of people in between — that’s been convening over the past year, and that gives me a bit of hope for family policy’s future. It also offers a road map for people who disagree vehemently on issues to have productive conversations and find points of connection. If nothing else, the group’s participants agree that too many American families are struggling, that families should be more of a political priority and that something needs to be done to help them.The convocation has the somewhat jargony name Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, and its members let me sit in on one of their guided discussions with the understanding that I would follow the Chatham House Rule — I can report on what was said during the session but not reveal “the identity nor the affiliation” of any speaker.The group consists of around 30 people and it has met monthly since April. It is directed by Abby McCloskey, who runs a research and consulting firm and was a policy adviser for Jeb Bush’s and Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaigns and Howard Schultz’s exploratory 2020 presidential run. The collaborative is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. With permission, after the meeting I reached out to some of the individuals involved to see if they’d be comfortable talking in general terms about their experiences in the group.During the initial meetings, the members came up with set of family policy principles they could mostly agree on. The discussion I observed involved them delivering feedback on a draft of a report outlining those principles. At first, I feared this was going to be an absolutely mind-numbing way to spend three hours of my life and that I would have to gently pinch myself to stay awake while listening to a discussion of the budgetary implications of the earned-income tax credit.Instead, the conversation was spicy while still being respectful, and full of fundamental disagreements that did not seem completely papered over simply for the sake of congeniality. McCloskey described it to me more than once as feeling like “couples therapy,” and it did.For example, a few people objected to wording in the report about center-based child care that they felt put a thumb on the scale against stay-at-home parents. Others disagreed with that objection, and there was an impassioned back-and-forth about it. Ultimately, the moderator stepped in, restated everyone’s point of view in a neutral way and advised that everyone needn’t agree on every detail to move forward.I give a lot of credit to that moderator, the aptly named David Fairman, who is a senior mediator at the Consensus Building Institute, for the structure and tone of the discussion. When we spoke on the phone afterward, he explained that C.B.I. is one of “roughly a dozen” similar organizations that help conduct mediation on public issues. His job is to help find common ground among people with different backgrounds and belief systems.There are three main things Fairman does to facilitate these discussions. The first is to build relationships among participants, so that “they discover that there’s more to them than the battle of tweets that they’ve had or the countering publications or testimony and the identities that they carry with their businesses, with their advocacy groups or whoever.” That kind of humanizing is done partly through guided conversations in breakout groups, and some of it is done more organically through events like in-person cocktail hours.The second is by getting people to “listen openly” during discussions, which means calming down their “rebuttal minds, the hamster wheel that is almost always turning as we listen to someone with whom we disagree, coming up with the counterarguments,” Fairman explained. Instead, he urges people to ask “clarifying questions, not rhetorical questions, not debating questions.” And he gave this example: “What do you mean by saying that ‘you really feel strongly that the child tax credit should remain universal’? Is it that the most important thing about it is that it’s for everyone? Or is it that you are worried that the political support for it will not be there if it is not universal, or is it something else? I just want to know.”The third, and I would argue the most difficult component, is trying to get beyond people’s stated positions to their underlying interests, values and principles, to create space “to explore new ways of thinking about the options,” Fairman said. He referred to a disagreement over how generous a child care tax credit or other allowance could be. The group was at an impasse. While they couldn’t agree on the appropriate size of the credit, a new idea emerged: that more flexibility for parents to choose how to spend the credit “over the life cycle of their child would be a win, even if it doesn’t address the question of the absolute amount of funding.”I also interviewed several members of the group about their experiences. My takeaway was that overall, people were happy to be in conversation with one another, to meet basically agreeable people with totally different ways of framing the problems at hand and to think hard about their own biases. “I think the level of candor was surprising,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center. “I think everybody committed to coming in with a willingness to critique their own side where necessary and to say frankly where their red lines were.”But the process was certainly not a cure-all. Many said that they wished they had even more time to work through the document they were creating. Some felt that some fundamental concerns — particularly with regard to race and immigration — weren’t aired thoroughly enough before moving on to the particulars of policymaking. More than one person expressed frustration that systemic racism was not more explicitly addressed and that barriers to accessing currently available benefits weren’t fully interrogated.While all the participants thought they would have a document at the end of the process that they would be willing to put their names to, some wondered if it would wind up being so watered down that it wouldn’t have “truly moved the needle,” as Lina Guzman, the chief strategy officer at Child Trends, put it, to get more people fired up about these issues.Even if they come up with something that isn’t earth-shattering, every person I spoke to felt that the process was worthwhile because of the relationships they built. “I think that having created the space to do this is valuable in and of itself, even if what we come out with falls short of what some people might have hoped,” said Katharine Stevens, the founder and chief executive of the Center on Child and Family Policy.We don’t know what unexpected alliances and priorities might arise in national politics in the coming years. But because these professionals have spent a lot of hours together talking about their deepest values, giving and getting clarity about their beliefs, they may find unexpected sources of support for specific ideas that aren’t yet mainstream.I came out of observing the discussion mostly wishing that we could all have mediators like Fairman at our holiday tables. We can’t simply wish away the profound disagreements many of us have. But I’ll certainly be trying to ask more clarifying questions of people I don’t agree with. Quieting my rebuttal mind, as a professional opinion haver, will be a rough one, but I’m going to do my best, and I’m going to try to maintain as much good faith as I can muster. We’ll need it in 2024. More

The video, called “Let’s Get Ready to Bumble,” is a slick mash-up of President Biden’s verbal slip-ups and his stumbles set to a thumping 1990s dance track. And when it was played on a big screen at Trump rallies late last year, it consistently drew laughs and jeers from the crowd.But Donald J. Trump thought he could improve it.So the former president asked an adviser to pass along a few notes to one of the video’s creators: It should include a clip of the president falling off a bicycle, he suggested, and another of him flubbing a line in a recent speech.The video’s co-creator — Bryan Heestand, a product engineer in Ohio who goes by the anonymous handle C3PMeme — rushed to incorporate the former president’s edits. He was delighted, he said later in a podcast interview, to see Mr. Trump play the new version at his final rally before the midterm elections, pausing his speech to watch it with well over a thousand supporters gathered at Dayton International Airport.“He had some suggestions. We made it happen,” Mr. Heestand said.Mr. Heestand doesn’t work for Mr. Trump, but he belongs to a small circle of video meme-makers who have effectively served as a shadow online ad agency for his presidential campaign. Led by a little-known podcaster and life coach, this meme team has spent much of the year flooding social media with content that lionizes the former president, promotes his White House bid and brutally denigrates his opponents.Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously, adopting the cartoonish aesthetic and unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls.Cheered on by Mr. Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor.Their most vulgar invectives are often aimed at women, particularly those seen as enemies of Mr. Trump. In one video, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s face is pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman, who kicks a man with the face of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the groin. Another depicts Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, as a porn star. Women with ties to Mr. DeSantis are often shown with red knees, suggesting they have performed a sex act.The former president and his inner circle have celebrated the group’s work and helped it reach millions. Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s social media adviser; Steven Cheung, the campaign’s spokesman; and Donald Trump Jr. frequently share the memes on their social media accounts.Since March, Mr. Trump has posted videos made by the team to his Truth Social and Instagram accounts — which have more than 30 million followers combined — at least two dozen times. He tends to share the group’s less crude content, favoring memes that feature him in a positive light.But Mr. Trump and his campaign have also taken a more active role in the group’s activities, a New York Times review found. Over the past year, he and his campaign have privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content. In at least one instance, the campaign shared behind-the-scenes footage to be used in videos, according to members of the team.Late last month, Mr. Trump sent personalized notes to several of the group’s members, thanking them for their work. In September, Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, posted that the meme team was “single-handedly changing the landscape of politics and social media.”Asked by The Times about the group, the Trump campaign on Tuesday cast them as mere volunteers.“Every campaign in politics has volunteers and shows appreciation to their volunteers,” said Mr. Cheung, the campaign spokesman, adding that the group had done a “masterful job” highlighting Mr. DeSantis’s “insecurities and blunders.”Viral memes have played a role in presidential races since Barack Obama’s first run for the White House in 2008. But the meme team’s work — blessed by Mr. Trump, polished and substantially scaled up — represents an evolution with the potential to transform campaigning online.In an age of social media, the power of memes is rising as the influence of traditional television ads fades. Cheap to make and free to distribute, they are largely unconstrained by regulations about accuracy, fairness and transparency that apply to television and radio advertising. And they are proliferating just as fewer internet platforms try to police political content.“It’s ominous,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission lawyer who now works at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog nonprofit.Mr. Ghosh said the meme team’s activities appeared to fit the definition of a super PAC — an entity that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support a candidate or issue but must report its donors and spending. Yet because the group operates outside the campaign finance system, its finances and funders remain unknown.The lack of transparency “creates an avenue for lots of money to be spent in coordination with a campaign and having a serious impact on races without the public having any sense of what’s really going on,” Mr. Ghosh said.‘It Doesn’t Have to Be True’At the center of Mr. Trump’s meme militia is Brenden Dilley, a 41-year-old podcaster, failed congressional candidate and self-described social media and political influencer. Mr. Dilley doesn’t create the memes himself, but he provides the organizing force and smash-mouth ethos driving the crew.“It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to go viral,” he has said on his podcast.Brenden Dilley, a life coach and onetime congressional candidate, is the ringleader of the meme team. His podcast offers a running narrative of the team’s work and ambitions.The group’s more than two dozen members, posting under the hashtag #DilleyMemeTeam, convene in a private Telegram channel to share ideas and pick targets. Many also faithfully tune into Mr. Dilley’s daily podcast, where he talks at length about the group’s activities, interacts with a small but devoted audience and promotes his 2013 self-help book, “Still Breathin’: The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man.”Most of the meme-makers post anonymously. The Times used podcast transcripts, photographs, news footage and public records to identify Mr. Heestand, who declined to comment.While some members have sizable followings, they have also been amplified by high-profile right-wing figures. Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Mr. Trump, hosted Mr. Dilley on his podcast last week, saying that he had “changed the course of history in this country.” The right-wing podcaster Jack Posobiec and the internet troll known as Catturd, who each have more than two million followers on X, regularly share the group’s work.But the team’s content isn’t just niche entertainment for the profoundly online; many memes have broken through to the mainstream.A video calling President Biden a “puppet candidate” and filled with conspiracy theories about election fraud went viral in July after Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, posted his criticism, calling it “the most alarming political ad I’ve seen this year.”In an interview, Mr. Luntz said he worried that such spots would soon become commonplace. “They have figured out how to manipulate the public,” Mr. Luntz said, “and they frankly don’t care about the consequences.”In August, when Mr. Trump was indicted on conspiracy charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, several team members produced a music video targeting the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. A Kanye West parody, it used artificial intelligence to mimic Mr. Trump’s voice rapping lyrics that were peppered with racist dog whistles.The initial posting on social media, by the meme team member Ramble_Rants, logged 1.4 million views on X and was widely shared on other platforms.Nobody has borne the brunt of the group’s attacks more than Mr. DeSantis.Ron and Casey DeSantis have been mocked relentlessly by the Dilley Meme Team, which takes credit for some of its insults having broken into the mainstream media. Meg Kinnard/Associated PressThe meme team has produced hundreds of derisive posts attacking the Florida governor’s masculinity, demeanor, marriage and parenting, and his height.The group’s members have described the onslaught as part guerrilla messaging aimed at shaping coverage of the race and part psy-op aimed at the candidate himself. They take credit for catapulting “bootgate” — the unproven rumor that Mr. DeSantis wears lifts in his cowboy boots — into the mainstream media. (Politico published a 1,400-word investigation into the candidate’s footwear in October.) They also claim its barrage of mockery is the reason Mr. DeSantis wears the boots in the first place.“They all went straight to his head,” Ramble_Rants posted last month.The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Dilley has sworn to “destroy” the governor’s career and make him “unelectable,” even if he drops out of the 2024 race. A recent Christmas-themed meme directed at Mr. DeSantis ended with: “Forever you will be mocked.”The Dilley Meme Team’s work is often cartoonish and rife with mockery, savaging Mr. Trump’s opponents while lionizing the former president. A video that focused on President Biden was played at Trump rallies last year. A recent meme delivered a message to Mr. DeSantis. Another appeared to use behind-the-scenes images of Mr. Trump. Mr. Dilley declined to be interviewed for this article, and the team subsequently produced a video mocking The New York Times. Mr. Dilley told his podcast listeners that he planned to hang a copy of this article next to a signed letter from Mr. Trump.“Thanks to your efforts,” that letter reads, according to photos posted to social media, “we exposed Joe Biden’s failures and lies for the whole country to see.”Gratitude and AccessMr. Dilley has been a supporter of Mr. Trump for years, and in 2018 he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Arizona as a “staunch believer in the Make America Great Again movement.” But until recently, his devotion always came from a distance.Today, Mr. Dilley, who now lives north of Atlanta, says he has visited Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort three times in the past year. He and his team have posted numerous photos of themselves posing with Mr. Trump, spending time with his advisers and attending events at Trump properties.During an episode of his show just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Dilley claimed to be texting one of those advisers, asking if he could join the former president at a football game at the University of South Carolina. That weekend, he and his wife were photographed by Mr. Miller in the governor’s box at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, S.C., along with Mr. Trump.A video that Mr. Dilley’s wife, Reanna, shot of Mr. Trump walking on the field at halftime was subsequently viewed millions of times online and reposted by the former president on Truth Social.Like many other influencers, Mr. Dilley appears to receive talking points from the campaign. He also claims more exclusive access, describing phone calls from advisers to Mr. Trump to discuss memes his team is producing and whether they strike the desired tone.In July, one of the group’s most prolific contributors — a musician from outside San Diego named Michael Beatty, who goes by the handle Miguelifornia — mentioned that Mr. Scavino and Mr. Miller “gave us tons of great video” shot at a Trump rally in South Carolina.Days later, the team released a clip that appeared to use behind-the-scenes footage of Mr. Trump at a rally. The moody meme, cast in blue monochrome and set to a Phil Collins song, cast Mr. Trump as a serious, heroic leader and concluded with information on how to text a donation to the campaign.“This is a campaign ad if I’ve ever seen one,” one team member, who goes by MAGADevilDog, wrote on X.A Plan to Avoid ‘a Ton of Oversight’Because the Dilley Meme Team’s content is shared on the internet, rather than on television or radio, it generally isn’t subject to laws requiring ads to include disclosure about who paid for them.“If it goes on the internet, there’s essentially no regulation,” said Richard L. Hasen, an elections law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. And without regulation, he added, it’s impossible to know who is paying for the content.But campaign finance experts pointed to two other unknowns about the Dilley Meme Team’s operations: coordination and compensation.If a group is receiving compensation to help a candidate get elected, then it could be considered a super PAC and should be registered and reporting its donors and spending.If it is not compensated but is coordinating with the campaign, then it may run afoul of strict limits on in-kind contributions, said Paul S. Ryan, who serves as deputy executive director of the pro-democracy group Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation.Mr. Ryan said receiving video footage that was not publicly available could be considered coordination.Memes created with input from the campaign, he said, “are just as good as a direct contribution to the campaign” and may be worth far more than the $6,600 individual limit per election cycle.Mr. Dilley and other members of the meme team often claim they receive no financial compensation for their efforts.“Everything they do, they do it for free and out of love of country,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican strategist close to Mr. Trump, who frequently shares Dilley Meme Team posts.Mr. Dilley, who in 2019 was found to have failed to pay more than $24,000 in child support and interest, says he now makes “multiple six figures” a year. That income, he said on his podcast last month, comes from a combination of sources: podcast subscriptions and sponsors, sales of apparel, his life-coaching business and streaming revenue from the video platform Rumble, where the Dilley Show has more than 12,000 subscribers.“There’s nothing here that’s mysterious,” he said. “It’s all transparent.”Federal Election Commission records show no payments from any political committee to Mr. Dilley or other members of the meme team.Mr. Dilley has claimed to have received gifts from Mr. Trump. Last March, he posted video of a box filled with 28 Make America Great Again hats, each signed by the former president. The package was sent by the campaign in thanks for assisting with “rapid response” during President Biden’s State of the Union address, Mr. Dilley said.Signed MAGA hats can sell for as much as $1,000 on the secondary market.Mr. Dilley also said he got access to dozens of V.I.P. tickets to a Trump rally in Hialeah, Fla., on Nov. 8, which he gave to supporters of his show. It is unclear how much the tickets were worth, but tickets for other rallies have sold for as much as $1,500 apiece.Mr. Dilley has been clear that he is looking for more than just thank-you gifts.In October, he told his podcast audience that he wanted to use limited liability companies to receive money from Trump donors to fund his team’s work. The idea, he said, is to avoid “a ton of red tape” and “a ton of oversight” that come with operating as a super PAC or being paid by the campaign.“If you go super PAC or official campaign, you can get paid, but the problem is a lawyer has to watch every single thing you put out, and we don’t want that,” Mr. Dilley said on his podcast in October. “What we need is people that were going to give huge dollar amounts to the super PACs and the campaigns to just give directly to us.”“We already have L.L.C.s formed,” he added. “We’re ready to rock ’n’ roll.”Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer who advises both Democrats and Republicans, described that plan as “problematic” because it implies a clear goal of circumventing public disclosure as required by the F.E.C.“People can take advantage of those failures of the regulatory system to promote the interests of a candidate without the public ever being aware of it,” Mr. Kappel said. In that landscape, he added, “L.L.C.s have become the tool of choice” because they can be layered to obscure both the source and recipient of payments.The Dilley Meme Team was registered as a business in July, using the address of a UPS store outside Tampa, according to Florida business records. Mr. Dilley acknowledged being involved in its parent company, Counter Productions Digital Media L.L.C., which was registered at the same address in early 2022. He denies having said he set up any L.L.C.s to avoid campaign finance rules.On his podcast, Mr. Dilley has laid out his vision for his team, saying he hopes to hire all 27 meme team members full time through the 2024 election. “We need 12 months of everyone full time working to meme Donald Trump back into the White House while destroying Joe Biden,” he said.Jaymin Patel contributed research. More

President Biden and the White House regularly post to millions of followers on social media, talking about the economy on Facebook, sharing Christmas decorations on YouTube, showcasing pardoned turkeys on Instagram, posting about infrastructure on the X platform. They’re even on Threads.But they aren’t speaking directly to 150 million Americans on TikTok. There’s no official @POTUS, White House or Biden-Harris 2024 account. You’ll find only one of the Republican presidential candidates there — and just 37 sitting Congress members, according to a New York Times review of accounts.Some pundits call next year the “TikTok election” because of the ballooning power and influence of the video app. TikTok may have been known for viral dances in 2020, but it has increasingly become a news source for millennials and Gen Z-ers, who will be a powerful part of the electorate. But less than a year from the election, most politicians are keeping their distance from the app, as efforts grow in Washington and elsewhere to restrict or ban it because of its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. Many lawmakers and regulators have expressed concern that TikTok could put users’ information into the hands of Beijing officials — an argument that the company disputes.By passing up a huge microphone because of those concerns, however, politicians are running the risk that they and their campaigns will not directly reach young people on the app. They might also be upstaged by savvy challengers who may not feel so conflicted and who can figure out how to use TikTok to their advantage.Many campaigns are trying to hedge their bets by turning to a growing network of TikTok political influencers to share their messages or by making short videos on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels in hopes that they’ll end up trending on TikTok. They have to give up some control to do that, and they need to persuade creators to work with them, often for little to no pay.To many political consultants, the politicians’ absence on TikTok is perhaps untenable.“The discourse is being shaped by this thing even if you yourself don’t use it,” said Teddy Goff, a top digital strategist for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, said that he was telling candidates “if you didn’t get it banned in 2023, you need to get on in 2024.”Several Republican presidential candidates have slammed TikTok at their recent debates and criticized Vivek Ramaswamy, the one candidate who has joined the app despite previously referring to it as “digital fentanyl.” He has defended joining TikTok, saying he did it to reach young voters.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign team said that it did not need its own TikTok accounts to reach voters.“The reality is us having an account would not make a substantial difference in what we need to do on TikTok,” said Rob Flaherty, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager and the former White House director of digital strategy. “The most important thing you can do is work through influencers.”TikTok arrived as a political force during the 2022 midterm campaign, when Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, successfully roasted his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, in a flurry of cutting videos, and Representative Jeff Jackson, Democrat of North Carolina, used a video filter to make his head look like a piece of broccoli while talking about reaching younger audiences.Annie Wu Henry, a 27-year-old digital strategist who helped run Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account in 2022, said his use showcased TikTok’s potential reach and influence. She said she was amazed as she watched clips and memes that Mr. Fetterman’s campaign posted on the app take off “and become actual parts of conversation or picked up by traditional media sources.”Annie Wu Henry helped run social media for John Fetterman’s Senate campaign last year.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesWeeks after the elections, though, Washington’s sentiment toward the company turned sour. The Biden administration, as well as most states, some cities and some college campuses, has barred the app from being used on official devices. Some lawmakers have called for a national ban.Today, just 7 percent of the 533 Senators and Representatives have verified accounts on TikTok, and some have never posted, according to the analysis by The Times. None are Republican. The few who have joined often post to the app from separate “TikTok phones” because of security concerns, said Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist.Mr. Jackson is the most popular, with 2.5 million followers, and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, comes in second, with 1.4 million. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota each have over 200,000 followers.Ms. Wu said campaigns, including Mr. Biden’s, were potentially leaving major audiences on the table.“It needs to be figured out, and there’s almost this rush right now of who’s going to do it,” she said.The White House has tapped into TikTok in the past few years by working with social media stars to promote access to Covid-19 vaccines and to brief viewers on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Inflation Reduction Act. Several stars told The Times they weren’t paid but were eager to participate.That sort of workaround is expected to be even more popular next year. “There’s this booming industry under the surface of both agencies and platforms that are helping political organizations, social impact groups and politicians themselves sponsor content on TikTok and partner with creators and influencers to put out messaging,” said Brian Derrick, a political strategist and co-founder of Oath, a platform for guiding donations to Democratic campaigns.TikTok prohibits paid political ads, including paying creators for endorsements. It doesn’t encourage politicians to join the platform, though it does verify official accounts.A White House spokesperson, when asked about the use of TikTok, pointed to a rule barring the app from being used on federal devices as of March and declined to comment further.Harry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, is a rising creator, sharing news and opinions against backdrops of social media posts and articles.Yuvraj Khanna for The New York TimesHarry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, started posting in 2020, when he was a high school senior, to help Mr. Biden’s campaign for president. He has amassed 700,000 followers.Mr. Sisson said that in the past year and a half, Democratic groups had offered him more opportunities, including filming voting videos with Mr. Obama and watching the State of the Union at the White House. He wasn’t paid but was thrilled to be involved.With the White House in particular, he said, “They’ve always stressed, we’re not here to tell you guys what to say, if you disagree with us, we’re not going to be upset.”Mr. Sisson said he earned money through views on his TikTok videos and accepted some paid collaborations with advocacy groups that he believed in like Planned Parenthood, but his goal was to help elect Democrats. A.B. Burns-Tucker, a political TikTok creator, believes that her content has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesA.B. Burns-Tucker, 34, is another political content creator who has joined White House briefings. She posts on TikTok as @iamlegallyhype, and has over 700,000 followers. She said her account took off after she made a popular explainer video about the Russia-Ukraine war, which colloquially referred to world leaders as “Big Daddy Biden” and “Big Bad P.” She says she’s now a news source for people who don’t tune in elsewhere.“I talk about current events with my friends all the time, but most of them are like, ‘Girl, I don’t watch the news, if you don’t tell me I don’t know,’” she said. “I took that and ran with it.”Ms. Burns-Tucker believes that she has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution. She was paid by Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights to make a TikTok video that urged people to vote for the ballot measure, which aligned with her personal beliefs, she said. “A lot of people in the comment section were like, I didn’t even know, I’ll be in line first thing tomorrow,” she added. The video passed 45,000 views.People like Mr. Sisson and Ms. Burns-Tucker don’t have a parallel among conservatives, said Amanda Carey Elliott, a digital consultant for Republicans.Ms. Elliott said that she was firmly against using TikTok based on the party’s stance on China — but that there was also less incentive for Republicans to use it.“There’s not a huge culture of TikTok influencers on the right — it’s just not the same for us,” she said.Still, some Republican consultants say the opportunity is too big to pass up. Mr. Wilson, the Republican strategist, has been trying to guide candidates on how to sign up for the app after criticizing it.“Candidates drive in cars all the time — that doesn’t mean they want cars to be unregulated,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a hypocrisy there if you’re clear about what your position is and how you’re using it.” More

At a town hall in Iowa, Ron DeSantis, who has the backing of Iowa’s popular governor, attacked Nikki Haley after she added a key supporter: Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire.As Republicans struggle to coalesce around a single rival to former President Donald J. Trump, the popular governors of Iowa and New Hampshire have also split their ticket.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, which votes first in the Republican presidential nominating contest, is backing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, which votes second, is supporting Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor.On Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis played up the power of Ms. Reynolds’s backing while dismissing the potency of Mr. Sununu and calling Ms. Haley an avatar of “the old failed Republican establishment of yesteryear.”“Even a campaigner as good as Chris is not going to be able to paper over Nikki being an establishment candidate,” Mr. DeSantis said during a town hall for Iowa voters broadcast by CNN on Tuesday, hours after Mr. Sununu announced his endorsement of Ms. Haley at an event in New Hampshire. “I mean, she’s getting funded by liberal Democrats from California like the founder of LinkedIn, people on Wall Street like the head of JPMorgan.”For Mr. DeSantis, the town hall was a chance to make his pitch before a national audience without the name-calling and noisy cross-talk of the Republican presidential debates. He had entered the race as the clear favorite to upend Mr. Trump. But as frequent missteps have marred his campaign, some influential megadonors have thrown their support behind Ms. Haley, whom they see as more moderate.Among them are the two donors name-checked by Mr. DeSantis, Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, and Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. (Ms. Haley also has the backing of traditional Republican donors.)Both Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley trail Mr. Trump by wide margins in polls nationally as well in the early-voting states. To close the gap, Mr. DeSantis has jumped at every opportunity to appear before Iowa voters, including the town hall hosted by CNN, a news organization that he has frequently derided as “corporate media.”Many of the questions asked on Tuesday, both by the voters in attendance at Grand View University in Des Moines and the moderator, Jake Tapper, were less than hard-hitting, and Mr. DeSantis was able to have a largely easy and confident stage presence.One voter asked him what food he most enjoyed at the Iowa State Fair. “Pork on a stick,” Mr. DeSantis replied with a smile, “but I did not do it in public because they said if they get a picture of it, you know, it’s a really bad thing.”Mr. Tapper asked Mr. DeSantis, who often talks about “destroying leftism,” to name his favorite Florida Democrat. He responded with two county sheriffs in South Florida.But Mr. DeSantis was also given the opportunity to detail some of his policy positions. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. DeSantis said he opposed a two-state solution. On Ukraine, he expressed support for efforts by Republicans in Congress to tie funding for its war against Russia to U.S. border security. On Social Security, he said seniors should keep their benefits and called for a bipartisan effort to ensure the program’s long-term stability.“My grandmother lived till 91,” Mr. DeSantis explained. “Social Security was her sole source of income. So I understand what a lot of people are going through.”Still, he was sometimes light on specifics.Pressed by Mr. Tapper to say when he would release his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, Mr. DeSantis said, “We’re working on it.”He added: “You kind of campaign in poetry, then you govern in prose.”And although he saved his harshest words for Ms. Haley, Mr. DeSantis also forcefully criticized Mr. Trump, something he has rarely done on national television.In his first answer, Mr. DeSantis said that Mr. Trump had “dramatically” mishandled the economy during the coronavirus pandemic. He also said that Mr. Trump was “flip-flopping” on abortion by criticizing a six-week ban that Mr. DeSantis had signed in Florida. And he noted Mr. Trump’s failure to build a wall on the United States’ southern border and have Mexico pay for it, as he had pledged to do.“It’s a different Donald Trump than ’15 and ’16,” he argued. “Back then he was colorful, but it was really America-first about the policies. Now, a lot of it’s about him.”Mr. DeSantis has said that Mr. Trump must be beaten in Iowa if Republicans want to stop him elsewhere. He has devoted extensive resources to winning the state, visiting each of its 99 counties and moving roughly a third of his campaign staff there.Outside groups are also helping his cause. One allied super PAC has built an extensive ground game to turn out support during the Jan. 15 caucuses. Another is investing heavily in advertisements targeting Ms. Haley.And he has campaigned frequently with Ms. Reynolds, who endorsed him last month. In a radio interview on Tuesday before the town hall, Mr. DeSantis called her “a tremendous help.”Other candidates are also focusing heavily on Iowa. The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy plans to visit a total of 29 counties this week alone, according to his campaign. On Wednesday, Mr. Ramaswamy will appear in a similar CNN town hall in Des Moines.But none of the efforts have seemed to move the polls. Mr. DeSantis now trails Mr. Trump by more than 30 points among Iowa Republicans, according to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom survey released on Monday.And in New Hampshire, where Mr. DeSantis has spent far less time, Ms. Haley has now pulled into second place. Mr. DeSantis has fallen to fourth or fifth. More

The opposition leader was endorsed by Parliament as the country’s next prime minister, unseating the right-wing Law and Justice party that had long denounced him as unfit to rule.It was just minutes after Donald Tusk made his triumphant return as Poland’s leader that his archenemy stepped to the podium in Parliament to rain acid on his parade.“I don’t know who your grandfathers were but I know one thing: You are a German agent, just a German agent,” growled Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Law and Justice, the right-wing party that, until Monday, had held all the reins of power.The accusation, one of many smears aimed at Mr. Tusk over a political career stretching back to the 1980s, came after Parliament endorsed Mr. Tusk as prime minister, stirring joy and relief among Polish liberals and pro-European centrists.The attack reflected the no-holds-barred approach to Polish politics after eight years of Law and Justice rule. But it also highlighted the difficulties for many in Poland of pinning down who their country’s next leader is and where he stands.In a country that has been largely mono-ethnic and monolingual since the end of World War II, Mr. Tusk stands out as a man of eclectic identities, interests and linguistic talents.As Parliament on Tuesday debated whether to endorse a cabinet proposed by Mr. Tusk, one of his most strident critics, the far-right legislator Grzegorz Braun, used a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles during an event with members of the Jewish community.The new government lineup later won a vote of confidence as expected.Mr. Tusk has described himself as having four parallel identities: a proud son of Gdansk, the formerly German port city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea; a Kashubian, an ethnic minority native to northern Poland with its own language and traditions; a Pole and a European.He speaks Polish, Kashubian, German and English, a language he barely knew when he took a break from Polish politics in 2014, to take a senior job in Brussels, but mastered quickly.Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party, left the plenary hall of the Parliament as Mr. Tusk spoke on Tuesday.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeing Polish, Mr. Tusk said in 2014, when he became president of the European Council is “my main identity” but the others matter, too — a position that baffles Mr. Kaczynski and other Polish nationalists, who see allegiance to the Polish state as indivisible.Riina Kionka, a diplomat from Estonia who advised Mr. Tusk in Brussels, remembers him as both a “passionate European” and a “proud Pole determined to lead his country.”Mr. Tusk always had “his two feet firmly on the ground” and sought compromise rather than total victory, she said. “He always told us: ‘It is better to have part of something than all of nothing.’”This distaste for all-or-nothing dogmatism led some to question the convictions of a politician who began his career in a circle of radical free-market believers but who, in Poland’s recent campaign, promised to preserve a raft of welfare payments introduced by Law and Justice.Asked in 2013 whether he had changed his earlier views, he quoted the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, a former Marxist who, after leaving Poland, became a trenchant critic of communism and described himself as a “liberal conservative socialist.” That, Mr. Tusk said, described his own views.“He is a political cherry picker,” said Jarolaw Kuisz, the author of a recent book, “The New Politics of Poland.” He added, “He takes what he sees as the best bits from every part of the spectrum.”Active in politics for more than 40 years, Mr. Tusk started out as a youth activist and journalist with Solidarity in Gdansk. After communism’s collapse, he went on to win two consecutive terms as prime minister, though he cut short the second to take the Brussels position.Mr. Tusk, when he was president of the European Council, in Gdansk in 2019.Adam Warzawa/EPA, via ShutterstockThe job that perhaps prepared him best for his current role, juggling implacable hostility from Law and Justice and tensions within his diverse alliance of supporters, however, was one he took in the 1980s in Gdansk, after communist authorities imposed martial law.Unable to find regular work after being briefly arrested, he took a job scaling chimneys and high buildings with mountaineering gear so as to paint or repair them.This “high-altitude work,” Mr. Tusk later recalled, involved being a “crazy alpinist” and equipped him to calibrate results and risk, a useful political skill. Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, leader of the Polish Peasants Party and Mr. Tusk’s candidate for defense minister, praised him Monday for taking the risk of leaving Brussels to return to Polish politics in 2021, starting what seemed a long-shot effort to beat Law and Justice.“He showed courage when he abandoned a comfortable life,” he said. “He abandoned lucrative posts and came back here.”Mr. Tusk’s flexibility has alarmed some progressives. They loathe Law and Justice but complain that Mr. Tusk has not rallied more forcefully to their side on issues like abortion, on which the outgoing government imposed a near total ban and which Mr. Tusk did nothing to liberalize when he was prime minister.A pro-European Union demonstration following a ruling of the Constitutional Court against the primacy of E.U. law in Poland, in Warsaw on October. Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Tusk declared women’s rights the “No. 1 issue” in Poland this year but, ahead of the general election, removed from his party’s list of candidates an activist who called for allowing for abortion at any stage of pregnancy, a position that risked alienating voters.His party, Civic Coalition, wants to liberalize Poland’s harsh abortion law but only to allow termination up to the 12th week of pregnancy.Zuzanna Dąbrowska, a veteran political journalist, said Mr. Tusk deserved credit for addressing an issue that most politicians avoided. “The majority in Poland has the same opinion that policy on abortion should be more liberal. But politicians have done everything to avoid this reality.”To become prime minister, Mr. Tusk stitched together an array of diverse opposition parties that together won a clear majority of seats in Parliament, and joined forces on Monday to reject Law and Justice’s nominee as prime minister and select Mr. Tusk. They include a leftist grouping, the center-right Polish Peasants Party and hard-line free-market liberals.“To be a good prime minister you must be everything but sometimes you can’t combine water and fire,” said Bartosz Rydlinski, a political scientist at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. “You cannot have low taxes and an effective welfare state. This is Tusk’s biggest challenge.”A fan of Miles Davis who studied history at university, Mr. Tusk has sometimes alienated potential voters, particularly more traditional-minded ones in small rural towns and villages.Mr. Tusk offended millions of Poles in 2005 by dismissing conservatives as a “mohair coalition” — a reference to the berets many older women wear to church. Mr. Tusk apologized but struggled for years to shake off an image of haughty contempt.The candidates Lech Kaczynski of Law and Justice and Mr. Tusk of Civic Platform during a TV debate three days ahead of the first round of presidential elections, in 2005.Tomasz Gzell/European Pressphoto AgencyHe has since talked about his youth in what he describes as “poverty” in Gdansk, particularly after his father, a carpenter, died when he was 14, and how he used to hang out with street toughs. His older sister, he says, helped set him straight.As a university student and then a journalist and youth activist with Solidarity, he embraced free-market economics. He helped found the Liberal Democratic Congress, a group of anti-communist free-marketeers. After the 1990 election of the Solidarity leader Lech Walesa as president, he was involved in managing the privatization of state assets.Widespread public discontent with economic “shock therapy” crushed his early political ambitions. His party’s defeat in a 1993 election dampened his faith in free-market orthodoxy.“He realized he had to follow political currents and adjust to reality,” said Ms. Dąbrowska. “He has been doing this ever since — adjusting his views and himself to political reality.”After retreating from politics for four years to write books, he won a seat in the Polish senate and then helped set up Civic Platform, a liberal party. He became prime minister after the party won a 2007 election, and served a second time after another victory in 2011.He boasted after his second triumph, “we have no one left to lose to” and, to the dismay of many supporters, decamped to Brussels before finishing his second term.A year after his departure, Law and Justice defeated his party in a parliamentary election and won an upset in a presidential race. “He was arrogant and misjudged the situation,” said Mr. Kuisz.But Law and Justice recently made the same mistake, misjudging Mr. Tusk’s ability to reach out to voters after seven years in Brussels.“He was presented as a lofty liberal and came back unsure of his success but determined to fight,” said Mr. Kuisz. “From Brussels he was suddenly everywhere in small towns and villages doing basic grass-roots politics.”Mr. Tusk addressing the Polish Parliament on Tuesday.Pawel Supernak/EPA, via Shutterstock More

Mr. Sununu is popular in the state, though former President Donald J. Trump continues to dominate the field.Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire endorsed Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination at a campaign event Tuesday evening, casting her as a fresh face for the party who could take on the elites in Washington and move the nation past the “nonsense and drama” of former President Donald J. Trump.“We are all in for Nikki Haley,” Mr. Sununu said to loud cheers at a ski area in Manchester, adding that her momentum was “real” and “tangible” and that her poll numbers and ground game have been “absolutely unbelievable.”Pacing in the middle of the audience, Ms. Haley called it “a great night in New Hampshire.” “It doesn’t get any better than this — to go and get endorsed by the ‘Live Free or Die’ governor is about as rock-solid of an endorsement as we could hope for.”The endorsement is a significant victory for Ms. Haley, who is trying to establish herself over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as the main alternative to Mr. Trump and has gained ground in New Hampshire polling in the past month.Mr. Sununu, a Trump critic who is serving his fourth and last two-year term as governor, was re-elected last year by more than 15 percentage points and is popular in the state. He was seen as a top recruit for the Senate last year but declined to run, and he also chose not to run for the Republican presidential nomination himself — saying at the time that he thought he could have more influence as an external voice than as a candidate.On the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Mr. Sununu stumped with Ms. Haley, Mr. DeSantis and former Gov. Chris Christie, as he weighed which of the three to back. In an interview last month, he said he would talk over his decision with friends and family over the Thanksgiving break. He said he was looking for someone who could beat Mr. Trump and who could connect with voters on “a very retail level.”Before the raucous crowd in Manchester, Mr. Sununu lauded Ms. Haley as a traditional Republican with the executive experience to secure the border, tackle mental health needs and ensure low taxes and limited government. He urged New Hampshire voters to turn the page on this era’s politics, taking shots at both President Biden and Mr. Trump. “We have a president who is more concerned about nap time,” he said. “We have a president who is worried about jail time.”In a news conference after the event, Mr. Sununu and Ms. Haley shot down suggestions that Ms. Haley might choose Mr. Sununu as her vice president should she win the nomination. “I think he is fantastic, but he has told me he doesn’t want anything to do with V.P.,” she said.Ms. Haley told reporters she had been more focused on winning over voters than scoring endorsements from elected officials, but she nevertheless called Mr. Sununu’s support a huge win for her bid. Mr. Sununu argued the race had now become a contest between only two people — “Nikki Haley and Donald Trump.”“There’s differences with us,” Ms. Haley said when Mr. Sununu was asked if he believed Ms. Haley had sufficiently confronted the former president. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough. Pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough. The end of the day, I put my truths out there and let the chips fall were they may.”Given his popularity and his proven ability to win as a Republican in a state that leans Democratic, Mr. Sununu could help sway the moderate Republicans and independents whom Ms. Haley is counting on to give her a strong showing in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 23.Undeclared voters, who can participate in the Republican primary, now make up roughly 39 percent of voters in the state, a greater slice of the electorate than either Democrats or Republicans. And with no competitive Democratic presidential primary next year, they are expected to play an even larger role in the Republican contest.“It is really a big move,” Matthew Bartlett, a former Trump appointee and Republican strategist who is unaligned in the race, said of Mr. Sununu’s backing. “It is really the last chess piece to fall in line before Election Day, and it is not to be underestimated.”But just how much weight it will carry is an open question in a primary in which nothing — not endorsements, not debates, not 91 felony charges — has changed the basic dynamic: Mr. Trump is the overwhelming favorite, and everybody else is fighting for second place.The Sununu endorsement was first reported by WMUR earlier on Tuesday.Mr. DeSantis received two of the biggest endorsements available in Iowa — those of Gov. Kim Reynolds and the evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats — but has yet to make significant gains on Mr. Trump there. Still, campaign officials for Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Christie downplayed the impact of Mr. Sununu’s backing.“This puts us down one vote in New Hampshire and when Governor Christie is back in Londonderry tomorrow, he’ll continue to tell the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump and earn that one missing vote and thousands more,” said Karl Rickett, campaign spokesman for Mr. Christie, who has made New Hampshire his do-or-die state.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, criticized both Ms. Haley and Mr. Sununu in a statement. “No matter how much Nikki Haley or Chris Sununu try to spin Granite Staters, the reality is they’re both MAGA extremists who spent years cozying up to Donald Trump,” he said.At the ski area in Manchester, a prospective voter solicited a low exclamation of “oohs” from the crowd when she asked if Ms. Haley would ever consider the vice presidency given Mr. Trump’s dominance in national and state polls.“It is not that big of a deal,” Ms. Haley responded, calming the crowd and prompting some laughter, “because what you have to know is I don’t play for second.”In the audience, Dan Silverman, 53, an undeclared voter who leans Republican, said he wasn’t particularly keen on any of the contenders in the Republican primary and was concerned about some of Ms. Haley’s “bombastic language” on foreign policy. But after watching her speak, Mr. Silverman, who teaches information systems courses at the University of New Hampshire, said he enjoyed her remarks. “I am coming around,” he said.Nearby, Bruce LaRiviere, 65, a retail salesman, said he was set on voting for Ms. Haley, whom he admired for her calls for term limits and competency tests for elected officials. He hoped Mr. Sununu’s endorsement would provide her the boost she needed to beat Mr. Trump, who he said was a force of a “noise and aggression.”“She’s very conservative,” he said. “I like the way she is going to try to change Washington.” More

Aides of the president met with influential Black male Democrats to discuss how to shore up his standing with a crucial group of voters before 2024.As President Biden’s allies grow more worried that his standing is slipping among Black men, his aides met on Tuesday at the White House with influential Black male Democrats to discuss how to increase his popularity with a crucial group of voters before the 2024 election.Several attendees said there was general agreement that Mr. Biden, during both his 2020 campaign and his first three years in office, had paid more attention to Black female voters than to Black male ones. These people said they had suggested to Mr. Biden’s aides that the president needed to make a specific argument about how his administration had improved the lives of Black men.“It’s clear that there’s been a focus on Black women and the question becomes, has there been an equal focus on Black men?” said Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman and Biden administration official who is now a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee and who was at the meeting.He added: “There’s been a mantra that Black women are the base of the party and, I think, it’s Black families that are the base of the party. That has the potential to separate the family unit by gender, which I think is just unfortunate.”The afternoon meeting included, among others, Representative Steven Horsford of Nevada, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus; Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania, who has warned publicly that Mr. Biden’s standing with Black voters has fallen; and Antjuan Seawright and Clay Middleton, political operatives from South Carolina who are closely associated with Representative James E. Clyburn, a key Biden ally in the state.The group agreed that Mr. Biden had many accomplishments that had helped Black men. Democrats, he said, are falling short in telling this story.“We left the room acknowledging that we collectively have to do a better job communicating,” said Kwame Raoul, the attorney general of Illinois. “Sometimes being awakened to a challenge is a good thing.”The White House session followed months of nail-biting among Democrats about rising skepticism of Mr. Biden among Black voters, especially Black men. Republicans have aimed to drive a wedge between Black voters and the Democratic Party in recent cycles, arguing that former President Donald J. Trump’s record on the economy and his passage of a criminal justice law were more beneficial for Black communities — arguments that Democrats have dismissed as disinformation.Polling released by The New York Times and Siena College last month found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of the most important presidential battleground states said they would support Mr. Trump against Mr. Biden next year, an alarming figure for Democrats given Black voters’ decades-long loyalty to the party.At the meeting on Tuesday — led by Steve Benjamin, the director of the White House’s public engagement office — the Black male allies of Mr. Biden were encouraged to recount what people in their communities and home districts had been saying about his administration and whether they would support him for a second term.“There have been communication gaps,” said Harold Love, a Tennessee state representative who is the incoming president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. He said the administration needed to tell people what Mr. Biden had done “in plain language so they can understand.”The White House declined to comment about the meeting.In interviews and focus groups, Black men who express openness to supporting Mr. Trump have pointed to the former president’s record on the economy and said their businesses and families fared better during his administration. Black Democrats have rebutted this idea, in some cases arguing that Black men have been targeted by disinformation that, if crystallized in enough voters’ minds, could endanger the president’s already shaky standing with them.Mr. Raoul, the Illinois attorney general, said that part of Mr. Biden’s problem was that he had articulated a complex message that often ended up competing with easier-to-digest misinformation.“Sometimes when you do a lot, it’s difficult to convey it to folks who are used to consuming things in sound bites and who have been at times recipients of intentionally targeted misinformation,” Mr. Raoul said on Tuesday.Democrats have emphasized earlier and more frequent outreach to Black communities as important to winning their voters.Vice President Kamala Harris has frequently met with small groups of Black men as she has traveled the country and, last month, hosted a group of 10 Black men in the news media and politics for dinner at her home in Washington. The party has also bought advertisements on Black radio stations and placed digital ads geared toward young Black voters.Mr. Benjamin’s office in the White House has held frequent meetings with a variety of constituency groups.But the meeting on Tuesday followed a particularly bad stretch of polling for Mr. Biden. CNN polls released Monday found Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump by 10 percentage points in Michigan and five points in Georgia — both battleground states with large numbers of Black voters.Even though Mr. Biden has no serious Democratic presidential challengers, the party’s primary election in South Carolina on Feb. 3 will be an early test of Black voters’ enthusiasm. Black voters made up nearly 60 percent of the Democratic electorate in the state in 2020, when Mr. Biden’s victory there set him on the path to the White House.No other Democrats have made a significant investment in the state’s primary this year, but the South Carolina Democratic Party on Monday nevertheless began a statewide voter outreach program, complete with a 50-person staff and a six-figure investment.Mr. Middleton, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden’s South Carolina campaign, said the meeting was ultimately meant to help determine how best to relay the president’s accomplishments and his plans for a second term to Black men across the country, with a focus on battleground states.“If we ignore what Black men are saying, then we would have some problems,” Mr. Middleton said. “This is to say, ‘We will not ignore.’” More

Speaking after a White House meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, US president Joe Biden said the US will support Ukraine in its war with Russia ‘as long as we can’. ‘Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine. We must, we must, we must prove him wrong,’ Biden said. The US president continued, highlighting praise for Republicans by a Russian TV host and said: ‘If you’re being celebrated by Russian propagandists, it might be time to rethink what you’re doing. History … will judge harshly’ More