Elections

President Biden’s advanced age (80) gets rehashed endlessly, because the human condition makes it inescapable. A deft politician can wait out almost any other liability: Scandals and gaffes fade over time; the economy bounces back; governing errors can be corrected. But Mr. Biden will never be (or appear) younger than he is today. The problem of his age will never fade.In our fixation on Mr. Biden’s age, we often gloss over the role the Democratic Party has played in promoting and lionizing its older leaders, then muddling through when illness or death undermines their ability to govern. The party’s leaders seem to believe implicitly in the inalienable right of their aging icons to remain in positions of high power unquestioned, long after it becomes reasonable to ask whether they’re risking intolerable harm.The party has come to operate more like a machine, in which lengthy, loyal service must be rewarded with deference. It is why Mr. Biden has not drawn a credible primary challenger, when polling and reporting alike suggest that Democrats are deeply anxious about his ability to mount a vigorous campaign and serve another full term.And it is that deference, from those who seek to protect Democratic leaders from all but the mildest criticism, that ensures that we keep reliving the same bad dream, where each subsequent election comes with higher stakes than the last. It leaves grass-roots supporters to see all their hard work — and democracy itself — jeopardized by the same officials who tell them they must volunteer and organize and donate and vote as if their lives depend on it. And for millions of younger voters, it becomes increasingly hard to believe that any of it matters: If defeating Republicans is a matter of existential urgency for the country, why is the Democratic Party so blasé about elevating leaders who are oblivious to the views of the young people who stand to inherit it?I peg the beginning of this recurring nightmare to the year 2009, when Senator Ted Kennedy’s death nearly derailed President Obama’s signature health care reform and ultimately deprived Democrats of their Senate supermajority, which they might have used to pass more sweeping legislation than they did. Eleven years later, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also died in office. Her death was a hinge point where history turned and swept much of her substantive legacy into the dustbin; worse, it left living Americans to toil indefinitely under the legacy that replaced hers.There were gentle behind-the-scenes efforts and a robust public persuasion campaign meant to convince Justice Ginsburg to retire when Democrats still controlled the Senate and President Obama could have appointed her replacement, but there were plenty of liberals urging her to stick it out. Christine Pelosi, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, who was then the House minority leader, cheered Justice Ginsburg for ignoring the calls for her to step down. “You Go Ginsburg! Resist that sexist Ageism,” she wrote.Despite all of this terrible history, we face a similar challenge today: an aging party, and a Democratic establishment not just unwilling to take decisive action to stave off disaster but also reluctant to even acknowledge the problem.When Senator Dianne Feinstein of California (90) developed complications from shingles earlier this year and was unable to fulfill her duties, leaving Senate Democrats unable to swiftly advance judicial nominations, the elder Ms. Pelosi framed the calls for Ms. Feinstein to step aside as a form of injustice. “I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters.She herself has ignored years of (gentle, always gentle) hints that it was time to step aside in favor of younger leaders with less political baggage. She did finally relinquish her leadership role in 2022, after losing the House majority for the second time in 12 years, but earlier this month, she said she would run for her House seat again.The end of Ms. Pelosi’s speakership has reduced the overall risk level somewhat. If she or Ms. Feinstein were to die in office, it wouldn’t be terribly destabilizing, the way it was when Mr. Kennedy and Justice Ginsburg died, and the way it would if Mr. Biden did. But it does feed the deeper and perhaps more insidious problem: a widespread sense of alienation among the young voters Democrats desperately need to turn out in elections.This should not go on. Liberals are apparently doomed to white-knuckle it through 2024, but there are affirmative steps Democrats could take to better allow younger leaders to displace older ones.Paradoxically, the G.O.P. may provide a model the Democrats can use. Although the Republican base is older, it does a better job insulating itself from gerontocracy than Democrats do. Republicans are obviously far from perfect champions of their own self-interest. Their penchant for personality cults has wedded them to Donald Trump, who also happens to be old, but they are vulnerable to charlatans of all ages. That’s in part because they take steps to reduce the risk that they lose power by the attrition of elderly leaders. Justice Anthony Kennedy timed his retirement so a Republican president could replace him; the House G.O.P. has cycled through several leaders over the past decade and a half, none of them terribly old. When Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear defeated the Republican incumbent Matt Bevin, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, encouraged his allies in the Kentucky Legislature to circumscribe Mr. Beshear’s appointment power — to ensure partisan continuity in Washington, should a Senate seat become vacant. So although Mr. McConnell seems committed to serving out his term, he has a succession plan.Democrats could adopt a similarly hard-nosed attitude about retiring their leaders in dignified but timely ways. Republicans term-limit the chairs of their congressional committees, which guarantees senior lawmakers cycle out of their positions and make way for younger ones.Even just acknowledging this issue — and encouraging good-faith dissent — would boost Mr. Biden’s credibility with younger voters. While a political conversation that sidesteps this uncomfortable topic, along with any number of others, might soothe anxious partisans, it will leave them unprepared for hard realities.Democratic Party actors may be able to convince themselves that there’s something high-minded about muzzling this discourse entirely — that vigorous intraparty criticism is self-defeating, and that complaining about Mr. Biden’s age when nothing can be done about it is a form of indulgent venting that only inflames public misgivings about the president. But they’d be wrong. We can see without squinting that his advanced age has created meaningful drag on his polling, and that it is a gigantic problem for the Democratic Party if younger voters, who are overwhelmingly progressive, come to view it as a lifestyle organization for liberals who have grown out of step with the times. Airing out widely held frustrations with the party’s gerontocracy might persuade younger voters that their leaders get it, and that their time in power will come to an end sooner than later.Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) writes Off Message, a newsletter about politics, culture and media.Source images by Liudmila Chernetska, Adrienne Bresnahan and xu wu/Getty ImagesThe 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

Politicians’ language can tell you a lot about the way they think, sometimes unintentionally.In this audio essay, Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada breaks down the significance behind Joe Biden’s favorite word for talking about America and how it contrasts with Donald Trump’s word of choice.Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Evan Vucci/Associated Press and Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe 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.This Opinion short was produced by Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing and original music by Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. More

Democrats and Republicans have been courting the small but fast-growing and vital demographic in purple suburbs and swing states.Suresh Reddy, a centrist Democrat and city councilman, is watching the Republican presidential primary with a mix of pride and disappointment.When Mr. Reddy and his wife, Chandra Gangareddy, immigrants from southern India, settled in the Des Moines suburbs in September 2004, they could count the number of Indian American families on one hand. Only one Indian American had ever served in Congress at the time, and none had dared to mount a bid for the White House.Now, for the first time in the nation’s history, two Indian Americans — Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy — are serious presidential contenders who regularly invoke their parents’ immigrant roots. But their deeply conservative views, on display as they seek the Republican nomination, make it difficult for Mr. Reddy to fully celebrate the moment, he said.“I’m really proud,” he said. “I just wish they had a better message.”That disconnect, reflected in interviews with two dozen Indian American voters, donors and elected officials from across the political spectrum — in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and across the country — may complicate the G.O.P.’s efforts to appeal to the small but influential Indian American electorate.Indian Americans now make up about 2.1 million, or roughly 16 percent, of the estimated 13.4 million Asian Americans who are eligible to vote, the third largest population of Asian origin behind Chinese and Filipino Americans, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the 2021 American Community Survey. Indian Americans also have tended to lean more Democratic than any other Asian American subgroups, according to Pew.Though a small slice of the overall electorate, the demographic has become one of the fastest-growing constituencies, and is large enough to make a difference at the margins in swing states and in purple suburbs, including in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada.Debate over the prominence of Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy is playing out in Indian American homes and places of worship in Des Moines and beyond. In interviews, many described their rise as a political triumph at a time when Indian Americans have become more visible in fields beyond medicine, tech and engineering.Venu Rao, a Democrat and retired engineer and program manager in Hollis, N.H., said Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy captured the ideological diversity among South Asian Americans, even if he doesn’t agree with their positions.“I am glad that we have a choice,” Mr. Rao said.But many of those interviewed also expressed frustration and dismay over the candidates’ hard-line positions on issues like race, identity and immigration. Some worried Mr. Ramaswamy’s pledges to dismantle agencies like the Education Department would destroy the same institutions that had been crucial to Indian American success and upward mobility.Others said they appreciated Ms. Haley’s attempts to strike a more center-right tone on some topics like abortion and climate change but indicated concern about what they described as her tepid pushback against former President Donald J. Trump and his 2020 election lies.“It can be really easy to see this as a win and be like, ‘Oh my god — look there, those are two brown faces on national TV. That’s amazing,’” said Nikhil Vootkur, 20, a student at Tufts University in Boston. But, “the diaspora, it has matured, and when a diaspora matures, you have a lot of ideological cleavages.”Over the past decade, Indian Americans have been rapidly climbing the political ranks. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat and the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, is the first woman, first Black person and the first Asian American to hold her office.Khimanand Upreti, the priest at a Hindu temple in Madrid, Iowa, described Mr. Ramaswamy as “very fresh and clean” and without former President Donald Trump’s controversies.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesIn 2015, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a onetime rising Republican star, became the first Indian American to run for president. But Mr. Jindal, who changed his name, Piyush, to Bobby and converted to Christianity when he was young, made a push for assimilation that turned off many Indian American voters. Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy have toggled between proud embraces of their roots and scorching criticism of the “identity politics” that has been known to alienate the Republican Party’s largely white and evangelical Christian base.Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, a political newcomer and millionaire entrepreneur from Cincinnati, Ohio, uses his Hindu faith to connect with Christian voters and expresses gratitude that his parents immigrated from the southwestern coast of India to the “greatest nation on Earth.”Ms. Haley, 51, a former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador from Bamberg, S.C., has written and spoken extensively about her experience as the daughter of Sikh immigrants from northern India, including the pain of watching her father, who wears a turban, endure racism and discrimination.Mr. Ramaswamy, who is running in the mold of Mr. Trump, has made a concerted effort to appeal to Indian Americans in the primary. He has made several appearances at the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Iowa, where many patrons have met his parents, and he has drawn the independent support of its Hindu priest, Khimanand Upreti, who in an interview described Mr. Ramaswamy as “very fresh and clean” and without Mr. Trump’s controversies.On the trail, Ms. Haley has talked less about her identity and often describes her immigrant family in general terms. But in a response to a voter question at a town hall in Hampton, N.H., on Thursday night, she explained how her father’s experience with prejudice helped her connect with a hurting community and persuade state lawmakers to take down the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State House, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston. She also used her parents’ immigrant background to tear into President Biden’s decision to provide temporary protected status and work permits for Venezuelan migrants.“My mom would always say if you don’t follow the laws to get into this country, you won’t follow the laws when you are in this country,” she said.At their home in Waukee, west of Des Moines, Nishant Kumar and Smita Nishant, who immigrated from New Delhi and Mumbai some two decades ago, and their daughter, Anika Yadav, 17, said the 2024 Iowa caucuses would be the first election they would all be able to participate in. The Nishants have only recently obtained citizenship, and Ms. Yadav will be old enough to vote in the next presidential election.The Nishant family in Waukee, Iowa: Smita Nishant and her husband, Nishant Kumar, with Anika Yadav and Atiksh Yadava. They are looking forward to voting next year.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe family first became politically engaged when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 — and would have backed Democrats in the past few elections if they could have voted. But as they weigh the 2024 presidential contenders, they have found Mr. Ramaswamy smart and refreshing, they said.They have seen less of Ms. Haley, but Ms. Yadav says she likes Ms. Haley’s experience on foreign policy and the way she holds herself on the national stage, even if she has not made her Indian American identity central to her campaign.“I think a lot of women, specifically young women, are leaning toward Nikki Haley — even young women who are Democrats,” she said.Still, some Indian American Democratic-leaning voters and prominent Indian American Democrats expressed concern or sadness over Mr. Ramaswamy’s and Ms. Haley’s approaches to issues of race and identity, saying they fed into “model minority” stereotypes and carried dog whistles that minimized or diminished the specific systematic racism faced by Black Americans.Both, when discussing their life story, tend to emphasize their successes as evidence of racial and ethnic progress in the United States. Both promote hard-line immigration measures and denounce race-conscious policies such as affirmative action in school admissions.Mr. Ramaswamy in particular has generated criticism for suggesting white supremacy was an exaggerated “boogeyman” and for pledging to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Ms. Haley has said she opposes birthright citizenship for people who have illegally entered the country.Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, criticized their approach on immigration and faulted them for ignoring the history of Asian exclusion in the nation’s immigration laws. The work of Indian and Black leaders during the civil rights movement helped open the pathways to migration and citizenship for Indian families to enter the United States, he said.“Their story about the Indian American experience will not fully connect because it has so many omissions,” Mr. Khanna said.But Bhavna Vasudeva, a longtime friend of Ms. Haley’s in Columbia, S.C., argued that Ms. Haley’s Republican values held real appeal for second-generation Indian Americans, adding that her approach to her family’s racial struggles exhibited a strong sense of “Chardi Kala,” an expression that for Punjabi and Sikh Indians and Indian Americans has become synonymous with “resilience” and a “positive attitude” in the face of fear or pain.“You can’t tell anyone who is a brown woman about racism and discrimination,” Ms. Vasudeva, a donor to Ms. Haley’s campaign, said. “We have faced it all with our heads high and crown straight.” More

The theatrically combative presidential candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy seems to be premised on two messages. One is his disdain for identity politics, which he argues creates a citizenry obsessed with victimhood and a corporate sector in thrall to trendy left-wing obsessions, leaving America trapped in a “cold cultural civil war,” as he put it last month in the first Republican debate. The other is his devotion to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy relentlessly defended in the debate, promising to support the former president, if Trump wins the Republican nomination, or to pardon him, if Ramaswamy wins the White House. He called Trump “the best president of the twenty-first century.”Both these stances, however, are complicated or contradicted by Ramaswamy’s literary trilogy: “Woke, Inc.” (2021), “Nation of Victims” (2022) and “Capitalist Punishment” (2023). In these works, Ramaswamy is more thoughtful, but also more confused, than his smiling, trolly, rapid-fire campaign persona. He can’t seem to decide if woke capitalism is a public-relations ploy or a mortal threat to the republic. And even as he lionizes Trump among his conservative heroes, he writes that Trump’s calls for American greatness degenerated into “just another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole.” (Swallowing much of something whole is a typical Ramaswamy hedge, one of several categorical assertions in these books that find room for a little wiggle.)In “Woke, Inc.,” published some seven months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Ramaswamy assails the rise of so-called stakeholder capitalism, the notion that companies should not solely serve the interests of shareholders but should also serve the interests of workers, the environment or society writ vague. The traditional principle of maximizing shareholder value is not just about encouraging corporate greed, he argues, but about keeping capitalists in their lane, making sure that their business judgments do not lapse into moral ones. Yet that is precisely what happens, Ramaswamy complains, when chief executives and investors conspire with activists to push for, say, racial equity audits or socially responsible investing.Here, Ramaswamy struggles to make up his mind. Stakeholder capitalism is a “farce,” he writes, an example of “corporate opportunism” and “self-interest masquerading as morality,” a “do-good smoke screen” through which businesses distract the public from their perfidy. “The social causes simply serve as a form of reputational laundering for those same companies’ profit-seeking,” Ramaswamy maintains, with businesses “performatively one-upping each other to show that they’re the good guys.”But if the whole thing is just a lucrative P.R. scam, then it is hard to see how it is also “the greatest long-run threat of all to American democracy itself,” as Ramaswamy warns readers. On one page, businesses are pushing radical agendas and imposing their elite progressive values on our democratic process; on another, they are just “feigning wokeness” to win favor with consumers, “pretending to care about justice in order to make money.” So, is stakeholder capitalism a punch in the mouth to our nation’s principles or just lip service to justice? In Ramaswamy’s writing, the answer is never quite clear.Even when he is certain that something nefarious is underway, Ramaswamy doesn’t seem quite sure who the bad guys are. He warns that Facebook and Google “have effectively assumed the role of the state itself,” censoring public discourse under the guise of fighting hate speech and misinformation. “The rise of Wokenomics consummates Silicon Valley’s coup over our democracy,” he writes ominously. Yet just a few pages later, readers learn that it is Congress that has “co-opted Silicon Valley” to restrict speech for its own purposes. So, is the tech industry the puppet or the master? Consistency seems irrelevant to Ramaswamy’s scattershot populism. In “Woke, Inc.” there are enough culprits to satisfy everyone.Ramaswamy can be hazy about his own basic tenets. “I don’t believe in ‘systemic racism,’” he declares in the third chapter of “Woke, Inc.” Yet in chapter 14, he acknowledges its reality. “My problem with woke complaints about ‘systemic racism’ isn’t that it doesn’t exist,” he writes. “It’s that too often it’s used as a vague, judgmental catchall phrase for all of America’s woes.” An author’s views can evolve over time, of course, and a politician’s are almost required to do so. It is less common to see them contradicted across the pages of the same book.I don’t know if Ramaswamy has an underlying philosophy or just an underlying shtick, but if one of these books captures it, it is probably “Nation of Victims.” In this book, Ramaswamy laments that Americans have lost their scrappy, underdog attitude and defaulted to a mentality of group identity and collective grievance — an outlook that becomes self-fulfilling. “If we divide the world into black and white, virtuous victims and evil oppressors with no shades of gray, we will create the nation that we see,” he writes.This is not a novel argument, and Ramaswamy highlights the post-Civil War Lost Cause narrative as an early example of the country’s enduring cultural resentments. “Modern America’s victim complex began as a tale of conservative white victimhood after the Civil War,” he writes, only to mutate into “an ongoing story of liberal white victimhood.”Ramaswamy concedes that “the Constitution brought justice to black Americans with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” but since then virtually every possible identity group has been battling for a perch on what he derides as the “victimhood podium.” The result, he concludes, is a nation that has lost confidence in itself — a culture in decline, a less productive economy, a society that produces activists rather than engineers, a country so weakened that it “would almost certainly lose” a naval war with China over Taiwan.This could be the core of Ramaswamy’s political message: He marries anti-woke messages to pro-growth ones and links culture wars at home to shooting wars abroad. If Ramaswamy makes any contribution to the long-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party, it will be in broadening the case against identity politics from the realm of book bans and bathrooms to that of economics and national security.In “Nation of Victims,” Ramaswamy privileges the misdeeds of the progressive left, which he says is so taken by its own fantasies and slogans that it “replaces the voices of black people themselves” who, he suggests, may want more police presence in their communities rather than less. But his critique encompasses the right as well. “The worst victimhood narrative that afflicts modern conservatives,” he writes, “is their budding belief that any election they lose must have been stolen.” Aside from policy differences with Trump over tariffs and spending, Ramaswamy blasts the former president as a “sore loser,” even likening him to Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor of Georgia who refused to concede her 2018 defeat — and to be clear, in conservative politics, that’s a serious burn. Ramaswamy also writes that the events of Jan. 6 shook his faith in the United States: “Rome fell to invading barbarians, but us Americans have become our own barbarians, sacking ourselves.”These books are not the sanitized autobiographies one usually gets from self-congratulatory business executives or aspirants to high office. Ramaswamy offers some family background to animate his political and cultural awakenings — he was drawn to the expansiveness of capitalism, he reports, in contrast to the rigidity of caste he witnessed in his parents’ India, and his youthful conservatism was in part an “emotive choice” to counter the liberal convictions of his father — but these volumes are far more about principled arguments than personal stories, and he includes an eclectic mix of policy wonkery and moral maxims.Ramaswamy proposes mandatory national service for American high schoolers — he cites Pete Buttigieg’s similar call during his 2020 presidential campaign — and calls for “a hefty inheritance tax with no gaping loopholes” to prevent America’s meritocratic winners from morphing into aristocratic ones. He emphasizes the need for stronger job retraining programs for displaced blue-collar workers, the deregulation of housing markets and the easing of professional licensing requirements. He urges companies to prioritize “diversity of thought” among their employees rather than a diversity “crudely measured by appearance or accent.” And he longs for a “Manhattan Project” (an obligatory reference for policy mavens) for the national semiconductor industry to raise America’s economic and military competitiveness.Particularly striking are Ramaswamy’s thoughts on how to move the country beyond the identity conflicts that, in his view, erode our sense of nationhood. “The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim,” he writes. Our true selves do not equal our superficial identities, Ramaswamy insists, and we become better people when we see ourselves and others as individuals with the power to direct their own lives. “When you free yourself from the illusion that you’re a mere victim, you simultaneously free yourself from seeing others as mere oppressors,” he writes. This plea for collective forgiveness is a welcome break from the hyper-pugilism of Ramaswamy’s campaign appearances, even if his harsh exchanges on the Republican debate stage suggest that his conciliatory side has not yet taken hold.“Capitalist Punishment,” the latest and slimmest of his books, is something of an outlier in the Ramaswamy canon. It is narrowly cast, focusing on his criticism of investment funds that adopt E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) principles to guide their strategies. Here, Ramaswamy’s transgressors are the investment firms BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. “The Big Three are becoming a threat to democracy,” he contends, because they impose social-activist values onto the industries in which they hold significant positions, including the oil and banking sectors, and because pension fund managers adopt E.S.G. investing even if individual pensioners may be ignorant of (or hostile to) such principles. “When elites force their values onto everyone else,” he writes, ordinary people lose trust in important institutions. “And that, in turn, makes society fall apart.”As in his other works, some tensions emerge in “Capitalist Punishment.” When Ramaswamy complains that E.S.G. investing is radically transforming corporate America but also revels in the fact that E.S.G. funds are “underperforming” and “dropping like flies,” it’s hard to tell if E.S.G. investing is pervasive or in decline. Yet, near the end of the book, readers gain some clarity on Ramaswamy’s own interests and motives.He calls for antitrust lawsuits against the big three and suggests that Black Rock break itself into two smaller firms. Ever helpful, he also offers an alternative for investors — an investment firm called Strive, co-founded in 2022 by Ramaswamy himself. And here the book reads almost like a fund prospectus:Strive’s mandate to underlying companies is simple: focus on excellence over politics; provide excellent products and services to your customers; and maximize value for your shareholders by doing that rather than advancing any particular social or political agenda.Though he retains a multimillion-dollar stake in the company, Ramaswamy resigned from the board and relinquished his day-to-day responsibilities at Strive earlier this year because he was running for president. Even so, depending on the standards to which one holds politicians, Ramaswamy’s self-serving approach in “Capitalist Punishment” may be disheartening or pedestrian. At the very least, encountering it does persuade me, as Ramaswamy argues in these books, that there are plenty of business people out there “pretending to care about justice in order to make money.”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

Surveys from NBC News and The Washington Post/ABC News pointed to a general election between two unpopular candidates.Two polls of the 2024 presidential race released on Sunday showed former President Donald J. Trump cruising through the Republican primary — and a general election between two unpopular candidates if, as seems likely, the nominees are Mr. Trump and President Biden.Each poll showed Mr. Biden with low approval ratings. One survey, from NBC News, showed the president’s disapproval rating at 56 percent, an all-time high for him in NBC polls. A second survey released on Sunday, by The Washington Post and ABC News, also showed 56 percent of voters surveyed as disapproving of his performance — though it included a general-election result that was far outside the range that other high-quality polls have found recently, which raised questions about the Post/ABC poll’s accuracy.But when it came to personal favorability, Mr. Biden still fared better than Mr. Trump in the NBC poll: 39 percent said they had a very positive or somewhat positive opinion of him, compared with 35 percent who said the same of Mr. Trump.In the Republican presidential primary race, the NBC poll had Mr. Trump leading his nearest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by a gaping 43-point margin nationwide: 59 percent to 16 percent.The race does not seem to have tightened as criminal indictments have piled up against Mr. Trump. In fact, his margin expanded from the 29 points that the last edition of the same poll found in June. But more than half the voters surveyed expressed concerns about his indictments.The Washington Post/ABC News poll had some similar findings, with Mr. Trump leading Mr. DeSantis nationally by nearly 40 points.The NBC poll found a hypothetical general election between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden tied, with each candidate at 46 percent. It is the same picture that survey after survey has shown for months, underscoring how impervious partisan polarization remains to the influence of current events — and, for that matter, to opinions of individual candidates. At the same time, a series of special elections across the country has pointed to a more positive picture for Democrats, who have overperformed 2020 and 2016 presidential results by double digits.But in the likely general election matchup, the Post/ABC News survey drew attention for how drastically it differed from what is otherwise a fairly steady consensus in recent polling.The poll showed Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden by 10 percentage points, a margin that no president has won by since Ronald Reagan in 1984. There were additional implausible results among subgroups of respondents: For example, the poll found Mr. Trump ahead by 20 points among voters younger than 35, a group Mr. Biden won by double digits three years ago.The Post itself took the unusual step of describing its own result as an outlier.Kevin Muñoz, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, dismissed it as well.“President Biden is delivering results, his agenda is popular with the American people and we are mobilizing our winning coalition of voters well ahead of next year’s general election,” he said, adding, “We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down and doing the work, not by fretting about polls.” More

As criminal cases proceed against the former president, heated rhetoric and anger among his supporters have the authorities worried about the risk of political dissent becoming deadly.At the federal courthouse in Washington, a woman called the chambers of the judge assigned to the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and said that if Mr. Trump were not re-elected next year, “we are coming to kill you.”At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents have reported concerns about harassment and threats being directed at their families amid intensifying anger among Trump supporters about what they consider to be the weaponization of the Justice Department. “Their children didn’t sign up for this,” a senior F.B.I. supervisor recently testified to Congress.And the top prosecutors on the four criminal cases against Mr. Trump — two brought by the Justice Department and one each in Georgia and New York — now require round-the-clock protection.As the prosecutions of Mr. Trump have accelerated, so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others. 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.Given the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, scholars, security experts, law enforcement officials and others are increasingly warning about the potential for lone-wolf attacks or riots by angry or troubled Americans who have taken in the heated rhetoric.In April, before federal prosecutors indicted Mr. Trump, one survey showed that 4.5 percent of American adults agreed with the idea that the use of force was “justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” Just two months later, after the first federal indictment of Mr. Trump, that figure surged to 7 percent.Given the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, scholars, security experts and others are increasingly warning about the potential for lone-wolf attacks by angry Americans.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe indictments of Mr. Trump “are the most important current drivers of political violence we now have,” said the author of the study, Robert Pape, a political scientist who studies political violence at the University of Chicago.Other studies have found that any effects from the indictments dissipated quickly, and that there is little evidence of any increase in the numbers of Americans supportive of a violent response. And the leaders of the far-right groups that helped spur the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 are now serving long prison terms.But the threats have been steady and credible enough to prompt intense concern among law enforcement officials. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland addressed the climate in testimony to Congress on Wednesday, saying that while he recognized that the department’s work came with scrutiny, the demonization of career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents was menacing not only his employees but also the rule of law.“Singling out individual career public servants who are just doing their jobs is dangerous — particularly at a time of increased threats to the safety of public servants and their families,” Mr. Garland said.“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”Security details have been added for several high-profile law enforcement officials across the country, including career prosecutors running the day-to-day investigations.The F.B.I., which has seen the number of threats against its personnel and facilities surge since its agents carried out the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, in August 2022, subsequently created a special unit to deal with the threats. A U.S. official said threats since then have risen more than 300 percent, in part because the identities of employees, and information about them, are being spread online.“We’re seeing that all too often,” Christopher A. Wray, the bureau’s director, said in congressional testimony this summer.The threats are sometimes too vague to rise to the level of pursuing a criminal investigation, and hate speech enjoys some First Amendment protections, often making prosecutions difficult. But the Justice Department has charged more than a half dozen people with making threats.This has had its own consequences: In the past 13 months, F.B.I. agents confronting individuals suspected of making threats have shot and fatally wounded two people, including one in Utah who was armed and had threatened, before President Biden’s planned visit to the area, to kill him.Jack Smith, the special counsel, has sought a gag order against Mr. Trump.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn a brief filed in Washington federal court this month, Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s prosecutions of Mr. Trump, took the extraordinary step of requesting a gag order against Mr. Trump. He linked threats against prosecutors and the judge presiding in the case accusing Mr. Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election to the rhetoric Mr. Trump had used before Jan. 6.“The defendant continues these attacks on individuals precisely because he knows that in doing so, he is able to roil the public and marshal and prompt his supporters,” the special counsel’s office said in a court filing.Mr. Trump has denied promoting violence. He says that his comments are protected by the First Amendment right to free speech, and that the proposed gag order is part of a far-ranging Democratic effort to destroy him personally and politically.“Joe Biden has weaponized his Justice Department to go after his main political opponent — President Trump,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the former president.But Mr. Trump’s language has often been, at a minimum, aggressive and confrontational toward his perceived foes, and sometimes has at least bordered on incitement.On Friday, Mr. Trump baselessly suggested in a social media post that Gen. Mark A. Milley, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, might have engaged in treason, “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the penalty would have been DEATH.” (General Milley has been interviewed by the special counsel’s office.)The day before the threatening call last month to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s chambers in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Trump posted on his social media site: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING FOR YOU!” (A Texas woman was later charged with making the call.)Mr. Smith — whom Mr. Trump has described as “a thug” and “deranged” — has been a particular target of violent threats, and his office is on pace to spend $8 million to $10 million on protective details for him, his family and senior staff members, according to officials.Members of his plainclothes detail were conspicuously present as he entered an already locked-down Washington federal courtroom last month to witness Mr. Trump’s arraignment on the election interference charges — standing a few feet from the former president’s own contingent of Secret Service agents.On Friday, a judge presiding over a case in Colorado about whether Mr. Trump can be disqualified from the ballot there for his role in promoting the Jan. 6 attack issued a protective order barring threats or intimidation of anyone connected to the case. The judge cited the types of potential dangers laid out by Mr. Smith in seeking the gag order on Mr. Trump in the federal election case.There have been recent acts of political violence against Republicans, most notably the 2017 shooting of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Last year an armed man arrested outside the home of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said he had traveled from California to kill the conservative Supreme Court jurist.But many scholars and experts who study political violence place the blame for the current atmosphere most squarely on Mr. Trump — abetted by the unwillingness of many Republican politicians to object to or tamp down the violent and apocalyptic language on social media and in the conservative media.In one example of how Mr. Trump’s sway over his followers can have real-world effects, a man who had been charged with storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 was arrested in June looking for ways to get near former President Barack Obama’s Washington home. The man — who was armed with two guns and 400 rounds of ammunition and had a machete in the van he was living in — had hours earlier reposted on social media an item Mr. Trump had posted that same day, which claimed to show Mr. Obama’s home address.At his rallies and in interviews, Mr. Trump has described the Jan. 6 rioters who have been arrested as “great patriots” and said they should be released.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn his first two years out of office, Mr. Trump’s public comments largely focused on slowly revising the history of what happened on Jan. 6, depicting it as mostly peaceful. At his rallies and in interviews, he has described the rioters who have been arrested as “great patriots,” said they should be released, dangled pardons for them and talked repeatedly about rooting out “fascists,” “Marxists” and “communists” from government.Mr. Trump’s verbal attacks on law enforcement agencies intensified after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago, as they pursued the investigation that later led to his indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. Some of his most aggressive comments were made as it became clear that the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, was likely to indict him last spring in connection with hush money payments to a porn actress.He posted a story from a conservative news site that featured a picture of Mr. Bragg with an image of Mr. Trump wielding a baseball bat right next to it.In another post, Mr. Trump predicted that there would be “potential death and destruction” if he were charged by Mr. Bragg. The district attorney’s office found a threatening letter and white powder in its mailroom hours later. (The powder was later determined not to be dangerous.)Professor Pape, of the University of Chicago, said that while the numbers of people who felt violence was justified to support Mr. Trump were concerning, he would rather focus on a different group identified in his survey: the 80 percent of American adults who said they supported a bipartisan effort to reduce the possibility of political violence.“This indicates a vast, if untapped, potential to mobilize widespread opposition to political violence against democratic institutions,” he said, “and to unify Americans around the commitment to a peaceful democracy.”Kirsten Noyes More

Voters on Sunday rejected the candidate for the hard-line Alternative for Germany Party, which is rattling German national politics, in the race for mayor in the city of Nordhausen.With a colorless and reputedly prickly small-city mayor being challenged by a far-right candidate known for his charisma and business success, many Germans feared that the hard-line Alternative for Germany party was about to win its first City Hall.But when the ballots were counted Sunday evening, voters in the city of Nordhausen had decisively returned their mayor to office, dealing a setback to a party that has drawn on nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment to secure a firm hold in German politics.“I thought it would be much, much closer,” said an early-round mayoral candidate, Andreas Trump, who ran for the conservative Christian Democrats and did not endorse a candidate for fear of driving voters into the arms of the rightists.The election came as Alternative for Germany, which has a nationalist, anti-migrant platform, is on the rise across the country. The party, known as the AfD, won only 10 percent of the votes in the 2021 general election, but since then, it has benefited from frustration with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party government, the rising cost of living, worries about the war in Ukraine and a surge in immigration.Now, the AfD is regularly above 20 percent in national opinion polls, well ahead of Mr. Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats. In the five states that were once part of East Germany, nearly a third of voters say they back it.A question-and-answer session for AfD supporters and residents in Gera, in eastern Thuringia, in June.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesBefore the vote in Nordhausen, in which the incumbent, Mayor Kai Buchmann, was challenged by the AfD candidate, Jörg Prophet, many thought the rightists might make a significant inroad into German governance.“Nordhausen is simply swept up in the blue wave,” Thomas Müller, a former local journalist, said, referring the party’s campaign color.Still, it was unclear if Nordhausen, despite its history as an East German municipality, would topple. A quaint city of 42,000 known for its schnapps distillery, it is an exemplar of Germany’s investment in its east, with modern trams and an impeccably maintained medieval quarter.“It’s not an especially right-leaning place,” Mr. Müller said.On Sunday, 55 percent voted for Mr. Buchmann, with 45 percent voting for Mr. Prophet.Benjamin Höhne, a political scientist who studies Alternative for Germany, said that winning the mayor’s office would have represented “another important step in the AfD’s normalization strategy.”“By showing they can take on communal executive responsibility, the hard-right-wing extremist core, which is increasingly crystallizing, appears to recede into the background,” he said,Nordhausen, a city with modern trams and a well-maintained medieval quarter, is home to about 42,000 people.Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis summer, AfD candidates won runoffs to lead a district in southern Thuringia and a small town in another eastern state, Saxony-Anhalt. The party has also gained ground at the state level. In Thuringia, Christian Democrats recently pushed through a property tax measure with AfD votes, three years after an outcry when mainstream parties allied with the far right to briefly oust the state’s leftist governor.None of this, however, means that the AfD is abandoning its extremes.That may have proved Mr. Prophet’s undoing.In the days after the first mayoral vote in Nordhausen, he turned away from city issues and solicited the help of two prominent AfD party figures who came to give speeches. He also refused to distance himself from Björn Höcke, the party’s most famous far-right extremist.“If he had really limited himself to just the municipal issues — there’s no telling how it would have turned out,” said Mr. Trump.The AfD leader Björn Höcke, speaking at a rally in Dresden in 2020, is viewed as one of the party’s most extreme figures.Gordon Welters for The New York Times More

The former press secretary in the Bush White House will moderate the next Republican debate. She’s managed to rise at Fox without being a Trump supplicant.Dana Perino can punch and parry with the best of them. But she could be better at ducking.In 2008, when Ms. Perino was the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, she got clocked in the face with a boom microphone in the scuffle that broke out after a journalist threw his shoes at Mr. Bush.“I had a black eye for six weeks,” Ms. Perino, now an anchor for Fox News, said in an interview last week from her sun-dappled Upper West Side apartment.That kind of fracas — and the nearly two years she spent taking questions from reporters in the White House briefing room — may be good preparation for her next act: moderating the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday in Simi Valley, Calif.It will be the biggest moment for Ms. Perino at Fox News since she began co-hosting “The Five” in 2011. Not known for being as provocative or partisan as many of her colleagues behind the desk, Ms. Perino, 51, has spent a good part of the last decade trying to thrive as a Bush Republican working for a network where loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump is often the ticket to high ratings and the career advancement that accompanies them.Ms. Perino, who also co-hosts the two-hour morning news show “America’s Newsroom,” is one of the relatively few White House aides to make the leap from politics to news anchor. She says she modeled her transition after two other former West Wing staff members who had made the transition — George Stephanopoulos, the ABC News anchor who served as Bill Clinton’s communications director, and Diane Sawyer, also of ABC, who was an assistant to Richard M. Nixon.Ms. Perino at her final briefing as the White House press secretary for President George W. Bush on Jan. 16, 2009.Doug Mills/The New York TimesCurrent and former colleagues said that she has managed to persevere at Fox by being neither a Trump supplicant nor fierce critic. During the raucous discussions on “The Five,” she can often be seen ducking the fray, flashing a knowing smile as her co-hosts mock Mr. Trump’s liberal antagonists.And she feels no need to deliver the pro-Trump monologues that other conservative hosts have made a staple of their programs.“If she tried to fake it, she knows people would see through her,” said Tony Fratto, a former Bush administration official who worked with Ms. Perino in the White House and remains a friend. Mr. Fratto said that Ms. Perino’s independence was something she was determined to keep while working her way up at the network.“She’s very rational and respectful of people with different views,” he said.Ms. Perino is one of the few Fox anchors to have never interviewed Mr. Trump. And she doesn’t appear especially eager to do so.When Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News over its promotion of conspiracy theories relating to Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020, some of Ms. Perino texts with her colleagues became public, revealing how little she thought of the former president and his claims that extensive voter fraud cost him the election. She said as much on air as well and told Mr. Fratto, who was representing Dominion at the time, in one text exchange how she was being threatened. “The maga people are crushing me for it,” she wrote, “and I even have death threats now.”Asked last week whether she would prefer it if Mr. Trump participated in this week’s debate — he will skip it, as he did the debate last month in Milwaukee — Ms. Perino wasn’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm.“Sure,” she said. If she were advising Mr. Trump, she said, she would encourage him to go. But she also said she believed his absence presents his rivals with opportunities to break out in ways that have eluded them so far.She said she believed that the last debate, which was hosted by her Fox News colleagues Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, was not particularly successful for the candidates because they spent so much time interrupting each other.“The candidates made a decision to break the rules, and to talk over each other,” she said.She will not shy away from interrupting them if they do the same, she said. And she does not fear playing the role of schoolmarm if she needs to. (Her co-moderator in the debate, Stuart Varney of Fox Business, is no shrinking violet either.)Ms. Perino, the co-host of the morning news show “America’s Newsroom,” is one of the relatively few White House aides to make the leap from politics to news anchor.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“I’m happy to be that,” she said, adding that she hopes that isn’t necessary. “I think that for them, they should not want that either, right, because it didn’t help them. If you think about that debate, there was no consensus of who won.”Preparing for the debate can be a thankless task, as many moderators before her have discovered. The candidates often dismiss the carefully drafted questions the moderators have written.Friends and former colleagues said that Ms. Perino has a knack for preparedness that exceeds most.“When she would prepare President Bush for press conferences, you’d go through the anticipated questions,” said Ed Gillespie, who served as counselor to the president during Mr. Bush’s second term. “A question would come, and it would be one that Dana said would come. And then there would be another that Dana said would come. And a third. And every single question would be one that Dana said would come.”President George W. Bush with Ms. Perino in the White House briefing room in August 2007, after announcing that she would be taking over as press secretary.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHer Fox colleague Greg Gutfeld, a fellow host on “The Five,” said he pokes fun at her for how she comes to the show armed with a notebook full of ideas based on the news articles that are driving the day. “Unlike me, she reads the articles. She’s like the grade-A student in your class,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “She doesn’t throw it in your face. But she’s prepared.”Former colleagues said that Ms. Perino wasn’t one to pull her punches when it came to briefing the president, which she always came to extensively prepped.“If you’re preparing the president, you have to do it nicely, of course, since he’s the one who was elected,” said Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state during Mr. Bush’s second term. “But you also have to be willing to say, ‘Mr. President, that answer isn’t going to fly.’ Dana did that. And I think President Bush respected her for it.”Ms. Perino’s second act as a news anchor puts her back where she started her career right out of college. After working as a disc jockey on the overnight shift at a country music station in Pueblo, Colo., she graduated from the University of Southern Colorado and moved to the Midwest, eventually landing a job as a reporter for a television station in Champaign, Ill. She decided a life of covering local news — holiday parades, municipal government meetings — wasn’t for her.“I didn’t see how you could get ahead quickly. And I had an ambition,” she explained, adding that she never saw herself becoming “the replacement for Tom Brokaw.” When she left local news, she said, she thought that would be the end of her time in television news. “I really thought if I do this I’ll never work in TV again.”Her first big job in the Bush White House came in 2006 when, after holding a series of communications jobs throughout Washington, she was hired at age 34 as the deputy press secretary under Tony Snow, a former host of “Fox News Sunday.” He stepped down in 2007, after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Mr. Bush named Ms. Perino as the new press secretary.“She can handle you all,” the former president told the room of journalists. Now, she is the journalist. And the G.O.P. presidential candidates will have to handle her. More