Elections

The momentum behind organizations that aim to combat online falsehoods has started to taper off.After President Biden won the election nearly three years ago, three of every 10 Americans believed the false narrative that his victory resulted from fraud, a poll found. In the years since, fact checkers have debunked the claim in lengthy articles, corrections posted on viral content, videos and chat rooms.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.This summer, they received a verdict on their efforts in an updated poll from Monmouth University: Very little has changed. Three of every 10 Americans still believed the false narrative.With a wave of elections expected next year in dozens of countries, the global fact-checking community is taking stock of its efforts over a few intense years — and many don’t love what they see.The number of fact-checking operations at news organizations and elsewhere has stagnated, and perhaps even fallen, after a booming expansion in response to a rise in unsubstantiated claims about elections and the pandemic. The social networking companies that once trumpeted efforts to combat misinformation are showing signs of waning interest. And those who write about falsehoods around the world are facing worsening harassment and personal threats.“It’s not getting better,” said Tai Nalon, a journalist who runs Aos Fatos, a Brazilian fact-checking and disinformation-tracking company.Elections are scheduled next year in more than 5,500 municipalities across Brazil, which a few dozen Aos Fatos fact checkers will monitor. The idea exhausts Ms. Nalon, who has spent recent years navigating a disinformation-peddling president, bizarre theories about the pandemic, and an increasingly polluted online ecosystem rife with harassment, distrust and legal threats.Voters in Brasília in October. Elections are scheduled next year in more than 5,500 municipalities across Brazil, which a few dozen Aos Fatos fact checkers will monitor.Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesMs. Fatos’s organization, one of the leading operations of its kind in Brazil, started in 2015 as attention to the fight against false and misleading content online surged. It was part of a fact-checking industry that bloomed around the world. At the end of last year, there were 424 fact-checking websites, up from just 11 in 2008, according to an annual census by the Duke University Reporters’ Lab.The organizations used an arsenal of old and new tools: fact checks, pre-bunks that tried to inform viewers against misinformation before they encountered it, context labels, accuracy flags, warning screens, content removal policies, media literacy trainings and more. Facebook, which is owned by Meta, helped spur some of the growth in 2016 when it started working with and paying fact-checking operations. Online platforms, like TikTok, eventually followed suit.Yet the momentum seems to be idling. This year, only 417 sites are active. The addition of new sites has slowed for several years, with just 20 last year compared with 83 in 2019. Sites such as the Baloney Meter in Canada and Fakt Ist Fakt in Austria have gone quiet in recent years.“The leveling-off represents something of a maturing of the field,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which the nonprofit Poynter Institute started in 2015 to support fact checkers worldwide.The work continues to draw interest from new parts of the world, and some think tanks and good-government groups have begun offering their own fact-checking services, experts said. Harassment and government repression, however, remain major deterrents. Political polarization has turned fact-checking and other misinformation defenses into a target among right-wing influencers, who claim that debunkers are biased against them.Yasmin Green, chief executive of Jigsaw, a group within Google that studies threats like disinformation and extremism, recalled one study in which a participant scrolled past a fact check shared by a journalist from CNN and dismissed it out of hand. “Well, who fact-checks the fact checkers?” the user asked.“We’re in this highly distrustful environment where you’re evaluating just on the basis of the speaker and distrusting people who you decided their judgment is not trustworthy,” Ms. Green said.“We’re in this highly distrustful environment where you’re evaluating just on the basis of the speaker,” said Yasmin Green of Jigsaw, a group within Google that studies disinformation.Rengim Mutevellioglu for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesIntervening against misinformation has a broadly positive effect, according to researchers. Experiments conducted in 2020 concluded that fact checks in many parts of the world reduced false beliefs for at least two weeks. A team at Stanford determined that education about misinformation after the 2016 election had probably contributed to fewer Americans visiting websites in 2020 that were not credible.Success, however, is inconsistent and contingent on many variables: the viewer’s location, age, political leaning and level of digital engagement, and whether a fact check is written or illustrated, succinct or explanatory. Many efforts never reach crucial demographics, while others are ignored or resisted.After falsehoods swarmed Facebook during the pandemic, the platform instituted policies against Covid-19 misinformation. Some researchers, however, questioned the effectiveness of the efforts in a study published this month in the journal Science Advances. They determined that while the amount of anti-vaccine content had declined, engagement with the remaining anti-vaccine content had not.“In other words, users engaged just as much with anti-vaccine content as they would have if content had not been deleted,” said David Broniatowski, a professor at George Washington University and an author of the paper.The remaining anti-vaccine content was more likely to be misleading, researchers found, and users linked to less trustworthy sources than they did before Facebook put its policies in place.“Our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry, and we are laser-focused on tackling industrywide challenges,” Corey Chambliss, a spokesman for Meta, said in an emailed statement. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”In the first six months of this year, more than 40 million Facebook posts received a fact-check label, according to a report that the company submitted to the European Commission.Social platforms where false narratives and conspiracy theories still spread widely have scaled back anti-disinformation resources over the past year. Researchers found that fact-checking organizations and similar outlets grew gradually more dependent on social media companies for a financial lifeline; misinformation watchers now worry that increasingly budget-conscious tech companies will start reducing their philanthropy spending.Such a move could “really turn the screws on fact checkers,” said Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, which is now known as X.Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety at Twitter, said that if tech companies cut back on their philanthropy spending it could “really turn the screws on fact checkers.”Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersIf Meta ever cuts the budget for its third-party fact-checking program, it could “decimate an entire industry” of fact checkers that depend on its financial support, said Mr. Roth, now a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. (Meta said its commitment to the program had not changed.)X has undergone some of the most significant changes of any platform. Its billionaire owner of less than a year, Elon Musk, embraced an experiment that relied on its own unpaid users rather than paid fact checkers and safety teams. The expanded fact-checking program — Community Notes — allows anyone to write corrections on posts. Users can deem a note “helpful” so it becomes visible to everyone; some notes have appeared alongside content from Mr. Musk and President Biden and even a viral post about a groundhog falsely accused of stealing vegetables.X did not respond to a request for comment. Tech watchdogs fretted this week about the quality of content on X after The Information reported that the platform was cutting half the team dedicated to managing disinformation about election integrity; the company had said less than a month earlier that it planned to expand the team.Crowdsourced fact-checking has shown mixed results in research, said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. An article she co-wrote in The Journal of Online Trust and Safety found that the presence of a Community Note did not keep posts from spreading widely. Users who created misleading posts saw no change in the engagement for subsequent posts, suggesting that they paid no penalty for sharing falsehoods.Since most popular posts on X get a surge in attention within the first few hours, a Community Note added hours or days later would do little to reach people who had read the falsehoods, said Mr. Roth, who resigned from the company after Mr. Musk’s arrival last year.“I’ve never found a way around having humans in the loop,” he said in an interview. “My belief, and everything I’ve seen, is that on its own, Community Notes is not a sufficient replacement.”Defenders against false narratives and conspiracy theories are also struggling with another complication: artificial intelligence.The technology’s reality-warping abilities, which still manage to stump many of the tools designed to identify their use, are already keeping fact checkers busy. Last week, TikTok said it would test an “A.I.-generated” label, automatically appending it to content detected as having been edited or created with the technology.Tests are also being run using A.I. to quickly parse the enormous volume of false information, identify frequent spreaders and respond to inaccuracies. The technology, however, has a shaky track record with truth. After the fact-checking organization PolitiFact tested ChatGPT on 40 claims that had already been meticulously researched by human fact checkers, the A.I. either made a mistake, refused to answer or arrived at a different conclusion from the fact checkers half of the time.Between new technologies, fluctuating policies and stressed watchdogs, the online information ecosystem is in its messy adolescent years — “it’s gangly, and it’s got acne, and it’s moody,” said Claire Wardle, a co-director of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University.She is hopeful, however, that society will learn to adapt and that most people will continue to value accuracy. Misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections was less toxic than feared, thanks partly to media literacy efforts and training that helped the authorities respond far more quickly and aggressively to rumors, she said.“We tend to get obsessed with the very worst conspiracies — the people who got radicalized,” she said. “Actually, the majority of audiences are pretty good at figuring this all out.”Audio produced by More

The president and his team insist they do not want the government to shut down. But they are also confident that Republicans will receive the blame if it does.President Biden’s shutdown strategy is simple: Avoid one, if possible. But if not, make sure Americans know whom to blame.His aides at the White House and in his re-election campaign have spent the past several days describing the consequences of what they call an “extreme Republican shutdown” of the government: delayed disaster relief; no food stamps for poor women and children; no pay for troops, air traffic controllers, Border Patrol or Transportation Security Administration agents.“They pull the country toward an extreme government shutdown in the name of draconian cuts to education, law enforcement, Meals on Wheels and Head Start,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in describing House Republicans.The president and his team are quick to insist that they do not want a shutdown, especially a lengthy one, because of the harms that would ripple across America. But they are also confident that Republicans will receive the blame, as they have during standoffs that temporarily shuttered government agencies in years past.White House aides also believe that the intraparty fighting in Congress is putting Republican dysfunction on display, to the benefit of Mr. Biden and Democrats. Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a handful of his most conservative colleagues are refusing to keep the government open unless their demands for border security and spending cuts are met. “Extreme House Republicans are playing partisan games with people’s lives and marching our country toward a government shutdown that would have damaging impacts across the country,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday, highlighting nearly 2,000 disaster recovery projects that would be delayed by a shutdown.Mr. McCarthy has tried to draw Mr. Biden into the drama by suggesting that he would be responsible for a work stoppage because of his refusal to support Republican proposals for more restrictions on migrants at the border with Mexico.Speaker Kevin McCarthy has suggested Mr. Biden is responsible for a government shutdown because of his refusal to support Republican proposals on immigration.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“The president, it’s in his hands,” Mr. McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters on Capitol Hill this week. “He can keep the government open by taking an action on the border.”Mr. Biden has also been under pressure from members of his own party to confront the surge of migrants at the border, thousands of whom are putting enormous stress on social services in big cities like New York and Boston.The president and his aides have pointed to their efforts to provide more migrants with a chance to receive work permits. And they have repeatedly noted that Republicans blocked a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration system that might have helped the authorities manage migration more easily.Advisers to Mr. Biden, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House and campaign strategy, are confident that — with a little nudging — Americans will place the blame squarely on House Republicans if the government shuts down this weekend. That could benefit the president for the remainder of his term, they say, by bolstering his leverage with lawmakers and eroding support for the Republican majority in the House.Campaign aides also say the sense of disgust among Americans with the shenanigans on Capitol Hill will help Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign by sharpening the contrast with his rivals. Former President Donald J. Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, has urged House conservatives to shut down the government, a move that Mr. Biden’s advisers and supporters are quick to point out.“Except for President Trump, who called for Republicans to shut down the government, no one actually wants this, because it means real people will get hurt,” said Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic strategist who has helped presidents develop messages inside the White House and during campaigns.Those running Mr. Biden’s campaign would be wise to repeatedly draw the public’s attention to the similarities between Mr. Trump and his conservative allies in Washington, Ms. Cutter said.“Republican infighting and dysfunction is the best example of the difference between Bidenomics and MAGAnomics,” she said. “These situations, when you’re thinking about your closing arguments, help you really crystallize the choice voters will have a year from now.”The president’s team has begun to do just that.His campaign issued a statement on Monday blasting Mr. Trump’s call for a shutdown, accusing House Republicans of “gleefully letting Donald Trump function as their chief political strategist at the expense of American families.” Mr. Biden’s most recent campaign ad, titled “The Way,” emphasizes bipartisan legislative achievements even as the current Congress is in stalemate.Inside the West Wing, the president’s closest advisers have been sending out daily talking points for their allies to deliver as a shutdown looms. Stephen Benjamin, the director of public engagement at the White House, and Anita Dunn, one of the president’s top strategists, emphasized those issues on a conference call on Thursday with Democratic surrogates.Aides are encouraging allies to stress several points.First, they are told to repeatedly remind voters that Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy shook hands on a spending agreement months ago that was supposed to avert a shutdown. The speaker, under pressure from his conservative members, later reneged on the deal.Second, Biden allies are urged to note how isolated Mr. McCarthy is. Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have urged their House colleagues to accept a short-term agreement to keep the government open.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is among the Republicans who have urged their colleagues in the House to accept a short-term agreement to keep the government open.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesFinally, Biden officials are asking their supporters to be specific about the pain that a shutdown is likely to inflict.The White House warned in a statement this week of the impact of a shutdown on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, which helps poor families buy food.“During an extreme Republican shutdown, women and children who count on WIC would soon start being turned away at grocery store counters, with a federal contingency fund drying up after just a few days and many states left with limited WIC funds to operate the program,” the statement said.The White House went into further detail with a state-by-state breakdown of exactly how many women, children and infants were enrolled in the program — 421,294 in Florida, 207,728 in Michigan, 139,765 in Arizona and so on — and at risk of losing assistance. 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Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”Donald Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.In poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including the vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary.That advantage over the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case. A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors in another after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. He is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer, sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”While a government shutdown won’t end the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The little-noticed remark came during a chaotic moment in the second G.O.P. debate. Mr. DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, but had not clearly committed to federal restrictions.In the chaos of Wednesday night’s noisy Republican presidential debate, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina interrupted Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to pose a question on abortion that Mr. DeSantis had dodged directly answering for months.Would the Florida governor sign a “15-week limit” on abortion as president, Mr. Scott asked, talking over both Mr. DeSantis and Dana Perino, one of the moderators, in a way that made his full remarks difficult to hear.“Yes, I will,” Mr. DeSantis replied.The moment — which largely escaped attention in real time but was noted by The Daily Signal, a news website published by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank — clarifies Mr. DeSantis’s position on abortion, an issue that has split the Republican primary field. Mr. DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida this year, but had not clearly committed to supporting federal legislation restricting the termination of pregnancies.Mr. DeSantis is using abortion to attack former President Donald J. Trump, particularly in socially conservative states like Iowa, where he is making his biggest push to dethrone Mr. Trump as the race’s front-runner.Despite appointing the Supreme Court justices who proved critical in overturning Roe v. Wade, Mr. Trump has ducked questions about whether he would support a 15-week ban, the baseline position of many anti-abortion activists in the Republican Party. And, with a clear eye on the general election — where a hard-line position on abortion could turn off moderate and independent voters and galvanize Democrats — Mr. Trump has criticized Mr. DeSantis for signing the six-week ban, calling it a “terrible mistake.”Mr. DeSantis used those comments to open a line of attack against the former president, telling “pro-lifers” that Mr. Trump was “preparing to sell you out.” Other conservatives, including Kim Reynolds, the popular Republican governor of Iowa who signed a similar abortion ban, have also joined in criticizing Mr. Trump. (Few women know they are pregnant by six weeks.)Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that the former president had “championed the life of the unborn.”Previously, Mr. DeSantis had generally said he would support anti-abortion legislation but had not committed to signing such a federal ban. At the first debate in Milwaukee last month, Mr. DeSantis seemed to hedge when asked if he would support a six-week ban as president. “I’m going to stand on the side of life,” he said, adding that conservative and liberal states would want to handle abortion restrictions differently.On Thursday, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign disputed the idea that his comments were a change from his past position, pointing to an interview he gave to Radio Iowa this month. Asked if he would sign a 15-week ban, Mr. DeSantis said, “You put pro-life legislation on my desk, I’m going to look favorably and support the legislation.”Other candidates running for the Republican nomination have been more clear. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he supports at least a 15-week ban. Mr. Scott has also suggested he would, at a minimum, sign a 15-week ban. At the same time, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who calls herself “unapologetically pro-life,” has knocked her rivals for what she has said are empty promises, given that Republicans would find it nearly impossible to force such restrictions through a polarized Congress.“Ron had months to advocate for a federal limit,” said Nathan Brand, Mr. Scott’s communications director, “yet discouraged efforts to protect life. If you’re going to back down on an issue, this is the one to do it on. Glad Ron is now on board.”Abortion barely featured at Wednesday’s matchup, after playing a far more prominent role at the previous debate. Only Mr. DeSantis and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey were asked to comment. The question that prompted Mr. Scott’s interruption was a challenge to Mr. DeSantis asking how he would win over abortion rights supporters in Arizona, a key swing state.Mr. DeSantis responded that he had won a resounding re-election in Florida last year. And he took the opportunity to criticize Mr. Trump, who skipped the debate.“The former president, you know, he is missing in action tonight,” Mr. DeSantis said. “He’s had a lot to say about that. He should be here explaining his comments to try to say that pro-life protections are somehow a terrible thing.”The next day, Democrats seized on Mr. DeSantis’s pledge to sign a 15-week ban — a reminder of how potent both parties see the issue in November’s election. On Twitter, the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response “War Room” account said that Mr. DeSantis had “an extreme anti-abortion record” and wanted to “rip away reproductive freedoms from women across the country.” More

With over 40 ads and $6 million spent, a group tied to the Club for Growth is no closer to an answer, a memo to donors says. Some ads even gave Donald Trump a boost.A well-funded group of anti-Trump conservatives has sent its donors a remarkably candid memo that reveals how resilient former President Donald J. Trump has been against millions of dollars of negative ads the group deployed against him in two early-voting states.The political action committee, called Win It Back, has close ties to the influential fiscally conservative group Club for Growth. It has already spent more than $4 million trying to lower Mr. Trump’s support among Republican voters in Iowa and nearly $2 million more trying to damage him in South Carolina.But in the memo — dated Thursday and obtained by The New York Times — the head of Win It Back PAC, David McIntosh, acknowledges to donors that after extensive testing of more than 40 anti-Trump television ads, “all attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective.”The memo will provide little reassurance to the rest of the field of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals that there is any elusive message out there that can work to deflate his support.“Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh states in the “key learnings” section of the memo.“Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability,” Mr. McIntosh adds. “This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”For the polling underpinning its analysis, Win It Back used WPA Intelligence — a firm that also works for the super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the race for the presidential nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Examples of “failed” ads cited in the memo included attacks on Mr. Trump’s “handling of the pandemic, promotion of vaccines, praise of Dr. Fauci, insane government spending, failure to build the wall, recent attacks on pro-life legislation, refusal to fight woke issues, openness to gun control, and many others.” (Dr. Anthony S. Fauci led the national response to the Covid pandemic.)The list of failed attacks is notable because it includes many of the arguments that Mr. DeSantis has tried against Mr. Trump. The former president leads Mr. DeSantis by more than 40 points in national polls and by around 30 points in Iowa, where Mr. DeSantis’s team believes he has the best shot of defeating Mr. Trump.Mr. McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman who co-founded the Club for Growth and the Federalist Society, makes it clear in the memo that any anti-Trump messages need to be delivered with kid gloves. That might explain why Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has treated Mr. Trump gingerly, even in ads meant to contrast his character and his record unfavorably against Mr. DeSantis’s accomplishments.“Broadly acceptable messages against President Trump with Republican primary voters that do not produce a meaningful backlash include sharing concerns about his ability to beat President Biden, expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons,” Mr. McIntosh writes in the memo.“It is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump,” he adds, “otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up, assuming the messenger is just another Trump-hater whose opinion should be summarily dismissed.”The polling conducted for Win It Back showed diminishing returns for the anti-Trump messaging and emphasized that Mr. Trump benefited from the fact that his rivals were still dividing up the non-Trump vote.In Iowa, Win It Back observed that in the areas where it ran ads, Mr. Trump’s likely share of the Republican vote fell by four percentage points. In the areas where the group did not advertise, Mr. Trump’s support grew by five points.Mr. DeSantis has made his handling of the pandemic a centerpiece of his campaign. But the analysis suggests that this strategy leads to a dead end.The memo says this of Win It Back’s most promising pandemic-themed ad: “This ad was our best creative on the pandemic and vaccines that we tested in focus group settings, but it still produced a backlash in our online randomized controlled experiment — improving President Trump’s ballot support by four points and net favorability by 11 points.”Win It Back did not bother running ads focused on Mr. Trump as an instigator of political violence or as a threat to democracy. The group tested in a focus group and online panel an ad called “Risk,” narrated by former Representative Liz Cheney, that focused on Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. But the group found that the Cheney ad helped Mr. Trump with the Republican voters, according to Mr. McIntosh.In a section of the memo titled “next steps,” Mr. McIntosh concludes, “We plan to continue developing and testing ads to deploy when there are signs of consolidation.” More

His decision comes after Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, tried unsuccessfully to move his own case from state to federal court.Former President Donald J. Trump will not seek to move the criminal racketeering case against him in Atlanta to federal court, according to a legal filing from his lawyer on Thursday.Mr. Trump was indicted by a grand jury in August, along with 18 of his advisers and allies, after a two-and-a-half year investigation into election interference by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. Keeping the case in state court means that any trial for Mr. Trump would be televised, unlike in federal court.“This decision is based on his well-founded confidence that this honorable court intends to fully and completely protect his constitutional right to a fair trial,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, wrote in the filing, referring to Fulton County Superior Court, “and guarantee him due process of law throughout the prosecution of his case.”The move comes a few weeks after a federal judge rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his own case to federal court. That decision has been appealed, but it dimmed the chances for successful removal efforts by other defendants, including Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, and three Georgia Republicans who submitted bogus Electoral College votes for the former president in December 2020.Removal is a longstanding practice meant to protect federal officials from state-level prosecution that could impede them from conducting federal business. It is rooted in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.But Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia decided this month that the actions ascribed to Mr. Meadows in the indictment were not within the scope of his federal duties as White House chief of staff. The evidence, he ruled, “establishes that the actions at the heart of the state’s charges against Meadows were taken on behalf of the Trump campaign with an ultimate goal of affecting state election activities and procedures.”Removal to federal court would have provided some advantages for Mr. Trump, including a jury pool somewhat more favorable to him. But he would have faced the same state felony charges.In the Georgia case, all 19 defendants are facing a racketeering charge for their role in what prosecutors have described as a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. Each defendant also faces at least one other charge; Mr. Trump and his former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, face the most — 13 each.If Mr. Trump ends up going to trial in Fulton County Superior Court, as now seems increasingly likely, the presiding judge will be Scott McAfee, who was recently appointed to the bench.While attending law school at the University of Georgia, Mr. McAfee was a vice president of the school’s chapter of the conservative Federalist Society. He later worked for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, where his supervisor was Ms. Willis.Thus far, Judge McAfee has been moving the court proceedings along briskly, but he has not had the opportunity to make many substantive rulings.When Mr. Trump will actually face trial remains uncertain. Two of the lawyers who worked to keep him in power, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, are set to go to trial on Oct. 23. The two defendants had requested an early trial date, which is their right under Georgia law, though both have been filing a flurry of motions over the last few weeks to dismiss the case, or parts of it.Another lawyer who faces charges, John Eastman, said in a filing on Thursday that he might still invoke his right to a speedy trial. Those not seeking the option may not face trial until the second half of next year, or even later. More

Fewer than 10 million people watched the Republican presidential candidates on Wednesday, according to preliminary data from Nielsen.Fewer than 10 million people watched the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, according to preliminary data from Nielsen, a sign that interest in the race is waning without the presence of former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner for his party’s nomination, who has so far refused to participate in the debates.The audience on Wednesday — viewers of Fox News (6.7 million), Fox Business (1.8 million) and Univision (813,000) — was down from the 12.8 million people who tuned in last month to watch the first Republican primary debate. Fox also hosted that debate.Those numbers are a fraction of the audiences for the first two Republican presidential debates in the summer of 2015, when a crowded field and curiosity about Mr. Trump pushed ratings to record highs. The first, hosted by Fox News in Cleveland, drew nearly 24 million viewers — ranking among the most-watched events in cable-TV history. The second, hosted by CNN in Simi Valley, Calif., had an audience of 22.9 million.Without Mr. Trump this primary season, the networks and the Republican National Committee are in a difficult spot. Television executives will be faced with deciding whether it’s worth the cost to produce an event that is drawing relatively tepid interest and is, for the moment, of questionable significance given Mr. Trump’s dominance in the polls. In most national surveys taken since the summer, he has led his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by more than 30 points.Mr. Trump appears unlikely to agree to appear at any debate in the near future. His campaign said this week that he would not participate in one scheduled for early November in Miami. And one of his senior advisers called on the Republican National Committee on Wednesday not to schedule any more debates for the primary season so Republicans could instead focus on defeating President Biden.Despite the lower ratings, the debate attracted an audience larger than any other program on cable or network television on Wednesday evening. More

More from our inbox:Members of Congress, Still Paid in a ShutdownTwo Views of JusticeColumbia’s Contributions to New York CityHigh-Quality TV Shows‘I Love Dogs,’ but Biden’s Must GoThe candidates mostly ignored former President Donald J. Trump’s overwhelming lead during the debate last night.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “5 Takeaways From Another Trump-Free Republican Debate” (nytimes.com, Sept. 28):Turn off the mic!Seven people onstage at the same time. Just enough time for the evening’s bloviators to spew out their prefabricated talking points. Not enough time for discussions of substance.And then there’s something called rules. In lieu of decorum, our debates have devolved into two hours of rudeness, interruption and incivility. Year after year, moderators exhibit little control or are completely ignored. Candidates with the least to say won’t shut up, and those with a cogent thought don’t have time to express it.Suggestion: With a clearly displayed clock, give each candidate a prescribed amount of time for talk and rebuttal. If another candidate interrupts, turn off his or her mike. For further interruptions, deduct minutes from that candidate’s talking time.Would candidates be receptive to such an idea? If not, why?Karl AbbottNew YorkTo the Editor:The smartest man on the G.O.P. debate stage was Donald Trump. He was omnipresent without the necessity of actual presence.Why would he debate? He has the nomination wrapped up. The taunts (“Donald Trump is missing in action” — Ron DeSantis; “Voters deserve to hear him defend his record”— The Wall Street Journal) are futile rhetoric. Mr. Trump will not be provoked. He can continue to go about his business unscathed while watching his frenzied rivals with minuscule ratings continue to flail.Meanwhile, Mr. Trump gets to skate into the nomination on his terms thanks to a Republican Party that can’t get enough of him. As Mr. Trump himself used to tweet, “Sad.”William GoldmanLos AngelesTo the Editor:I’m a very proud, lifelong Democrat. But I like to watch the G.O.P. debate because I enjoy seeing the party implode and eat its own. But I stopped after 45 minutes.It was simply a bunch of lies, misleading statements and prepared applause lines. Not one of them has any idea how to solve America’s problems, nor do they even offer a sensible plan, or in many cases any plan, to do so.The party will simply anoint the twice-impeached, criminally indicted former POTUS. This is what the party wants, and, in short, nothing and no one will stop this from happening. We are all watching, in slow motion, the game play out before the final out.Ben MilanoLindenhurst, N.Y.Members of Congress, Still Paid in a Shutdown Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesTo the Editor:How is it that if there is a government shutdown, others suffer and go hungry but members of Congress still get paid? That is obviously wrong and needs to change.Joan PachnerHartsdale, N.Y.Two Views of Justice Dave Sanders for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “More Democrats Calling on Menendez to Resign” (front page, Sept. 27):Senator Robert Menendez is indicted by the Justice Department. Democratic lawmakers across the country call for him to resign.Donald Trump is indicted by the Justice Department. Republican lawmakers across the country call for investigations into the weaponization of the Justice Department.Can there be a clearer indication of which group has a higher regard for ethics, morality and the rule of law?Barry LuriePhiladelphiaColumbia’s Contributions to New York CityColumbia’s science center was built on a new campus in Harlem. As the university expanded its footprint in the city, the number of New Yorkers enrolling declined.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Columbia and N.Y.U. Expand, but Pay Little Tax” (front page, Sept. 27):Columbia is honored to call New York home, and we are committed to being a responsible and engaged citizen of this city. While we don’t profess to be perfect, we take pride in the estimated $14.6 billion we contribute in annual economic impact to our community, according to the most recent study by New York’s Commission on Independent Colleges & Universities.But whittling down the university’s local contributions to dollars spent ignores the broad array of commitments, large and small, that we have made to this city as one of its oldest and proudest institutional residents.I could point to the critical role played by the university and our health care providers throughout the pandemic, including providing space and logistical support to house health care workers, or to researchers at our Climate School, who are contributing their time and resources to studying harmful algae blooms in city parks.Most recently, our faculty and students have volunteered to help asylum seekers who are filing applications for the authorization to work.Columbia is expanding our commitments to the city. That includes doing more to recruit, admit and support New York City’s public school students.We know this is an all-hands-on-deck moment for New York City, and we are dedicated to contributing in every way we can to assure a bright future for it.Gerald M. RosbergNew YorkThe writer is senior executive vice president of Columbia University.High-Quality TV Shows Matteo Giuseppe PaniTo the Editor:Re “The Era of Prestige TV Is Ending. We’re Going to Miss It When It’s Gone,” by Roy Price (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Sept. 21):Before Netflix, before Amazon, before HBO, before any of the streamers, was “prestige” content from public broadcasting worldwide. And before that was “Playhouse 90” and other prestige content from the networks of television’s early years.Good content is not just produced by big distributors; look at the range of truly interesting shows that media creators are developing on easily accessible platforms that don’t demand big budgets and fancy pedigrees.Open your eyes beyond your narrow West Coast view, Mr. Price. There’s a lot to like out there.Alice CahnRockland, MaineThe writer is a former head of children’s programming for PBS and vice president at Cartoon Network.‘I Love Dogs,’ but Biden’s Must GoCommander, a 2-year-old German shepherd, has bitten several members of the Secret Service, including biting one officer on the arm and thigh badly enough that the officer was sent to the hospital.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Once Again, a Biden Dog Gives a Bite to an Agent” (news article, Sept. 27):I love dogs more than I love most humans. That said, I feel it’s long past time that Commander, President Biden’s German shepherd, is permanently exiled from the White House to a comfortable, safe environment, such as a farm, where he has fewer opportunities to bite people.I doubt that Mr. Biden wants this outcome, but a dog with his record of biting folks should have been sent away long ago.Richard B. EllenbergerNormandy Park, Wash. More