Elections

Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Ron DeSantis still trails Donald Trump by double digits. And now Mr. Trump is stepping up his visits.On paper, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing everything that a Republican presidential candidate should do to win Iowa.He is doggedly crisscrossing the state, visiting 58 of its 99 counties so far and vowing to make it to the rest. He is meeting voters at small-town churches, meeting halls, county fairgrounds and ice-cream parlors, heavily courting evangelicals and racking up endorsements from influential faith leaders and local politicians. His super PAC is building a formidable get-out-the-vote operation and says it has reserved $13 million in television ads in Iowa through Thanksgiving.For Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Iowa by double digits, the state has become a must-win. Mr. Trump, who has campaigned sparingly here, appears to know it. The Trump campaign recently announced that he would visit Iowa five times in the next six weeks, including stops on Wednesday, in a clear attempt to scupper Mr. DeSantis’s bid for the presidency with a resounding victory in the Jan. 15 caucuses, the first votes of the race for the nomination.Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the Republican base — so strong that the former president has recently felt comfortable veering away from the party’s orthodoxy on abortion — is only one of Mr. DeSantis’s major hurdles in Iowa. The other is his lack of light-up-the-room charisma and folksy authenticity, qualities that seem required, at a minimum, to beat an established star like Mr. Trump.“He’s very cerebral, very smart,” said John Butler, 75, an accountant from Pella, Iowa, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “But it feels like it can be hard to get to know him.”For now, Mr. DeSantis’s top advisers say they are planning a steady diet of the grind-it-out approach that worked for the Republican victors in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Iowa caucuses — none of whom, notably, went on to capture the party’s nomination.“Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult,” David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, said in an interview this month. “It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organization, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”A campaign stand for former President Donald J. Trump was set up at a tailgate event this month in Nevada, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMuch of the DeSantis strategy mirrors the approach taken by the last three Republicans to win contested caucuses in Iowa: former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, all social conservatives who trekked to practically every corner of the state. Mr. Cruz — not exactly a ball of white-hot magnetism himself — beat Mr. Trump here in 2016, an effort in which Mr. Polyansky played a key role.“Governor DeSantis is doing the 99-county tour,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who appeared with Mr. DeSantis on Saturday at a meet-and-greet at a county historical society in her hometown, Red Oak. “He’s meeting with those Iowa voters. That makes a difference.”And Mr. Trump may be giving Mr. DeSantis openings to press his case in the state.In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida a “terrible thing.” Iowa passed a similar law that is widely popular with social conservatives. Mr. DeSantis struck back on Monday in an interview with Radio Iowa, saying, “I don’t know how you can even make the claim that you’re somehow pro-life if you’re criticizing states for enacting protections for babies that have heartbeats.”The former president has also spent few days campaigning in Iowa so far, and he was booed when he appeared this month at the Iowa-Iowa State football game.“They’re jittery, they’re nervous, and they absolutely should be,” Mr. Polyansky said of the Trump campaign. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a very tight race in Iowa. And the former president losing there seriously damages the sheen of invincibility that they are trying to project.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump would “put the pedal to the metal” in Iowa, even though he has a commanding lead.“We don’t play prevent defense,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time.”One of Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenges may be showing voters that he is not as painfully awkward as his critics suggest.Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, has seen Mr. DeSantis appear at roughly 10 events so far this cycle. She said that his small-town approach made sense in Iowa but that he himself might not be the right candidate to execute it. She has been particularly struck, she said, by how he interacts with voters.“He always looks miserable until he’s directly in front of a camera about to take a selfie,” said Dr. Paine Caufield, who has written a book about the Iowa caucuses.On Twitter, a cottage industry has sprung up turning Mr. DeSantis’s most awkward moments into viral memes. There was the time he told a young girl at a county fair in Iowa that her Icee probably had a lot of sugar. The painful way his face contorted when he was reminded that Mr. Trump led him in the polls. And, of course, the bizarre, almost body-racking laughs — his head thrown violently back, eyes screwed shut, mouth agape — he uses to herald jokes from voters.New York magazine and Vanity Fair have packaged those interactions into clickbait listicles. They have become fodder for late-night comedians. The Onion, a satirical news site, has turned Mr. DeSantis into a regular punching bag (“DeSantis Has Surprisingly Smooth Verbal Exchange With Iowa State Fair Corn Dog,” one headline read).Even his super PAC, Never Back Down, reminded Mr. DeSantis that he should be “showing emotion” when discussing his wife and children, in an unexpectedly public memo about last month’s debate.Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has been integral to his campaign in Iowa, and it has reserved $13 million in television ads there through Thanksgiving.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesBut on the campaign trail, where he is often accompanied by his wife, Casey, a former local television anchor, and their three small children, Mr. DeSantis has seemed plenty likable, voters say. Even some Trump supporters don’t find him to be a stiff. They just like Mr. Trump better and wish the Florida governor had waited to run until 2028.“I saw a very confident spokesman for what he believes in,” said Madeline Meyer, 85, a retiree who heard Mr. DeSantis speak at a fund-raiser in Iowa last month but said she planned to stick with the former president. “He’s got a good voice and a nice, young family.”In a Fox News interview last weekend, Mr. DeSantis called criticisms of his demeanor a “bogus narrative.”Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer, said the group’s messaging in Iowa would zero in on Mr. DeSantis’s plans for immigration and the economy, which polling shows are top issues for Republicans.“We’re focusing on amplifying what the governor has said he will do for voters,” Ms. Davison said in an interview.Mr. DeSantis has also tried to tailor his appeal more specifically to Iowa voters in recent trips, after heavily focusing his initial pitch on his record in Florida. He has noticeably adjusted his stump speech to talk less about Florida and more about what his priorities would be as president.But the governor clearly finds it hard to leave his home state behind.As he walked through an Iowa cattle ranch over the weekend, a gust of wind blew his blazer open, revealing that its lining had been stitched with images of Florida’s state flag.Maggie Haberman More

Nearly half of all states have similar programs that combine getting a driver’s license or state ID card with registering to vote.Pennsylvania, a battleground state that could play an outsize role in the 2024 presidential election, will begin to automatically register new voters as part of its driver’s license and state ID approval process, officials said on Tuesday.The program, which was announced by Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, is similar to those offered in 23 other states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Voters must meet certain eligibility requirements, which include being a U.S. citizen and a Pennsylvania resident for at least 30 days before an election. They also must be at least 18 years old on the date of the next election.“Automatic voter registration is a common-sense step to ensure election security and save Pennsylvanians time and tax dollars,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement. “Residents of our Commonwealth already provide proof of identity, residency, age and citizenship at the D.M.V. — all the information required to register to vote — so it makes good sense to streamline that process with voter registration.”In the 2020 election and the midterm races last year, Pennsylvania was a hotbed of falsehoods about voter fraud, promoted by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies. Republicans in the state have mounted a series of unsuccessful legal challenges over voters’ eligibility and absentee ballots that did not have dates written on their return envelopes, which a state law requires.The move to automatic voter registration, which begins Tuesday, comes as both Republicans and Democrats keep an eye on the state as the 2024 race heats up.The state where President Biden was born, Pennsylvania could determine not only whether he is elected to a second term, but also whether Democrats maintain control of the closely divided Senate. Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat in his third term, is facing a key re-election test.In the near term, a special election in the Pittsburgh area on Tuesday was expected to determine the balance of power in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives.Pennsylvania had about 8.7 million registered voters as of December 2022, according to state officials, who, citing census figures, estimated that about 10.3 million residents were eligible to register to vote. More

It was clear from an early point that barring some unforeseen circumstance, the 2024 presidential election would be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — the first contest with two presidents on the ballot since 1912’s four-way matchup between William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, the upstart Woodrow Wilson and the long-shot socialist Eugene V. Debs.Most Americans, according to several polls conducted this year, say they do not want this. Most Americans, a recent CBS News survey reports, think a Trump-Biden rematch — which would not be the first presidential rematch in American history — is evidence of a broken political system. But most Americans who plan to vote are nonetheless resigned to casting a ballot for either Biden or Trump next November.This palpable sense of exhaustion is perhaps the reason so many political observers have taken to speculating about a future in which Biden, at least, doesn’t run.David Ignatius wrote last week in The Washington Post that if Biden and Kamala Harris “campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.” Likewise, Eliot Cohen wrote this summer in The Atlantic that Biden “has no business running for president at age 80.”I find this drumbeat, which has been ongoing since at least 2022 (“Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024,” Mark Leibovich wrote last summer, also in The Atlantic. “He is too old”), to be incredibly strange, to say the least. The basic premise of a voluntary one-term presidency rests on a fundamental misconception of the role of re-election in presidential politics and presidential governance.Re-election — or rather the act of running for re-election — isn’t an unexpected treat or something ancillary to the position. It is one of the ways presidents seek to preserve their influence, whether or not they ultimately win another term of office.“Among the many hats the president wears, none is more important to his long-term success than that of party leader,” the political scientist James W. Davis writes in a 1992 book on presidential leadership. “Unless he is skilled in the management of party affairs, especially in dealing with members of the coequal legislative branch, the president will not be able to achieve that esteemed place in history reserved for all of our great presidents.”The reason, Davis explains, is that the institutional separation of the executive and the legislature along with the fragmented nature of political authority in the American system — presidents and lawmakers of the same party, even lawmakers within the same state, do not share the same constituencies — result in large and imposing barriers to presidential ambition. But, Davis writes, “while the president faces numerous constraints in our Madisonian system of checks and balances, he nevertheless can, if he has the inclination and leadership drive, use his party ties to lead the nation to new heights.”Crucial to achieving this is the possibility of future power, which is to say, the prospect of re-election. The promise of a second term, and thus another four years to achieve their political and ideological goals, is a critical incentive that binds lawmakers to the president in the present. This is especially true given the recent trend toward the nationalization of congressional elections, in which public esteem for the incumbent — or lack thereof — shapes the fate of the entire party.Or, as the presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter observed in a 1957 letter addressing a House committee hearing on the potential repeal of what were then recently enacted presidential term limits, “Everything in our history tells us that a president who does not or cannot seek re-election loses much of his grip in his last couple of years.” In other words, no president wants to be a lame duck.Rossiter, it should be said, opposed the 22nd Amendment — which wrote presidential term limits into the Constitution in 1951 — as a nakedly partisan prohibition “based on the sharp anger of the moment rather than the studied wisdom of a generation.” It was, in his view, an “undisguised insult to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”There was a notion during the 2020 presidential race that Biden would be a one-term caretaker. “Biden should do the honorable thing and commit to standing aside after the completion of a successful first term,” a CNN op-ed declared. Some of Biden’s advisers even floated the idea that he would essentially step aside after winning election. “According to four people who regularly talk to Biden,” Politico’s Ryan Lizza wrote in 2019, “all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for re-election in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.”Even Biden himself said that he viewed himself as a “transition candidate.” Perhaps that was true in the months after he won the nomination. For reasons that should now be obvious, however, it was a fantasy. There is no faster way to political and policy irrelevance than for a president to tell the nation he plans to step aside. Biden could be an effective, successful president or he could be a one-term, transitional figure. He cannot not be both. A president who doesn’t intend to run for re-election is essentially a president who can be safely ignored as a nonentity. No one who wanted to achieve something with the office would make that pledge.Let’s also be honest about the individual in question: the kind of person, like Joe Biden, who plans and plots for a lifetime to become president is going to want to serve as long as the law, and the voting public, will allow.Absent an extraordinary turn of events, Biden will be on the ballot next year. He wants it, much of the institutional Democratic Party wants it, and there’s no appetite among the men and women who might want to be the next Democratic president to try to take it away from him. Democrats are committed to Biden and there’s no other option, for them, but to see that choice to its conclusion.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 NewsA special election on Tuesday to fill an open legislative seat in the Pittsburgh area will also determine which party takes power in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives.The state’s lower chamber has been split 101-101 between Democrats and Republicans since July, when former Representative Sara Innamorato, a Democrat, stepped down from her seat to run for Allegheny County executive.Voters in Ms. Innamorato’s former district, which includes part of Pittsburgh and its northern suburbs, will choose her successor. The candidates for the state’s 21st House District are Lindsay Powell, a Democrat who has strong ties to party leaders in Washington, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader; and Erin Connolly Autenreith, a Republican who is the chairwoman of a local party committee.Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives has been split between Democrats and Republicans since July, with each party holding 101 seats.Matt Rourke/Associated PressWhy It Matters: The vote will determine a swing state’s power balance.Pennsylvania is a crucial swing state, playing an important role in presidential elections, as well as determining which party holds power in the United States Congress. Whichever party gains an upper hand in the state can make a major difference in Washington, in addition to making law in Pennsylvania.It’s also one of just two states, along with Virginia, where the legislative chambers are split by party.In Harrisburg, Democrats have controlled the governor’s office since 2015, and Gov. Josh Shapiro won his first term convincingly in November 2022. Republicans, on the other hand, have held a strong grip on the Senate for decades.Democrats won a majority in the House in 2022 for the first time in 12 years and by the slimmest of margins — it took only Ms. Innamorato’s resignation to make it an even split.Background: The state has seen several special elections this year.In May, Heather Boyd, a Democrat, won a closely watched special election in southeast Delaware County, part of the Philadelphia suburbs. Top Democrats, including President Biden and Governor Shapiro, had framed the contest as crucial to protecting reproductive rights in Pennsylvania.But on the same day, in a separate special election, Republicans retained a state House seat in north-central Pennsylvania with the triumph of Michael Stender, a school board member and firefighter.Heading into the third special election of the year on Tuesday, the Democratic candidate, Ms. Powell, 32, who works in work force development, was viewed as a solid favorite, with a sizable fund-raising advantage.She would become the first African American woman to represent the district, which Ms. Innamorato captured in 2022 with 63 percent of the vote.Republican officials acknowledged that the heavily Democratic district would be difficult for them to win. Still, Ms. Autenreith, 65, has been active on the campaign trail.What Happens Next: The state House could soon be in play yet again.No matter who prevails on Tuesday, voters in Pennsylvania may soon face yet another special election with huge stakes.If State Representative John Galloway, a Democrat who represents a district northeast of Philadelphia, prevails in a race for a district judgeship in November, as is expected, the chamber would be split again until another contest could be held to fill his seat. More

Voting rights advocates say the law, intended to curb fraud, is impeding people with disabilities, older voters and non-English speakers.For years, Stella Guerrero Mata, a 73-year-old retired school bus driver who lives near Houston, has been able to cast her vote through the mail with little hassle. Ms. Mata, who uses a cane to walk and suffers from a long list of ailments, including diabetes, worsening eyesight and back pain, expected the 2022 midterm elections to be no different.But sometime after she placed her ballot in the mail, she received a letter with news that left her angry and confused. Her ballot was not accepted because she had failed to include her driver’s license number and the last four digits of her Social Security number, a requirement of a contested new voting law that was approved in 2021.“My vote was rejected,” Ms. Mata said, adding that she had realized it was too late for her to correct her mistake. “It made me feel angry, because my voice was not being heard.”Ms. Mata was one of several voters to testify in a trial, now underway in San Antonio, over the state’s sweeping election overhaul, known as S.B. 1. The law was passed by a Republican majority even after Democratic lawmakers staged a 38-day walkout, leaving the state in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the bill from coming to a vote.Since it went into effect, critics have raised concerns that the law would impede voters with disabilities, elderly voters and voters who do not speak English. The federal trial, now entering its second week, is providing an unusual opportunity to hear directly from voters who wanted to cast a vote but were not able to do so.A coalition of voting rights groups, including MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, claim in their lawsuit that the law hurts people who vote by mail, those who use the help of aides known as assisters to vote and those who rely on community organizations to learn about where and how to vote.The law added new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; made it harder to use voter assisters; set criminal penalties for poll workers if they are too forceful in reining in people at polling places; and banned 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, measures that were notably used in Harris County during the pandemic.Lawyers representing the state countered that the new rules prevent potential voter fraud and that voters seem to be adapting better with every passing election. Election integrity means that voters “are going to have confidence in the process,” said Ryan Kercher, a lawyer for the state. In addition, Mr. Kercher said, the law allows for expanded early-voting hours to encourage more voter participation.During cross-examination, another lawyer for the state, Will Wassdorf, pointed out to Ms. Mata that she had entered the required information in an application for a mail ballot, but that she did not do so when she mailed the actual ballot. Mr. Wassdorf then directed her attention to a video screen that showed the entries she had left blank.“Do you understand that that’s why your ballot was rejected?” he asked her.“Now I do. At this time, yes,” she replied.An example of a new mail-in ballot request requiring a driver’s license number and the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number.Sergio Flores/ReutersAsked by one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Fátima Menéndez, if she would have the confidence to cast a vote by mail in 2024, Ms. Mata replied that she was not sure. “I feel like it would not be counted at all,” she said.A parade of election officials from Dallas, Austin, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley also testified that they found many of the new regulations confusing and vague and that they often struggled to explain them to equally confused voters.“I did not know what to tell voters,” said Dana DeBeauvoir, a county clerk in Travis County, home to Austin, who oversaw several elections before she retired. Ms. DeBeauvoir described the purported problem of voter fraud as “a unicorn,” at best, “ones and twos out of millions of votes, and in most cases unintentional.”Mr. Kercher seized on that during cross-examination. “Even though voter fraud is a unicorn, we still have to be vigilant,” he said.“I always was,” she replied.The judge in the case, Xavier Rodriguez, of the Western District of Texas, is expected to listen to testimony for the next few weeks before issuing an order.Judge Rodriguez previously found one part of the law to be unlawful: its requirement that voters write down either the last four digits of their Social Security number or a driver’s license’s number when requesting to vote by mail and that election workers be able to match one of the numbers with the voter’s registration records.Judge Rodriguez, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled that the requirement violated the Civil Rights Act because elections officials may be turning away voters who otherwise qualify to vote by mail but have a hard time providing the extra information.The A.C.L.U. of Texas said that about 40,000 submissions for mail-in voting ballots have been rejected for errors connected to this requirement.Nina Perales, a lawyer with MALDEF, argued during her opening statement that voters with disabilities are among the most affected.“Adding more steps to the voting process and requiring more forms makes voting more difficult, and it reduces the number of ballots cast,” Ms. Perales said. “This imposes significant and more obstacles for disabled voters and will cause disabled voters to be disenfranchised.”The new voting law became a priority for Gov. Greg Abbott after former President Donald J. Trump claimed he lost the 2020 election because of election fraud, a claim that has been discounted by judges around the country. Nevertheless, Mr. Abbott threatened to call a special session of the Legislature until lawmakers sent him the voting bill to sign.The legislation followed a series of voting changes adopted in several urban areas across Texas, places largely dominated by Democrats, that were designed to make it easier for eligible voters to cast ballots. Houston, for example, drew national attention by offering 24-hour drive-through voting at the height of the pandemic.The defense has not yet begun presenting a case. Much of the first week was taken up by voters and election officials, called by the plaintiffs, who detailed their struggles with the new rules.Toby Cole, a lawyer who lost the use of his arms and legs after an accident when he was 18 and votes with the help of an aide, testified that he felt uncomfortable sharing his medical information with poll workers when voting in person, a method he prefers, in order to have an aide assist in casting his ballot.Mr. Cole said he knows of many fellow voters with disabilities who may choose not to vote in person or at all because they do not feel comfortable sharing why they qualify for extra assistance.He has been able to vote, he said, only “because I’m persistent.”Kirsten Noyes More

The hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin supported Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign in Florida last year, but has not backed a Republican for president.Kenneth Griffin, a billionaire hedge-fund executive and major Republican donor who has made it clear that he wants the party to move on from former President Donald J. Trump, still has yet to settle on an alternative in the primary — even as time dwindles for Mr. Trump’s opponents to cut into his enormous lead before voting begins in January.Mr. Griffin’s continued absence from the primary fight, which he confirmed in an interview with CNBC that was broadcast on Monday night, points to a deep dissatisfaction among some anti-Trump Republican megadonors with their choices in the race.It is also a particular snub to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. When Mr. DeSantis was up for re-election as governor last year, Mr. Griffin supported him to the tune of $5 million, but he has expressed dissatisfaction with his presidential campaign.“I don’t know his strategy,” he told CNBC, in a major departure from his assertion last year that the country would be “well served” if Mr. DeSantis were president. “It’s not clear to me what voter base he is intending to appeal to.”Zia Ahmed, a spokesman for Mr. Griffin’s company, Citadel, confirmed those remarks but emphasized to The New York Times that Mr. Griffin “never said who he’s supporting or not supporting in 2024.”“I’m still on the sidelines,” Mr. Griffin said in the CNBC interview. He added: “Look, if I had my dream, we’d have a great Republican candidate in the primary who was younger, of a different generation, with a different tone for America.”That description might once have seemed to refer to Mr. DeSantis, who is 45 and has tried to present himself as someone who can restyle the Republican message and win back the swing voters turned off by Mr. Trump.But Mr. DeSantis has leaned hard into the cultural grievances that animate the Republican base, denouncing transgender rights and the teaching of race in schools, among other things, while echoing or trying to one-up much of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on issues like immigration.Polls show him badly trailing Mr. Trump, at times by dozens of percentage points.People close to Mr. Griffin have described him as particularly upset by Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute,” and by the six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida.Mr. Griffin spent more than $100 million in the 2022 midterm cycle, and his largess could make a big difference for a Trump opponent — if, or when, he settles on one. More

Looking past the Republican primary, Donald Trump and his campaign are already gearing up for a possible rematch with President Biden.Former President Donald J. Trump is planning to travel to Detroit on the day of the next Republican primary debate, according to two Trump advisers with knowledge of the plans, injecting himself into the labor dispute between striking autoworkers and the nation’s leading auto manufacturers.The trip, which will include a prime-time speech before current and former union members, is the second consecutive primary debate that Mr. Trump is skipping to instead hold his own counterprogramming. He sat for an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that posted online during the first G.O.P. presidential debate in August.The decision to go to Michigan just days after the United Auto Workers went on strike shows the extent to which Mr. Trump wants to be seen as looking past his primary rivals — and the reality that both he and his political apparatus are already focused on the possibility of a rematch with President Biden.So instead of attending the next G.O.P. debate — on Sept. 27 in California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — Mr. Trump intends to speak to over 500 workers, with his campaign planning to fill the room with plumbers, pipe-fitters, electricians, as well as autoworkers, according to one of the Trump advisers familiar with the planning. Mr. Trump has not directly addressed the wage demands of striking workers and has attacked the union leadership, but he has tried to more broadly cast himself on the side of autoworkers.The campaign is also considering the possibility of having Mr. Trump make an appearance at the picket line, although the adviser said such a visit, which could involve difficult logistics given the former president’s security protections, is unlikely.The former president has long prided himself on his appeal to rank-and-file union workers — even as most union leaders have remained hostile to him, and as Mr. Biden has called himself the most pro-union president in history. In the 2016 campaign, an adviser to Mr. Trump, Paul Manafort, sought to establish a back channel with organized labor in Michigan and Wisconsin in the hopes the A.F.L.-C.I.O. would scale back its efforts to help the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. It did not appear to go anywhere, but underscored the areas that Mr. Trump considered vital in the general election.Mr. Trump won Michigan in the 2016 election, one of the states in the so-called blue wall that crumbled for Democrats that year. But Mr. Biden carried Michigan by more than 150,000 votes in 2020, and it is seen as a critical state for Democrats in 2024.The Trump campaign has produced a radio ad that will begin running on Tuesday in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, trying to cast Mr. Trump as aligned with autoworkers. The same Trump adviser said the ad targeted union workers and men, and will air on sports and rock-themed stations.“All they’ve ever wanted is to compete fairly worldwide and get their fair share of the American dream,” the narrator says in the ad. “Donald Trump calls them great Americans and has always had their backs.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized the transition to electric vehicles, and in a post on his social media site Truth Social over the weekend, he called it an “Electric Car SCAM.” The radio ad also uses the Biden administration’s support for the transition to electric vehicles to attack Mr. Biden.The ad does not specifically mention the strike, which began last week against all big three Detroit automakers, and in which the union is seeking a 40 percent wage increase over four years.Ammar Moussa, a press officer for Mr. Biden’s campaign, said in a statement, “Donald Trump is going to Michigan next week to lie to Michigan workers and pretend he didn’t spend his entire failed presidency selling them out at every turn.”Mr. Biden has sided with the striking workers, sending two top aides to Detroit and saying at the White House hours after the strike began that “workers deserve a fair share of the benefits they helped create.”The United Auto Workers pointedly decided not to endorse Mr. Biden this spring ahead of the current labor clash, with the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, expressing concern about the labor elements of the transition to electric vehicles. At the same time, in a memo, Mr. Fain said Mr. Trump would be a “disaster” if he returned to the White House.In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast over the weekend, Mr. Trump was critical of Mr. Fain, saying workers had been “sold down the river by their leadership.”“I don’t know the gentleman, but I know his name very well, and I think he’s not doing a good job in representing his union,” Mr. Trump said. “Because he’s not going to have a union in three years from now. Those jobs are all going to be gone, because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China.”In a statement after The New York Times reported on Mr. Trump’s Detroit plans, Mr. Fain said that “every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”“We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class,” he said. More

As we stumble toward another existential election, panic is setting in among some progressive groups because the donors who buoyed them throughout the Trump years are disengaging. “Donations to progressive organizations are way down in 2023 across the board,” said a recent memo from Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voter Project, an organization founded in 2016 that channels funds to community organizers, mostly in swing states, who engage and galvanize voters. He added, “Groups need money to make sure we have a good outcome next November. But. People. Are. Not. Donating.”As both big and small donors pull back, there have been layoffs across the progressive ecosystem, from behemoths like the Sierra Club to insurgent outfits like Justice Democrats, the group that first recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge the Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018. According to a July analysis by Middle Seat, a Democratic strategy and consulting firm, in the first half of this year, grass-roots donations to Democratic House and Senate campaigns were down almost 50 percent compared to the same point in 2021. Wimsatt, who had to lay off 15 people from a 55-person staff in June, told me, “I haven’t experienced a situation like this before when there’s been such a sense of scarcity.”This isn’t just about political operatives losing their jobs: It means that organizations that should be building up their turnout operations for next year are instead having to downsize. And it speaks to a mood of liberal apathy and disenchantment that Democrats can’t afford ahead of another grueling election. “To the degree that there isn’t enough organic enthusiasm, we have to generate it,” Wimsatt said. That’s hard to do when you’re broke.It was probably inevitable that left-leaning fund-raising would fall once the immediate crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency ended. Activism, like electoral politics, is often thermostatic: There’s more energy on the right when Democrats are in power, and more on the left during Republican administrations. After a pandemic, an insurrection, and innumerable climate disasters and mass shootings, people are burned out and maybe even, as Ana Marie Cox argues in the New Republic, traumatized, a state that can lead to hypervigilance but also avoidance. And, of course, there’s inflation, a big part of the reason that charitable giving is down overall.Yet if liberal lassitude is understandable, it’s also alarming, because we’re going to have to fend off Trump once again. And even if some of the pullback is cyclical, some seems to be rooted in a more enduring malaise. “There was a huge amount of additional grass- roots funding in the Trump era, because people were so scared,” said Max Berger, the co-founder of progressive groups such as If Not Now and the Momentum Training Institute. “And I feel like we’re at the end of the wave of what people are willing to do out of sheer terror. So now, if we’re going to keep that level of momentum, we need something more positive.”One small, characteristic piece of this problem — and perhaps the easiest part to solve — involves the way Democrats use email. If you’re on any progressive mailing lists, you surely know what I’m talking about: the endless appeals, sometimes in bold all caps, warning of imminent Democratic implosion. (Recent subject lines in my inbox include, “We can kiss our Senate majority goodbye” and “This is not looking good.”)In the short term, these emails are effective, which is why campaigns use them. Over time, they encourage a mix of cynicism and helplessness — precisely the feelings leading too many people to withdraw from political involvement. “We and others in the field have argued that, long term, it’s disastrous, because you don’t build a trusting base,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party when I asked him about these hair-on-fire missives.But this is just a symptom of a bigger problem, which is that, right now, progressive politics are necessarily organized around preventing imminent catastrophe rather than offering up a vision of a transformed world. Joe Biden has an impressive legislative record, but because of the counter-majoritarian roadblocks in our system, the case for his re-election is largely about staving off disaster rather than the promise of new accomplishments. “It’s really hard to get people to give money when you do not have a coherent theory of change,” said Berger.Where there is a prospect of real change, progressives are still getting mobilized. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, “there was a resurgence of both activist energy and donor energy,” said Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a network of progressive donors channeling money to pro-democracy grass-roots groups. “And those things are often correlated.” As she pointed out, Janet Protasiewicz raised “more money than God” in her race for a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. In Ohio, organizers fought off a sneaky statewide ballot measure meant to kneecap a campaign to protect reproductive rights. (Planned Parenthood has recently laid people off, but the organization insists this was because of restructuring rather than a fund-raising shortfall.)As the prospect of Trump redux moves from looming horror to daily emergency, Gavito expects people to throw themselves into politics once again. “I have faith in the anti-MAGA coalition, that we will not go back,” she said. I hope she’s right, and democratic forces can rouse themselves one more time. It’s a depressing paradox: We need politics that are about more than just the miserable business of stopping Trump, but unless Trump is stopped, we’re not going to get them.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