Elections

Of all the descriptors attached to Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old political tyro enjoying a bizarre surge in the Republican primary race for second place, the most common one seems to be “annoying.” After the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, a Politico headline quoted a party strategist about Ramaswamy’s performance: “It just got to be annoying.” In a widely shared essay, the writer Josh Barro, a Harvard contemporary of Ramaswamy, probed the quality that “makes Vivek so annoying.” CNN’s S.E. Cupp called him, in a column: “Obnoxious. Annoying. Disrespectful. Inexperienced. Conspiratorial.”Matt Lewis, an anti-Trump conservative writer for The Daily Beast, marveled that there are some who actually like Ramaswamy’s cocky, know-it-all persona: “As Seinfeld might say, ‘Who are these people?’”The answer, of course, is much of the Republican Party. The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos polled likely Republican primary voters before and after last week’s debate. Following his performance, Ramaswamy’s favorability rating rose from 50 percent to 60 percent, even though his unfavorability rating rose even more, from 13 percent to 32 percent. Participants in a CNN focus group of Iowa Republicans declared him the debate’s winner, as did a poll released on Thursday from JL Partners. The day after the debate, his campaign reportedly raised more than $1 million.The question is what Ramaswamy’s supporters see in this irksome figure. Some Republicans, clearly, appreciate the way he sucks up to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy has called “the best president of the 21st century.” But that doesn’t explain the roughly 10 percent of Republicans who tell pollsters they’re planning to vote for Ramaswamy instead of Trump. It can’t only be his shtick as Fox News’s “woke and cancel-culture guru,” as one anchor called him, since at this point even the Florida governor Ron DeSantis has learned that railing against wokeness is a losing message. Nor is Ramaswamy’s appeal tailored to the downwardly mobile Trump voters who appreciated the former president’s pledges to protect their entitlements, since Ramaswamy’s promise to “dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s failed ‘Great Society’” makes Paul Ryan look like a social democrat.Instead, I suspect that Ramaswamy’s fans are drawn to him for all the reasons his critics find him insufferable. Conservatives love being championed by representatives of groups that they think disdain them. Despite the right’s deep resentment of the entertainment industry, Republicans tend to adore celebrity candidates, from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump. Think of the infamous tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” (They deleted it once the rapper Kanye West’s right turn veered into outright Hitler fandom.) At Democratic conventions I’ve seen famous actors walk around either unrecognized or ignored, while at Republican conventions C-listers are feted like superstars.Ramaswamy, too, is a performer, but what he’s performing is a parody of meritocratic excellence. If you’ve spent time around entitled Ivy League grads, you likely recognize him as an exaggerated version of a familiar type: the callow and condescending nerd who assumes that skill in one field translates to aptitude in all others. But to his fans, the very fact that he’s such a pure product of elite institutions — in addition to Harvard, he went to Yale Law and made his fortune with a biotech start-up he ran from Manhattan — likely gives him extra oomph as a class traitor.People who care about the basic workings of government are gobsmacked by Ramaswamy’s apparent ignorance — on Sunday, for example, he said that if he’d been in Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have pushed through election reform “in my capacity as president of the Senate.” But he’s good at sounding like he knows what he’s talking about. Sarah Longwell, a political strategist who has conducted extensive focus groups with Republican primary voters, said that people who like Ramaswamy inevitably say, “I think he’s really smart.”That’s why Chris Christie’s comparison of Ramaswamy to Barack Obama, whom conservatives saw as a smug, smooth-talking foreign interloper, fell flat. Ramaswamy’s very superficial similarities to Obama work for him, giving conservative audiences the satisfaction of hearing their resentments affirmed by a defector from the culture of the coastal gentry. At the debate, Ramaswamy encouraged the analogy when he ripped off an old Obama line to introduce himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name.” Longwell doesn’t think Ramaswamy has a shot at beating Trump for the nomination, but, she said, “I think that Republicans want their own Obama.”Many older white conservatives, after all, feel threatened by multiethnic younger generations that largely reject their most fundamental values about faith, gender and patriotism. Ramaswamy is part of this menacing cohort, and he’s telling Republicans that their suspicions about it are correct. “More than anything, he has portrayed his generation and younger ones as empty souls living meaningless lives,” Jonathan Weisman wrote in The Times. He’s a young man running an anti-youth campaign; a centerpiece of Ramaswamy’s platform is a call to strip the franchise from most people under 25 unless they pass a civics test. And he’s a person of color who argues, even in the wake of another white supremacist mass shooting, that most American racism comes from the left. If he annoys those who find him most familiar, that’s surely part of the point.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

A March trial could become the center of gravity of the G.O.P. primary, structuring the campaigns of Donald Trump and his rivals.This isn’t shaping up to be your usual presidential primary.On Monday, the judge overseeing the election subversion case against Donald J. Trump in Washington set a March 4 trial date, putting his trial right in the heart of primary season.If the trial goes as scheduled and lasts “no longer” than four to six weeks, as the government said in a filing, around two-thirds of the delegates to the Republican convention will be awarded during the trial of the party’s front-runner but, in all likelihood, before a verdict.A March trial could easily become the center of gravity of the primary season — the fact that structures the opportunities available to Mr. Trump and his rivals. It could even start to affect the calculations of the candidates today.When 2024 Republican Delegates Will Be AwardedAbout two-thirds of the delegates to the Republican convention could be awarded during the election subversion trial in Washington, which is expected to begin March 4. More

Ron DeSantis rose to prominence in part on his “anti-woke” agenda, especially when it comes to education. In some settings, culture-war messaging seems to be receding.Earlier this year, the Republican presidential primary looked as though it would be driven by conservative cultural battles, especially fights over education that had animated the party’s base since the pandemic.Gov. Ron DeSantis seemed poised to lead the charge, thanks to an “anti-woke” agenda he put into effect in Florida, restricting how schools teach America’s racial history, banning lessons about gender identity and empowering parents to have books removed from libraries and classrooms.Even Donald J. Trump seemed to be trying to outflank Mr. DeSantis on education policies, promising to root out “Marxists” in the Education Department.But anti-wokeness has not played as large a role as expected in the Republican race so far. On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has refocused his stump speech on the economy and border security while leaning less into culture-war issues. Former Vice President Mike Pence called in a speech this month to redistribute federal education spending to states — a traditional Republican goal dating from long before anti-woke crusades.In the first primary debate last week, the word “woke” was uttered exactly once. Instead, when the topic was education, the conversation onstage in Milwaukee sounded more like a product of the Reagan era than the Trump era.There were calls to eliminate the Education Department.To expand “school choice.”To slay the teachers’ unions.The focus on a throwback set of education topics seems to signal that Republicans are seeking to frame the 2024 campaign around topics beyond their opposition to “wokeness” — generally understood as liberal views on race and gender — as they try to appeal to audiences wider than conservative activists. On education, the candidates were turning to a general election message, though one with familiar echoes.“The old Reagan agenda was front and center, and the post-Trump agenda didn’t get much attention,” said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the center-right American Enterprise Institute. He noted that after school closures during the pandemic, some polling showed a reversal in voters’ longstanding preference for Democrats on education issues. “I think what you see is Republican candidates trying to find a way to leverage that support into something sustainable,” he said.On Monday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina rolled out a plan that seeks to unite older and more recent Republican talking points on education. Calling his proposal the “Empower Parents Plan,” Mr. Scott said he wanted to “enact nationwide school choice,” while also ripping “the false notions of ‘equity’ and the left’s attacks on honors classes.”A cooling-off of the cultural battle over education in the political conversation could reflect recent electoral history showing that railing against “woke” ideology plays well with social conservatives, but also that most parents are more concerned about children’s pandemic-era learning loss and a lack of mental health support in schools.The sole time the word “woke” was spoken in the two-hour debate last week was when Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, seemed to dismiss school-based cultural issues as a distraction from student learning. “There’s a lot of crazy, woke things happening in schools, but we have got to get these kids reading,” Ms. Haley said, touching on both traditional and current issues for conservatives.For his part, Mr. DeSantis nodded to the bans on critical race theory and what he called “gender ideology” that he enacted in Florida schools (though there is no evidence that critical race theory was taught in the state’s K-12 schools). On the stump before Republican audiences, the governor still reels off an alphabet soup of anti-woke targets like C.R.T., for critical race theory, and E.S.G., for environmental, social and governance corporate investment policies.But Mr. DeSantis has also adjusted the way he presents those issues, making more of an effort to explain why they matter.Aides to the DeSantis campaign say that since the governor has successfully introduced himself to voters as an anti-woke warrior, he is now ramping up his messaging on other policies.Asked in Iowa the day after the debate why he hadn’t emphasized an anti-woke message during the widely viewed televised broadcast, Mr. DeSantis said there were few questions prompting the topic. (Education was the fourth most-discussed issue at the debate, just below abortion, Donald Trump and their credentials, according a Times analysis.)“I mean, for example, they asked a question about U.F.O.s,” Mr. DeSantis said. “They didn’t ask about things like D.E.I. in universities and corporate settings.”It’s not uncommon for candidates to use different rhetoric on the campaign trail or in fund-raising requests to activists than they may use during debates to primary voters. And in many settings, Mr. DeSantis is still invoking “woke” issues to stir up his base.In a fund-raising text last week sent to supporters, Mr. DeSantis wrote, “Across the nation, I am witnessing radical ideology, brimming with hate and guilt, shoved down the throats of children from their earliest days of school.”One possible motive for candidates to de-emphasize education in culture-war terms is the lesson of the 2022 midterms at the local level. In nearly 1,800 school board races nationwide, conservative candidates who opposed discussions of race or gender in classrooms, or opposed mask mandates during the pandemic, lost 70 percent of their races, according to Ballotpedia, a site that tracks U.S. elections. A Republican National Committee memo from last September warned candidates that “focusing on C.R.T. and masks excites the G.O.P. base, but parental rights and quality education drive independents.”“These culture-war arguments are falling flat,” said Karen M. White, deputy executive director of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. “Banning books and talking about gender identity is not the approach parents and educators and students want.”Traditionally, Republicans have sought to push control of education down to the local level and minimize federal involvement. Under President George W. Bush, the party briefly changed course with the No Child Left Behind Act, which created a rigorous federal program to compel schools to raise student achievement.But sentiment shifted again with Republicans’ rejection of the Obama administration’s promotion of Common Core learning standards a decade ago. Now, some candidates, most visibly Mr. DeSantis, have suggested that the federal government intervene more vigorously with policies like banning critical race theory in schools nationally, and defunding diversity, equity and inclusion offices in higher education, as he has done in Florida’s public colleges and universities.“We’re going to do similar things across the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said in Rock Rapids, Iowa, during a campaign swing on Friday.At the same time, he, too, supports eliminating the Education Department. First proposed by Ronald Reagan in the presidential campaign of 1980, killing the department has been a Republican talking point ever since.In the debate last week, Mr. Pence, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who styles himself as a millennial embodiment of Trumpism, all said that the department must go. Mr. Ramaswamy called it “the head of the snake.”But no Republican administration or G.O.P.-led Congress has seriously tried to shutter the Education Department. Its major programs are widely popular. They include Pell grants for low-income college students, so-called Title I subsidies for schools in low-income communities and funds to ensure that students with disabilities get an equal education.“Given that Republicans don’t even want to trim Medicare and Social Security, it’s incredibly hard to see any credible path forward on defunding the major Department of Education programs,” said Mr. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.“There’s no way you can get even half the Republican caucus in the House to zero out money for kids with special needs,” he added. “Nobody wants to zero out Title I. And nobody wants to zero out Pell grants.”Ann Klein More

A racially motivated shooting and an impending storm provide the most serious tests of Mr. DeSantis’s leadership since he began running for president in May.For the first time since declaring his bid for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is facing a crisis in his home state.Well, not one crisis, but two.On Saturday, a gunman motivated by racial hatred killed three people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville. All the victims were Black. The shooter was white. And on Wednesday, a major storm is projected to strike somewhere along Florida’s Gulf coast, the first to hit the state during the 2023 hurricane season.After the shooting, Mr. DeSantis flew back to Tallahassee from a campaign trip to Iowa. He then canceled a visit to South Carolina scheduled for Monday, citing the storm and sending his wife, Casey DeSantis, in his place. He has said he will stay in Florida for the storm’s duration and aftermath.“This is going to be our sole focus,” Mr. DeSantis said on Monday at a news conference at the state’s emergency operation center in Tallahassee.The twin crises provide the most serious tests of Mr. DeSantis’s leadership since he began running for president in May. On the stump, he often cites his track record as governor as his biggest advantage over his rivals, almost none of whom hold executive office. He has also criticized President Biden for his response to the wildfires that devastated Maui.But the emergencies have pulled Mr. DeSantis off the trail at a time when his campaign had seemed to stabilize after weeks of layoffs and upheaval among his staff, as well as a debate performance that drew strong reviews from many Republican voters.Both the shooting and the storm could further spotlight criticisms that rival candidates have made of Mr. DeSantis’s stewardship of Florida since being elected as governor in 2018. After clashes on a number of race-related issues, including the way African American history is taught in schools, his relationship with Florida’s Black community is so strained that he was loudly booed when he appeared at a vigil for the shooting victims in Jacksonville on Sunday.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was booed and heckled when he spoke at a vigil for three people killed in an attack where officials say a white gunman targeted Black people inside a Jacksonville, Fla., store.John Raoux/Associated PressMr. DeSantis has also struggled with the state’s property insurance market, a long-running problem that the governor has repeatedly tried to address with legislation. The market has been so battered by high costs that Mr. DeSantis said in July that he would “knock on wood” for no big storm to hit Florida this year.Mr. DeSantis’s opponents, including former President Donald J. Trump and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, have used the issues to criticize him.A spokesman for the DeSantis campaign said the governor’s response to the shooting and the storm demonstrated “the strong leadership in times of crisis that Americans can expect from a President DeSantis.”“In the face of the tragedy in Jacksonville and the impending major hurricane, Ron DeSantis is focused on leading his state through these challenging moments,” Bryan Griffin, the campaign’s press secretary, said in a statement. “He’s now at the helm of Florida’s hurricane response and is working with local officials across the state to do everything necessary to ensure Florida is fully prepared.”Mr. DeSantis said in an afternoon news conference that he had spoken to Mr. Biden and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.Partly because of extreme weather, Florida homeowners have seen their property insurance costs rise more than those in any other state since 2015. Some major insurers have pulled out of the market, although smaller ones have entered. Last year, Mr. DeSantis called a special legislative session to address property insurance. But he has warned that fixing the troubled market will take time.Last month, Mr. Trump urged the governor to leave the campaign trail and “get home and take care of insurance.”Hurricanes traditionally provide an opportunity for Florida governors to demonstrate their strength and leadership. Mr. DeSantis has faced several major storms, as well as the fatal collapse of a condominium in Surfside, since taking office.Last year, Hurricane Ian killed 150 people in Florida, making it the state’s most deadly hurricane in decades and raising questions about why local officials had not issued evacuation orders earlier. On the trail, Mr. DeSantis frequently talks about his efforts to rebuild the state after the storm, including quickly repairing bridges and causeways to islands that had been cut off.On Sunday, Mr. DeSantis received a starkly negative reception when he attended a vigil for the victims of the shooting in Jacksonville, which has a large African American population.His administration has come under repeated fire for rejecting the curriculum of an Advanced Placement African American studies class and rewriting African American history courses, something that Mr. Scott, who is Black, has criticized.After the crowd in Jacksonville booed Mr. DeSantis when he tried to speak, a city councilwoman stepped in and asked people to listen. He was booed again when he finished.On Monday, Mr. DeSantis announced that he would award $1 million through the Volunteer Florida Foundation to bolster campus security at Edward Waters University, the historically Black university near the Dollar General store that the gunman attacked. He also said that the foundation, a tax-exempt state commission focused on community service projects, would donate $100,000 to the families of the victims.State Representative Angie Nixon, who represents Jacksonville, called the shooting “a stark reminder of the dangerous consequences of unchecked racism” and criticized Mr. DeSantis for “empty gestures” and “publicity stunts.”“Our historically Black institutions have faced an uphill battle for decades, and I invite DeSantis to go back through unfilled budget requests and line-item vetoes to begin to provide the funding they’ve needed for years. For it to take murder for him to dig in his overflowing coffers for support is appalling,” she said.In April, Mr. DeSantis was faulted for not visiting Fort Lauderdale, which strongly leans Democratic, after damaging flooding there. Since officially announcing his 2024 bid in May, Mr. DeSantis has spent several days per week out of Florida, usually meeting voters in the early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, or attending closed-door fund-raisers with donors.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has seemed to steady in recent days thanks in part to his performance in the first Republican primary debate last week in Milwaukee that Mr. Trump, the front-runner who is leading Mr. DeSantis by double digits, did not attend. The DeSantis campaign said it raised more than $1 million the next day and a snap poll of Republican voters by the Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos declared him the winner.On his weekend bus tour through northwest Iowa, many Republican voters said they had been impressed, particularly by how Mr. DeSantis talked about his record as governor.“DeSantis was the one who broke through,” said Cody Hoefert, a former co-chair of the Republican Party of Iowa who endorsed the governor immediately after the debate. “I want somebody who is going to lead and deliver results.” More

More from our inbox:Trump Pardoning Himself? An ‘Appalling Idea’Trump’s WeightImproving Access to E-BooksGraphicaArtis/Getty ImagesTo the Editor: Re “Hey, America, Grow Up!” by David Brooks (column, Aug. 11), about how an emphasis on trauma makes adults immature:As a psychiatrist, I feel that Mr. Brooks makes several valid points regarding trauma but fails ultimately to thread the needle.A good psychiatrist or therapist identifies the real trauma in a patient’s past — typically from events in childhood at the hands of parents or other family members — while simultaneously discouraging the kind of victim mind-set that displaces past pain onto present-day scapegoats.The goal is to illuminate the real trauma, which requires re-evaluating what is often an idealized remembrance of one’s upbringing, so that the patient can stop projecting malice onto anyone and instead regain a sense of agency. As the saying goes, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.If we fail as a culture to acknowledge the well-established long-term consequences, both physical and psychological, of legitimate trauma, we will wind up creating more people who identify as victims, not fewer.Christopher BaileyKirkland, Wash.To the Editor:One thing David Brooks’s good column leaves untouched is how much resistance to the hyperinflation of “trauma” there has been among psychotherapists themselves.In 1967, Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, wrote that the concept had become so “carelessly used” that its “blurring” could lead to “abandonment and loss of a valuable concept.” In 1978, psychiatrist Henry Krystal, an Auschwitz survivor and founder of contemporary trauma theory, said flatly that the use of the term “has become so loose that it has become virtually useless.”Of course, “trauma culture” has a life of its own, independent of psychiatric or psychological knowledge. And no small number of therapists have fully cashed in from Trauma, Inc., which is, indeed, big business.But my sense is that, even in the culture at large, “trauma” hype may have run its course. What follows may be greater “maturity,” as Mr. Brooks and many others would hope, or it may be just the next form of mishegoss.Henry GreenspanAnn Arbor, Mich.The writer is an emeritus psychologist at the University of Michigan.To the Editor:Wouldn’t it be nice if David Brooks’s ideas about how people should “throw off some of the tenets of the therapeutic culture” and “weave their stable selves through the commitments to and attachments with others” in order to build a culture of maturity were realistic?But try telling that to people who have grown up in poverty, who have never had adequate health insurance or medical care, who grew up in families rife with violence and abuse, who live in communities with chronic gun violence, and who have to drop out of high school to give birth to a baby.What can you weave in there? And who can you attach to when your life and the lives of those around you are a mess, and you live in a world that you have little hope of escaping?Debra KuppersmithDobbs Ferry, N.Y.The writer is a psychoanalyst.To the Editor:David Brooks made some excellent observations about our country’s growing narcissism. But he missed a key prescription for change: helping Americans develop a sense of purpose.This starts with treating challenges as temporary setbacks and harnessing our talents and efforts in the service of something bigger than ourselves. We need to lose the “me” and find the “we.”Studies show that people who feel a sense of purpose in their lives — through family, friends, work or community — are overall more resilient and report a greater sense of well-being. This message feels especially urgent for adolescent girls in America who are experiencing record levels of isolation, depression and suicidal thoughts.Until Americans commit to a purpose-driven mind-set, we will continue to wallow in our current obsession with victimization and search out cheap ways to validate our self-worth.Suzanne ChazinChappaqua, N.Y.Trump Pardoning Himself? An ‘Appalling Idea’Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor: It has become commonplace to suggest that one difference between a state and a federal conviction of Donald Trump is that Mr. Trump could not pardon himself from a state conviction if he is elected president, implying that he could pardon his own federal offenses. It’s long past time to stop giving this appalling discussion of self-pardons any air.A president pardoning himself for his own crimes is the very definition of unchecked power. Revolutionaries called it tyranny, which in this context is a better word. The idea that our executive has so much power that the rule of law does not apply to him because he could forgive himself betrays what the Revolutionary War was about.The Constitution separated the powers of the government into three branches. It empowers Congress with the legislative power and the courts with the judicial power. The idea that a president could make himself immune from both other branches — in the furtherance of a crime — is inexcusable.Mr. Trump has floated this idea before and some allies are resurrecting it again. It’s born in the brevity of the Constitution’s pardon power. But it flouts both the rule of law and the separation of powers essential to the Constitution. We should be outraged.Andrew J. KennedyMonroeville, Pa.The writer is a lawyer.Trump’s WeightTo the Editor: Re “Trump Is Booked at Jail in Atlanta in Election Case” (front page, Aug. 25):Donald Trump weighs only 215 pounds? Forget the mug shot T-shirts; his campaign should be selling whatever brand of scale he’s using.Alan RutkowskiVictoria, British ColumbiaImproving Access to E-BooksAnn Johansson for The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “What Does It Mean to Own a Book?” (Business, Aug. 13):I would like to thank David Streitfeld for his piece shining a light on the innovative and visionary work done by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive. In the discussion about the complexity of providing digital access, the work of our nation’s libraries and nonprofits like the Digital Public Library of America that support them should not be overlooked.Public libraries across the country offered access to over a billion digital e-books and half a billion digital audiobooks in fiscal year 2021. They circulated 460 million digital items and spent nearly $600 million to provide that access. And these numbers continue to grow.Mr. Streitfeld rightly points out that many titles are increasingly expensive for libraries to acquire, especially those from the “big five” publishers, which only offer licenses that are limited to a certain number of loans or length of time. However, the Digital Public Library of America works with hundreds of midsize and independent publishers to offer more reasonable terms including, for example, a perpetual one-user-at-a-time license that functions much like library ownership of a print book.Right now, legislators in several states are working with librarians to draft legislation that would enshrine the rights of libraries to acquire digital content on reasonable terms.Libraries need our support to ensure that as the transition into a digital world continues, access to knowledge becomes more and not less accessible.John S. BrackenChicagoThe writer is the executive director of the nonprofit Digital Public Library of America. More

To win back a key seat it lost in 2022, the party must first deal with a battle between Mondaire Jones and Liz Whitmer Gereghty, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s sister.Sipping iced coffee at a diner the other day, Liz Whitmer Gereghty looked every bit the dream recruit Democrats need to recapture this coveted suburban House seat north of New York City.She once owned a shop down the street, served on the school board and speaks passionately about abortion rights. She also happens to be the younger sister of one of her party’s brightest stars, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.“My rights are at risk,” said Ms. Gereghty, 50. “Everything feels very urgent, and I have a congressman who is not representing me, so I raised my hand.”Problem is, she was not the only one. Mondaire Jones, a popular former congressman who represented much of the area until January, is also running and believes he is the best candidate to defeat Representative Mike Lawler, the Republican incumbent.It is a pattern repeating itself in swing seats across the country this summer, but nowhere more so than New York, where ambitious Democrats eager to challenge Republicans defending seats that President Biden won are creating primary pileups from Long Island to Syracuse.Contested primaries have long been a reality for both parties. But after Democrats’ underperformance in 2022 made New York a national embarrassment, party officials and strategists have been increasingly worried that Democrat-on-Democrat fights could drain millions of dollars and bruise a crop of eventual nominees, threatening their carefully laid plans to wrest back House control.“My view is we shot ourselves in the foot last cycle, and we seem intent on shooting ourselves in the head this cycle,” said Howard Wolfson, who helps steer tens of millions of dollars in political spending as Michael R. Bloomberg’s adviser.“I can’t for the life of me understand why we can’t figure this out and ensure that we have one strong candidate running in each of these districts,” he added.Paradoxically, the problem could grow only more stark if Democrats win a lawsuit seeking to redraw the state’s district lines. That could ease the party’s path to victory, but also prompt the courts to push the primary date from June to late August, extending the bitter primary season and truncating the general election campaign.There is time for leaders like Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat and a New Yorker, to intervene if they want to. While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee rarely interferes in open primaries, there is a tradition of less direct maneuvering to boost preferred candidates and edge others out.So far, Mr. Jeffries appears to be doing the opposite — privately encouraging more potential candidates, with mixed success, according to four Democrats familiar with his outreach who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss it. He tried to nudge State Senator Michelle Hinchey into a Hudson Valley contest earlier this year and urged the former Nassau County executive, Laura Curran, to enter a large primary field for another seat as recently as July.Mr. Jeffries has also offered support to Tom Suozzi to enter the race for his old House seat on Long Island, where a crowded field of Democrats is circling Representative George Santos, a first-term Republican who faces federal fraud charges.The leader’s allies argue that the competition will strengthen their nominees, and brush off concerns that Democrats will be short on funds. A Democratic super PAC has already earmarked $45 million for New York races. And the D.C.C.C. is pitching donors — as recently as a party retreat in Torrey Pines, Calif., last weekend, according to an attendee — to give to special “nominee funds,” a kind of escrow account collecting money for primary winners.“Leader Jeffries has no plan to endorse in any Democratic primary in New York,” said Christie Stephenson, his spokeswoman. “He is confident that whoever emerges in these competitive districts will be strongly positioned to defeat the extreme MAGA Republican crowd.”But the mix of ego and ideology buffeting the star-studded race between Mr. Jones and Ms. Gereghty shows the potential risks, particularly in such a high-profile race to reclaim a Hudson Valley seat lost last year by Sean Patrick Maloney, who was the chairman of the Democratic campaign committee at the time.Mr. Jones held the Hudson Valley seat, but opted in 2022 to run for an open seat in New York City, where he lost in a primary.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Jones, an openly gay Black Democrat, represented a more liberal configuration of the seat in Congress last term. But after a court imposed new district lines in 2022, Mr. Maloney opted to run for Mr. Jones’s seat instead of his traditional one. Rather than run against a party leader, Mr. Jones chose to move 25 miles to Brooklyn to run for an open seat there.He lost and has now moved back north.In a phone interview, Mr. Jones, 36, said he was confident that voters would understand his “impossible situation,” but regretted his decision not to challenge Mr. Maloney, who lost to Mr. Lawler in a seat Mr. Biden won by 10 points.Mr. Jones said the outcome showed that “you can’t just substitute any Democrat for Mondaire Jones in this district.” More than 100 local and national officials and groups — from the Westchester Democratic chairwoman to the congressional Black and progressive caucuses — have backed his comeback attempt, making him the clear front-runner against Ms. Gereghty.But some of the positions Mr. Jones trumpeted to win more liberal electorates in earlier campaigns could prove cumbersome.He is already tacking toward the center and would say little about Ms. Gereghty in the interview. Mr. Jones referred to his own calls to defund the police in 2020 as “emotional, facile comments”; his current campaign features video of Mr. Jones shaking hands with a local police chief while touting votes to increase police funding.Mr. Jones said he wanted to see New York grant judges new authority to set cash bail for defendants they deem dangerous. And he said he would support a state plan to tax cars traveling into central Manhattan only if there was a carveout for the suburban counties he represented.Over breakfast in Katonah, an affluent Westchester suburb, Ms. Gereghty pitched her modest record as an electoral strength in a general election. She cast herself as a member of the get-it-done wing of the Democratic Party, like her sister, and predicted Mr. Lawler would gleefully use Mr. Jones’s words against him, as he did to Mr. Maloney.“If you got tired of the Sean Maloney ads last year, we’ll at least have some more variety if he’s the candidate,” she said.Ms. Gereghty serves on a school board in her district, and was a former shop owner in the area.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesMs. Gereghty has no plans to drop out. But she has struggled to amass local support.Her most notable endorsement comes from Emily’s List, the national group dedicated to electing women who back abortion rights. Of the $408,000 she’s raised thus far, almost half came from residents of Michigan.Democrats have caught some breaks in neighboring districts.Republicans have yet to field a top-tier challenger to Representative Pat Ryan, the only Democrat defending a swing seat here. They are also headed toward their own fraught primary if Mr. Santos continues to run.Elsewhere, the candidates are crowding in.Three Democrats, including Sarah Hughes, a former gold medal figure skater, are vying to represent the party against Representative Anthony D’Esposito in a Long Island district Mr. Biden won by 14 points.Three more have already raised at least $300,000 to run in Mr. Santos’s neighboring district. That does not include Mr. Suozzi or Robert Zimmerman, the party’s 2022 nominee, who is eyeing another run.A similar dynamic is playing out in Syracuse, where four Democrats are competing over whether a moderate or progressive should take on Representative Brandon Williams, a Republican who narrowly won a seat that favored Mr. Biden by eight points in 2020.“Primaries can be bloodying, and they cost a lot of money,” said Ms. Curran, who has decided not to run for Mr. D’Esposito’s seat. “It clouds the message and the mission.”Republicans have watched it all with delight.Mr. Lawler spent the month of August meeting constituents and gathering large campaign checks. He said he ran into Mr. Jones along the way and got an earful — about how frustrated the Democrat was to be stuck in a primary.He won’t have a Democratic primary vote, but Mr. Lawler, who will have to defend his own conservative votes unpopular in the district, made clear he has a preference.“Look, I’d be happy to run against either,” he said. “But Mondaire Jones certainly has a very long and detailed record that shows him clearly out of step.” More

Much of what is happening in American politics today can be explained by two simple yet seemingly contradictory phenomena: Most partisans believe that the other side is more powerful than their own, while at the same time feeling quite certain that their own team will prevail in the upcoming election.Just as Democrats view Republicans as wielding outsize influence through dark money, structural advantages in our political system and control of institutions like the Supreme Court, Republicans view themselves as under siege by not just a federal government largely controlled by Democrats but also by the media, the entertainment industry and, increasingly, corporate C-suites.Republicans in particular hold a fatalistic view of the future of the country. In a recent Times poll, 56 percent said they believe we are “in danger of failing as a nation.” Far from the party of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad, the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy countered during last week’s debate: “It’s not morning in America. We live in a dark moment.”Given that many Republicans have such an apocalyptic view of the future, believing that the future of the country hangs in the balance if their party does not win the 2024 election, you might assume that Republicans would prioritize electability as they choose a nominee and seek a safe, steady standard-bearer to face President Biden next November. And you might assume, as many pundits and commentators do, that Republicans would begin to consider that nominating Donald Trump, with all his troubles and legal peril, would be too great a risk.But the belief that the other party would be simply disastrous for the nation is feeding the deep confidence that one’s own side is going to prevail in 2024.What does this mean for Republicans? It means that G.O.P. voters see Mr. Biden as eminently beatable, and they think most Americans see him as they do. Given that, most Republicans aren’t looking to be rescued from Donald Trump. The fact is, they really do like him, and at this point they think he’s their best shot.Despite losing the 2020 elections and then experiencing a disappointing 2022 midterm, most Republicans seem confident that their candidate — even Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump — would defeat Joe Biden handily in 2024. They have watched as Mr. Biden has increasingly stumbled, as gas prices have remained high and as Americans have continued to doubt the value of “Bidenomics.” Many of them believe the pernicious fantasy pushed by Trump — and indulged by too many Republican leaders who should know better — that the 2020 election was not actually a loss.Republican voters see the same polls that I do, showing Mr. Trump effectively tied against Mr. Biden even though commentators tell them that Mr. Trump is electoral poison. And they remember that many of those same voices told them in 2016 that Mr. Trump would never set foot in the White House. In light of those facts, Republicans’ skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser begins to make more sense.It didn’t have to be this way. In the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterms, which were disappointing for many Republicans, there was a brief moment where it seemed like the party might take a step back, reflect and decide to pursue a new approach — with new leadership. In my own polling immediately following the election, I found the Florida governor Ron DeSantis running even with Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup among likely Republican primary voters, a finding that held throughout the winter. Even voters who consider themselves “very conservative” gravitated away from Mr. Trump and toward the prospect of an alternative for a time.But by the end of the spring 2023, following the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis’s rocky entrance into the presidential race, not only had Mr. Trump regained his lead, he had expanded upon it. Quinnipiac’s polling of Republican primary voters showed that Mr. Trump held only a six-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in February, but that lead had grown to a whopping 31 points by May.Any notion that Republicans ought to turn the page, lest they face another electoral defeat, largely evaporated. And the multitude of criminal indictments against Mr. Trump have not shaken the support of Republicans for him, but have instead seemingly galvanized them.In our focus group of 11 Republican voters in early primary states this month, Times Opinion recruited a range of likely primary voters and caucusgoers to weigh in on the state of the race. They were not universally smitten with Donald Trump; some described him as “troubled,” “arrogant” or a “train wreck.” About half of our participants said they were interested in seeing a strong competitor to Mr. Trump within the party.But the argument that Donald Trump won’t be able to defeat Joe Biden? Not a single participant thought that Mr. Trump — or any Republican, really — would lose to Mr. Biden. In polling from CBS News, the ability to beat Joe Biden is one of the top qualities Republican primary voters say they are looking for, and they think Mr. Trump is the best poised to deliver on that result. Only 9 percent of likely Republican primary voters think Mr. Trump is a “long shot” to beat Mr. Biden, and more than six in 10 think Mr. Trump is a sure bet against Mr. Biden. Additionally, only 14 percent of Republican primary voters who are considering a Trump alternative said they were doing so because they worried Mr. Trump couldn’t win.In an otherwise strong debate performance last week, when Nikki Haley argued that “we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America — we can’t win a general election that way,” the reaction from the crowd was decidedly mixed. This isn’t to say such an argument can’t become more successful as the primary season goes on, as Mr. Trump’s legal woes (and legal bills) continue to mount and as the alternatives to Mr. Trump gain greater exposure.But for now they think that Mr. Biden is both enormously destructive and eminently beatable. They are undeterred by pleas from party elites who say Mr. Trump is taking the Republican Party to the point of no return.Republicans both deeply fear a 2024 loss and also can’t fathom it actually happening. Candidates seeking to defeat Mr. Trump in the primary can’t just assume Republican voters will naturally conclude the stakes are too high to bet it all on Trump. For now, many of those voters think Mr. Trump is the safest bet they’ve got.Kristen Soltis Anderson is a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups.Source photographs by Joe Raedle/Getty Images and Brian Snyder/ReutersThe 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

Proceedings before federal judges in Washington and Atlanta could begin to address some of the many complexities and scheduling challenges in the cases against the former president.By the end of Monday, another piece could be put in place in the complicated jigsaw puzzle of the four criminal cases facing former President Donald J. Trump: A date could be chosen for Mr. Trump’s federal trial on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.At a hearing on Monday morning in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan was considering widely differing proposals for the date of the trial, and could select one.In dueling court papers filed this month, the government and Mr. Trump’s lawyers each proposed ambitious schedules for the trial, with prosecutors asking for the case to be put before a jury as early as Jan. 2 and the defense requesting that it be put off for more than two years, until April 2026. As Judge Chutkan considered the arguments, another legal proceeding related to Mr. Trump was set to play out on Monday in federal court in Atlanta, underscoring the complexity of bringing the charges against him to trial.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., recently proposed starting a trial in her case against Mr. Trump, on charges of tampering with the 2020 election in that state, in March. But that date remains somewhat uncertain not only because of the jockeying among prosecutors over the timing of the different cases, but also because some of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the case have asked for the trial to start as early as this fall while others want to slow things down.At the same time Judge Chutkan took the bench in Washington, a federal judge in Atlanta was scheduled to hold a hearing to determine if one of those co-defendants in the Georgia case, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, can remove his charges from the state judicial system and have them heard in federal court.Mr. Meadows has argued that he is immune to the state charges because all of the acts underlying the accusations against him were performed as part of his official duties as a federal official. But prosecutors working for Ms. Willis have countered that the charges relate to Mr. Meadows’s political activities during a re-election campaign, which fall outside of his formal government responsibilities.Mr. Meadows was on the line in January 2021, when Mr. Trump placed a call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to “find” enough votes for Mr. Trump to win the election there. Prosecutors issued a subpoena last week to have Mr. Raffensperger, among others, testify at the hearing in Atlanta.In most legal proceedings, the selection of a trial date is a largely mundane matter, depending on the number of defendants, the amount of evidence, and the schedules of the judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers.But the timetables for Mr. Trump’s four trials have taken on outsize importance. That is not only because there are so many of them, each one needing a slot, but also because they are unfolding against Mr. Trump’s crowded calendar as the candidate leading the field for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.As a further complication, Mr. Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. If either of the two federal trials he is confronting is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether.At Monday’s hearing in Washington on the federal election charges, Judge Chutkan has said she also intends to discuss a schedule for handling the small amount of classified material that may emerge as evidence in the case. If she ultimately agrees to the government’s request to start the trial in January, it would be the first of Mr. Trump’s four cases to be tested in a courtroom.Prosecutors from the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, brought the case early this month, filing an indictment against Mr. Trump in Washington after months of intense investigation. The indictment charges the former president with three overlapping conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted.Another one of Mr. Trump’s trials, in which he has been charged with 34 felonies connected to hush money payments to a porn star in the run-up to the 2016 election, is set to start in March in a state court in Manhattan. Another, in which he stands accused of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents after leaving office, is set to go before a jury in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., near the end of May. More