Elections

After his wrongful conviction as one of the Central Park Five was overturned, Mr. Salaam found it hard to rebuild his life. Now he stands to take office next year.This week, 34 years after he and four other teenage boys who barely knew one another were bound together by notorious failures of justice, Yusef Salaam was officially declared the winner in the Democratic primary for a seat in New York’s City Council, having received almost 64 percent of the vote. Given that more than three-quarters of voters in the district identify as Democrats, we can assume that beginning in January, he will represent Harlem, where he grew up, was arrested and returned after serving nearly seven years in prison for a crime he did not commit.The crime — the rape and near-fatal beating of a 28-year-old investment banker who was jogging in Central Park one night in April 1989 — came to define a late-20th century city plagued by entwined crises of violence, ferocious racial polarization and worsening inequity. The boys, known as the Central Park Five, were convicted on the grounds of coerced false confessions. In Mr. Salaam’s case, there wasn’t even recorded evidence of an admission of guilt. No DNA evidence linked any of the accused assailants to the victim; they were exonerated in 2002 only after the actual offender, an imprisoned serial rapist, came forward and provided forensic evidence that proved his culpability.Mr. Salaam’s electoral victory is as much a poetic correction as it is a political success. It signals not only a triumph over an entrenched political establishment — his rivals were longtime elected officials in their 60s and 70s — but also over an idealistic brand of progressivism embodied by the incumbent councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan, whose popularity fell off quickly. A young Democratic Socialist elected two years ago on a platform of “radical love” and police abolitionism, Ms. Jordan dropped out of the race in May when her defeat seemed certain.From the vantage of middle age — Mr. Salaam is now 49 — he can reflect and say that Harlem has been poorly governed for a long time. “When I look at 125th Street, I see rats, drugs, empty lots, the need for wraparound services,” he said during a conversation a few days before the race was called. “We’ve had legends here, but we have not had the full investment our tax dollars require.”Six years ago, Mr. Salaam moved to Georgia; Harlem had become so expensive. He returned at the end of last year. He sees the lack of affordable housing as the area’s chief concern, and he is committed to working with developers to create more. The problem, as he sees it, is that too often when “developers are coming into a community to develop, we are usually called to the meeting after they have decided to do whatever they are going to do.”Ms. Jordan did not show the same kind of flexibility. One reason she fell into disfavor with Harlemites was that she effectively killed a project on 145th Street that would have delivered hundreds of apartments at below-market rates; she insisted there were not enough for those in the lowest income brackets. Ultimately, the developer used the land for a truck depot.Mr. Salaam’s ascent suggests the political appeal of lived experience over the attraction of outlier ideologies that have been cultivated at a privileged distance. Ms. Jordan is also from Harlem, but she is the daughter of doctors, a graduate of the Calhoun School (a private school on the Upper West Side) and Brown, a poet and an independent publisher focused on the work of literary activists. After the murder of George Floyd, much of the rhetoric around defunding police seemed intentionally hyperbolic, a means to an end of reducing, not eliminating the presence of police. Ms. Jordan, though, held a literal, more absolutist view.“I actually believe in moving toward a world without cops,” she told The Nation in a 2021 interview. Not long after she was elected to the council, two police officers were killed in her district during a domestic violence call, and she found herself widely criticized for expressing sympathy not just for the slain men but also for the person accused of killing them. Despite what he suffered at the hands of a warped system, Mr. Salaam maintains a position on policing that is comparatively moderate, calling for better and more sensitive policing, not a world without it.One of his political supporters is a former corrections officer who first encountered Mr. Salaam in a Lower Manhattan courthouse in the early stages of his long ordeal. The officer, Derrick Taitt, believed in the innocence of the five teenagers from the outset. He recalled seeing them in court for the first time. “It’s just an experience I’ll never forget — going home that day,” he said. “I walked from Centre Street to 14th. I couldn’t get on the train because my head hurt so badly.” As the president of the Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle and a lifelong resident of the neighborhood, Mr. Taitt, who is now 68, has witnessed an unsettling resurgence of crack in the area recently, and he maintains that Mr. Salaam could not have built a viable campaign on anti-law-enforcement sentiment.When I spoke with Mr. Salaam, he ended our conversation for afternoon prayer. He has been a practicing Muslim for most of his life, and the notion of a career in political leadership was born, against all odds, not long after he was arrested. He could not help but see uncanny similarities between his own story and that of his namesake, the prophet Yusef, in the Quran who was thrown into a well, sold into slavery, wrongly accused of rape and imprisoned. Ultimately he rose to a position of authority in his kingdom.“I was just blown away,” Mr. Salaam told me. “For me reading that as a young person, it was a seed that was planted.”After his conviction was overturned, he re-entered the world at 23, to endure the predictable indignities common to those who have been incarcerated. One of his first jobs after prison was working construction at a Mitchell-Lama apartment complex on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. When the company he was working for found out who he was, he said, he was fired. The experience provided a terrible insight. “Prison is about continuous punishment,” he said. “But if you survive prison, every single door for success will be shut in your face.”Many people in the community supported him when he was released, Mr. Salaam’s mother, Sharonne, told me. But many others did not. “You still have that boiling sensation as you try to move on with your life,” said Ms. Salaam, who was teaching at the Parsons School of Design when her son was arrested. Exoneration did not bring peace for everyone. “It was easier for Yusef to move on and see a path forward.”After the construction job, Mr. Salaam worked in tech at Weill Cornell, became a motivational speaker, wrote books, received a lifetime achievement award from Barack Obama and helped to raise 10 children — seven of his own and three stepchildren.He would like to bring more public bathrooms to Harlem. He worries about the effects of global warming on people who make their living as outdoor vendors. He wants people to look inward and to look outward, to try to stay positive. Yet to this day he has not had an apology from any of the prosecutors in his case. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Upper Manhattan voters have embraced him overwhelmingly. A landslide can be the best revenge. More

Mr. Salaam was one of the Central Park Five who were wrongly convicted and then exonerated in the rape and assault of a jogger in Central Park in 1989.Yusef Salaam, one of five Black and Latino men whose convictions were overturned in the 1989 rape and assault of a female jogger in Central Park, cemented his victory in a highly contested City Council primary race in Harlem, according to The Associated Press on Wednesday.Mr. Salaam, 49, held a commanding lead on Election Day, with more than twice the number of votes over his closest rival, Inez Dickens, a state assemblywoman. The New York City Board of Elections began tabulating ranked-choice votes on Wednesday, and the new ranked-choice tabulation now shows Mr. Salaam with almost 64 percent of the vote to Ms. Dickens’s 36 percent.“This is a victory for justice, dignity and decency for the Harlem community we love,” Mr. Salaam said in a statement. “It’s a victory in support of not turning our backs on those in need, for saying we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and for saying the only way for all of us to thrive is to believe in the promise we all have.”In addition to Ms. Dickens, Mr. Salaam defeated another sitting member of the Assembly, Al Taylor, who is serving his sixth year in the Legislature. Mr. Salaam is not expected to face a serious challenger, if any, in November.He will succeed Kristin Richardson Jordan, a democratic socialist who was one of the most far-left members of the City Council. She dropped out of the primary in May, but her name still remained on the ballot and she will serve out her term.All three candidates were moderates who sought to distance themselves from Ms. Jordan’s far-left views on issues such as policing. Mr. Salaam cast the election as an opportunity for a generational shift in Harlem, which was once the center of Black political power in New York City but had ceded that title to Brooklyn.During the race, Mr. Salaam spoke frequently about his conviction, exoneration and persecution by former President Donald J. Trump, who in 1989 took out full page ads in The New York Times and other papers calling for the death penalty in the Central Park jogger case. During debates or forums, Mr. Salaam often referenced his conviction and the nearly seven years he spent in prison.In a recent interview, Mr. Salaam said his victory restored his “faith in believing that what happened to me was for this very moment.”Issues in the district include a lack of affordable housing, the loss of Black residents and the saturation of drug treatment and social services facilities. One of the major issues during the election was the fate of a proposed affordable housing project on Lenox Avenue and West 145th Street.Ms. Jordan initially opposed the project and rejected it because it was not affordable enough for Harlem residents. The developer instead opened a truck depot on the site. Mr. Salaam said he supports the development of housing at the intersection and will work with area residents to make sure the project meets their needs.“The problem that we are experiencing in Harlem right now is that we are being pushed out,” Mr. Salaam said. “They’re saying that we’re leaving, but the truth of the matter is that we are being priced out and therefore we are being pushed out.”Mr. Salaam received a warm reception while walking around Harlem recently with passers-by who wanted to shake his hand and take selfies with him, including Janice Marshall, a consultant and lifelong Harlem resident, even though she said Mr. Salaam was not her first choice.“I’m happy because it’s justice for him and I’m happy for the new energy,” Ms. Marshall said. “I’ve heard of his story and I just wish him well.” More

The war has illuminated one of the biggest ideological divides within the Republican Party: between members who see a significant global role for the United States, and a more isolationist wing.Few issues have been more divisive among the Republican presidential candidates than the war in Ukraine and how, if at all, the United States should be involved.It has illuminated one of the biggest ideological divides within the Republican Party: between traditional members who see the United States as having a significant role to play in world affairs, and an anti-interventionist wing that sees foreign involvement as a distraction from more important issues at home.The old school has more adherents in the 2024 field, including Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Tim Scott, who support sending Ukraine military equipment and weapons but not troops. This aligns with President Biden’s strategy, though they maintain that Mr. Biden is executing it wrong.But the anti-interventionist wing is dominant in terms of influence, with two members, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, far outpolling everybody else.Only one candidate, Will Hurd, wants to significantly expand U.S. involvement.The anti-interventionistsDonald J. TrumpFormer President Donald J. Trump has said that the war in Ukraine is not of vital importance to the United States.In a CNN town hall event, he did not give a straight answer when asked repeatedly whether he would continue to provide military aid, instead declaring that he would end the war “within 24 hours” by meeting with Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. He claimed falsely that the United States was sending so much equipment that “we don’t have ammunition for ourselves.”Former President Donald J. Trump has said that the war in Ukraine is not of vital importance to the United States.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Trump — who was impeached in 2019 for withholding aid to Ukraine to pressure Mr. Zelensky to help him electorally — also suggested to Fox News that he could have prevented the war by ceding Ukrainian land to Russia. “I could’ve made a deal to take over something,” he said. “There are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly.”Ron DeSantisGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has called the war a “territorial dispute” whose outcome does not materially affect the United States.“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” he told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson in March.After criticism from fellow Republicans, he backtracked, saying that his comments had been “mischaracterized” and that Russia’s invasion was wrong.He has since endorsed a cease-fire, saying he wants to avoid a situation “where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate.” He has maintained his position that the United States should not get more involved.Vivek RamaswamyThe entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy opposes aid to Ukraine because, he argues, the war does not affect American interests.He says he would pursue an agreement that would offer sweeping concessions to Mr. Putin, including ceding most of Ukraine’s Donbas region to Russia, lifting sanctions, closing all U.S. military bases in Eastern Europe and barring Ukraine from NATO. In exchange, he would require Russia to end its military alliance with China and rejoin the START nuclear treaty.The presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy greeted Iowa voters at the Veterans Freedom Center during a pancake breakfast last month. He’s a staunch opponent of aid to Ukraine.Jordan Gale for The New York Times“I don’t think it is preferable for Russia to be able to invade a sovereign country that is its neighbor, but I think the job of the U.S. president is to look after American interests, and what I think the No. 1 threat to the U.S. military is right now, our top military threat, is the Sino-Russian alliance,” Mr. Ramaswamy told ABC News. “I think that by fighting further in Russia, by further arming Ukraine, we are driving Russia into China’s hands.”The traditionalistsNikki HaleyNikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, says that it is “in the best interest of America” for Ukraine to repel Russia’s invasion, and that she would continue sending equipment and ammunition.“A win for Ukraine is a win for all of us, because tyrants tell us exactly what they’re going to do,” she said on CNN. She added: “China says Taiwan’s next — we’d better believe them. Russia said Poland and the Baltics are next — if that happens, we’re looking at a world war. This is about preventing war.”Victory for Ukraine, Ms. Haley said, would “send a message” more broadly: warning China against invading Taiwan, Iran against building a nuclear bomb, and North Korea against testing more ballistic missiles. To Russia, it would signal that “it’s over.”In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, she said President Biden had been “far too slow and weak in helping Ukraine.”Mike PenceFormer Vice President Mike Pence supports aid to Ukraine and has accused Mr. Biden of not supplying it quickly enough. In June, he was the first Republican candidate to travel to Ukraine, where he met with Mr. Zelensky.Like Ms. Haley, he has described helping Ukraine as a way to show China that “the United States and the West will not tolerate the use of military force to redraw international lines,” a reference to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.This position sets him apart from the president he served under. Criticizing Mr. Trump’s description of Mr. Putin as a “genius,” Mr. Pence said on CNN that he knew “the difference between a genius and a war criminal.”Former Vice President Mike Pence meets with Iowa voters at Midland Power Cooperative in Boone, Iowa on Tuesday.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesHe has emphasized that he would “never” send American troops to Ukraine, and said he did not yet want to admit Ukraine to NATO because he wanted to prevent the United States from becoming obligated to send troops. But he said he was open to admitting the country into NATO after the war.Tim ScottSenator Tim Scott of South Carolina supports aid to Ukraine and told NBC News that Mr. Biden had “done a terrible job explaining and articulating to the American people” what the United States’ interests are there, an argument Mr. Pence has also made.“First, it prevents or reduces attacks on the homeland,” Mr. Scott said. “Second, as part of NATO and land being contiguous to Ukraine, it will reduce the likelihood that Russia will have the weaponry or the will to attack on NATO territory, which would get us involved.” He has endorsed a forceful defense of Ukraine from the start, writing in March 2022 that the fight was “for the principles that America has always championed.” That May, he voted for an emergency funding measure that went beyond what Mr. Biden proposed. He accused Mr. Biden of waiting “too long to provide too little support,” but Mr. Biden supported the increase.Chris ChristieFormer Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has said that the United States should continue to support Ukraine until the war is “resolved.”“None of us like the idea that there’s a war going on and that we’re supporting it, but the alternative is for the Chinese to take over, the Russians, the Iranians and the North Koreans,” Mr. Christie said in a CNN town hall, calling the conflict “a proxy war with China.”He added that “some kind of compromise” with Russia might eventually be needed, and that the United States should help negotiate it once “Ukraine can protect the land that’s been taken by Russia in this latest incursion.”He has said that Mr. Trump “set the groundwork” for the war and called him “Putin’s puppet.” And he compared Mr. DeSantis to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who tried to appease Hitler.Asa HutchinsonFormer Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas supports aid to Ukraine with audits to ensure funds are used as intended. He told C-SPAN that U.S. leadership was “important in supporting Ukraine and bringing the European allies together” against Russia, and that he disagreed with Mr. Trump’s and Mr. DeSantis’s more “isolationist view.”Like several other candidates, he has argued that allowing Russia to win would embolden it and other authoritarian countries to attack elsewhere.“If we stand by and let this nation falter, it leaves a hostile Russia on the doorstep of our NATO allies,” he said, adding, “By taking a supportive and public stand in Ukraine, we’re sending a message to Russia and to China that their aggressive posture towards other nation-states is unacceptable.”Doug BurgumGov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota has indicated that he supports military aid with “accountability on every dollar.”“Russia cannot have a win coming out of this, because if it’s a win for them, it’s a win for China,” Mr. Burgum told KFYR, a television station in North Dakota, while adding that he wanted Europe to shoulder more of the financial burden.He told CNN in June that the domestic turmoil in Russia had created an opening that the United States and NATO could exploit. “Let’s give them the support they need,” he said of Ukraine, without elaborating. “Let’s get this war over now instead of having it be protracted.”Francis SuarezMayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami supports aid but wants to tie it to new NATO rules requiring Europe to carry an equal burden.In a National Review essay, he said Mayor Vitali Klitschko of Kyiv had warned him that if Mr. Putin was not stopped, Russia and China would continue to attack the West, possibly including the United States. Mr. Suarez added that Russia had to be defeated because it was part of “a broader resurgence of communist-inspired regimes,” though Mr. Putin’s Russia is not communist.Without naming him, Mr. Suarez criticized Mr. DeSantis’s position. “It doesn’t take a Harvard lawyer to see that the war in Ukraine is not a territorial dispute,” he wrote, shortly after Mr. DeSantis used that phrase to describe it. “It is a moral and geopolitical struggle between two visions of the world.”The hawkWill HurdFormer Representative Will Hurd of Texas — who said from the start that the United States should send Ukraine “as much weaponry as we can” — has espoused a more hawkish policy than any other major candidate, arguing that the United States should go well beyond providing equipment and weapons.Mr. Hurd told ABC News that he supported establishing and helping enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. NATO leaders and U.S. lawmakers from both parties rejected that last year, saying they feared escalation. Mr. Hurd has brushed that concern aside, arguing that Mr. Putin had not escalated when a mercenary leader threatened a coup.He said that the United States should help Ukraine retake not only the territory Russia invaded in 2022, but also Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. More

One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million.Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — an increasingly Democratic constituency — has grown by 13.3 million.These trends do not bode well for the prospects of Republican candidates, especially Trump. President Biden won whites with college degrees in 2020, 51-48, but Trump won by a landslide, 67-32, among whites without degrees, according to network exit polls.Even so, there is new data that reflects Trump’s ongoing and disruptive quest for power.In a paper published last year, “Donald Trump and the Lie,” Kevin Arceneaux and Rory Truex, political scientists at Sciences Po-Paris and Princeton, analyzed 40 days of polling conducted intermittently over the crucial period from Oct. 27, 2020, through Jan. 29, 2021.The authors found that Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him has had continuing ramifications:The lie is pervasive and sticky: the number of Republicans and independents saying that they believe the election was fraudulent is substantial, and this proportion did not change appreciably over time or shift after important political developments. Belief in the lie may have buoyed some of Trump supporters’ self-esteem.In reaction to the lie, Arceneaux and Truex write, “there was a significant rise in support for violent political activism among Democrats, which only waned after efforts to overturn the election clearly failed.”Endorsement of the lie pays off for Republicans, Arceneaux and Truex argue: “Republican voters reward politicians who perpetuate the lie, giving Republican candidates an incentive to continue to do so in the next electoral cycle.”These trends are among the most striking developments setting the stage for the 2024 elections.Among the additional conditions working to the advantage of Democrats are the increase in Democratic Party loyalty and ideological consistency; the political mobilization of liberal constituencies by adverse Supreme Court rulings; an initial edge in the fight for an Electoral College majority; and the increase in nonreligious voters along with a decline in churchgoing believers.These and other factors have prompted two Democratic strategists, Celinda Lake and Mike Lux, to declare, “All the elements are in place for a big Democratic victory in 2024.” In “Democrats Could Win a Trifecta in 2024,” a May 9 memo released to the public, the two even voiced optimism over the biggest hurdle facing Democrats, retaining control of the Senate in 2024, when as many as eight Democratic-held seats are competitive while the Republican seats are in solidly red states:While these challenges are real, they can be overcome, and the problems are overstated. Remember that this same tough Senate map produced a net of five Democratic pickups in the 2000 election, which Gore narrowly lost to Bush; six Democratic pickups in 2006, allowing Democrats to retake the Senate; and two more in 2012. If we have a good election year overall, we have a very good chance at Democrats holding the Senate.Republican advantages include high rates of crime (although modestly declining in 2023 so far), homelessness and dysfunction in cities run by Democrats; a parents’ rights movement opposed to teaching of so-called critical race theory and gender-fluid concepts; and declining public support for gay rights and especially trans rights.There are, needless to say, a host of uncertainties.One key factor will be the salience on Election Day of issues closely linked to race in many voters’ minds, including school integration, affordable housing, the end of affirmative action, crime, urban disorder and government spending on social programs. As a general rule, the higher these issues rank in voters’ priorities, the better Republicans do. In that respect, the success of conservatives in barring the use of race in college admissions has taken a Republican issue off the table.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, noted in an email that in the “sour environment” of today’s politics, “many voters may be tempted toward a protest vote, and it is likely that there will be some options available for such voters.” It is not clear, Lee added, “what No Labels will do, but the potential there introduces considerable additional uncertainty.”Asked what factors he would cite as crucial to determining the outcome of the 2024 election, Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, pointed out by email:The economy is the source of the most uncertainty — it is doing well, although inflation is not fully tamed. Will things continue to improve and will Biden start to get credit? This is especially important for white working-class voters in swing states like Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, documents growing Democratic unity in two 2023 papers, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats Are Moving Left” and “The Transformation of the American Electorate.”As a result of these trends toward intraparty consensus, there has been a steady drop in the percentage of Democratic defections to the opposition, as the party’s voters have become less vulnerable to wedge-issue tactics, especially wedge issues closely tied to race.From 2012 to 2020, Abramowitz wrote in the Transformation paper, “there was a dramatic increase in liberalism among Democratic voters.” As a result of these shifts, he continued, “Democratic voters are now as consistent in their liberalism as Republican voters are in their conservatism.”Most important, Abramowitz wrote, therise in ideological congruence among Democratic voters — and especially among white Democratic voters — has had important consequences for voting behavior. For many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.Three Supreme Court decisions handed down in the last week of June — rejecting the Biden administration’s program to forgive student loan debt, affirming the right of a web designer to refuse to construct wedding websites for same-sex couples and ruling unconstitutional the use of race by colleges in student admissions — are, in turn, quite likely to increase Democratic turnout more than Republican turnout on Election Day.Politically, one of the most effective tools for mobilizing voters is to emphasize lost rights and resources.This was the case after last June’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the right to abortion and in the 2022 midterm elections mobilized millions of pro-choice voters. By that logic, the three decisions I mentioned should raise turnout among students, gays and African Americans, all Democratic constituencies.My Times colleague Jonathan Weisman argued in a July 1 article, “Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening,” that the rulings giveDemocrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.In addition, Weisman wrote, “Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024.”The education trends favoring Democrats are reinforced by Americans’ changing religious beliefs. From 2006 to 2022, the Public Religion Research Institute found, the white evangelical Protestant share of the population fell from 23 percent to 13.9 percent. Over the same period, the nonreligious share of the population rose from 16 to 26.8 percent.Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, found that the nonreligious can be broken down into three groups: atheists, who are the most Democratic, voting 85-11 for Biden over Trump; followed by agnostics, 78-18 for Biden; and those Burge calls “nothing in particular,” 63-35 for Biden.The last of the pro-Democratic developments is an initial advantage in Electoral College votes, according to an analysis at this early stage in the contest.Kyle D. Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, published “Electoral College Ratings: Expect Another Highly Competitive Election” last week.“We are starting 260 electoral votes worth of states as at least leaning Democratic,” Kondik writes, “and 235 as at least leaning Republican,” with “just 43 tossup electoral votes at the outset.”In other words, if this prediction holds true until November 2024, the Democratic candidate would need to win 20 more Electoral College votes while the Republican nominee would need to win 35.The competitive states, Kondik continues, “are Arizona (11 votes), Georgia (16) and Wisconsin (10) — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada (6), which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins each time.”In the case of Arizona, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, argued in an email that domestic migration from California to Arizona is substantial enough to help shift the state from red to purple.“In some recent work we have done comparing California, Arizona and Texas,” Cain added, “we find that the movement of Californians is greater in absolute numbers to Texas, but proportionately more impactful to Arizona.”People who move, Cain continued,make Arizona a bit more polarized and close to the Arizona purple profile. They contribute to polarized purpleness. Enough move over a four-year period to have a measurable impact in a close race. Unlike immigrants, domestic migrants can become voters instantly.How about the other side of the aisle?Daniel Kreiss, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina, writing by email, cited the Republican advantage gained from diminished content regulation on social media platforms: “This platform rollback stems broadly from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which gave other platforms a green light to drop electoral and public health protections.”The beneficiaries of this deregulation, Kreiss continued, are “Trump and Republicans more broadly who use disinformation as a strategic political tool.”These content regulation policies are a sharp policy shift on the part of the owners and managers of social media websites, Bridget Barrett, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, and Kreiss write in a June 29 paper, “Platforms Are Abandoning U.S. Democracy.”They argue that in the aftermath of the 2020 electionplatforms took serious steps to protect elections and the peaceful transfer of power, including creating policies against electoral disinformation and enforcing violations — including by Trump and other candidates and elected officials. And deplatforming the former president after an illegitimate attempt to seize power was a necessary step to quell the violence.More recently, Barrett and Kreiss note, “social media platforms have walked away from their commitments to protect democracy. So much so that the current state of platform content moderation is more like 2016 than 2020.”Frances Lee pointed out that Cornel West’s entry into the presidential election as a candidate of the Green Party will siphon some liberal voters away from Biden: “West has announced a presidential bid and has now moved from the People’s Party to the Green Party, which will have ballot access in most states,” she wrote.Insofar as West gains support, it will in all likelihood be at Democrats’ expense. West is a prominent figure in progressive circles and his agenda is explicitly an appeal to the left.In a June 28 appearance on C-SPAN, West declared:We need jobs with a living wage. We need decent housing, quality education, the basic social needs. You can imagine disproportionately Black and brown are wrestling with poverty. The abolition of poverty and homelessness. I want jobs with a living wage across the board. I want a U.S. foreign policy that is not tied to big money and corporate interests.While West will draw support from very liberal Democrats, there is another factor that may well weaken Democratic support among some moderate voters: the seeming insolubility of homeless encampments, shoplifting, carjacking and crime generally in major cities. This has the potential to tilt the playing field in favor of Republican law-and-order candidates, as it did in the 2023 Wisconsin Senate race and in suburban New York House contests.In 2022, crime ranked high among voter concerns, but Republicans who campaigned on themes attacking Democrats as weak on crime met with mixed results.A recent trend raising Republican prospects is the Gallup Poll finding that the percentage of people “who say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable” fell by 7 percentage points, from a record high of 71 percent in 2022 to 64 percent this year.There was a six-point drop among Democrats on this question, from 85 to 79 percent approval, and a precipitous 15-point falloff among Republicans, 56 to 41 percent. Independents, in contrast, went from 71 percent approval to 72 percent. The overall decline reversed 20 years of steadily rising approval, which has grown from 39 percent in 2002 to 71 percent in 2022. Gallup also found that the public is holding increasingly conservative views on key issues related to gender transition.Asked “Do you think transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity or should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” the public favored birth gender by 28 points, 62-34, in May 2021. In May 2023, the margin grew to 41 points, 69-28.Similarly, Gallup asked “Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong to change one’s gender.” In May 2021, 51 percent said morally wrong, 46 percent said acceptable. In May 2023, 55 percent said morally wrong, 43 percent said acceptable.President Biden is a strong supporter of transgender rights. On March 31, the White House released “Statement From President Joe Biden on Transgender Day of Visibility,” in which Biden vowed:My administration will never quit fighting to end discrimination, to stand against unjust state laws, and to guarantee everyone the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are. We’ll never stop working to create a world where everyone can live without fear; where parents, teachers and whole communities come together to support kids, no matter how they identify; and every child is surrounded by compassion and love.Republican candidates are moving in the opposite direction. At the Faith and Freedom conference last month in Washington, Mike Pence promised to “end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, and we will ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatment for kids under the age of 18.”Ron DeSantis told the gathering:The left is lighting the fire of a cultural revolution all across this land. The fire smolders in our schools. It smolders in corporate board rooms. It smolders in the homes of government. We’re told that we must accept that men can get pregnant. We are told to celebrate a swimmer who swam for three years on the men’s team, then switches to the women’s team and somehow is named the women’s champion.The 2020 election raised a new concern for Democrats: Trump’s success in increasing his support from 2016 among Latino voters.Kyle Kondik’s analysis shows that Nevada (17 percent of the vote was Hispanic in 2020) and Arizona (19 percent was Hispanic) are two of the four tossup states in 2024. This suggests that the Latino vote will be crucial.While acknowledging the gains Trump and fellow Republicans have made among Latino voters, a June 2023 analysis of the 2022 election, “Latino Voters & The Case of the Missing Red Wave,” by Equis, a network of three allied, nonpartisan research groups, found that with the exception of Florida, “at the end of the day, there turned out to be basic stability in support levels among Latinos in highly contested races.” In short, the report’s authors continued, “the G.O.P. held gains they had made since 2016/2018 but weren’t able to build on them.”In Florida, the report documented a six-year collapse in Democratic voting among Hispanics: In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 66 percent of the Latino vote; in 2020, Biden won 51 percent and in 2022 Democratic congressional candidates won 44 percent.The Equis study also pointed to some significant Democratic liabilities among Latino voters: Substantial percentages of a key bloc of pro-Democratic Hispanics — those who say they believe Democrats “are better for Hispanics” — harbor significant doubts about the party. For example, 44 percent agreed that “Democrats don’t keep their promises” and 44 percent agreed that “Democrats take Latinos for granted.”In addition, the percentage of Latino voters describing immigration as the top issue — a stance favoring Democrats — has nose-dived, according to the Equis analysis, from 39 percent in 2016 to 16 percent in 2020 and 12 percent in 2022.Where, then, does all this contradictory information leave us as to the probable outcome of the 2024 election? The reasonable answer is: in the dark.The RealClearPolitics average of the eight most recent Trump vs. Biden polls has Trump up by a statistically insignificant 0.6 percent. From August 2021 to the present, RealClear has tracked a total of 101 polls pitting these two against each other. Trump led in 56, Biden 38, and the remainder were ties.While this polling suggests Trump has an even chance, surveys do not fully capture the weight of Trump’s indictments and falsehoods on his own candidacy and, as evidenced in competitive races in 2022, on Republicans who are closely tied to the former president.Among the key voters who, in all likelihood, will pick the next president — relatively well-educated suburbanites — Trump has become toxic. He is, at least in that sense, Biden’s best hope for winning a second term.Even before the votes are counted on Nov. 5, 2024, the most important question may well turn out to be: If Trump is the Republican candidate for a third straight time and loses the election for a second, will he once again attempt to claim victory was stolen from him? And if he does, what will his followers — and for that matter, everyone else — do?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

With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, vaccine skepticism has been back in the headlines. Though Kennedy has said he isn’t anti-vaccine and that his children have had vaccines, and his campaign manager (the former Democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich) says calling Kennedy “anti-vax” is a “left-handed smear,” Kennedy continues to suggest a link between vaccines and autism — a link that has leaned heavily on flawed and retracted science. He’s also been a vocal opponent of Covid vaccines.When a flurry of April polls indicated that Kennedy would enjoy double-digit support in a Democratic primary, I wondered if the respondents knew about his views on vaccines and agreed with them, if they were intrigued about the possibility of a contested primary or if they just had warm feelings about the Kennedy name. I worried that Covid vaccine skepticism had potentially sullied Americans’ feelings about all vaccines: If a meaningful slice of the Democratic electorate was either vaccine hesitant or indifferent to vaccine skepticism, I’d be concerned about dangerous diseases like polio, diphtheria, measles and mumps making a comeback.I was relieved, then, to see a survey from Pew Research in May that found that in 2023, 88 percent of American adults believe that the benefits of the M.M.R. (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine outweigh the risk — the same percentage that Pew found in 2016 and 2019. Per Pew, there’s been some softening in vaccine trust, particularly among Republicans and white evangelical Christians (who lean Republican), and this jibes with Republicans’ negative views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several other government agencies. But overall, the picture isn’t dire.When you look at rates of vaccination among young children for potentially dangerous infectious diseases, the data is encouraging. According to a study published in January in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report:Vaccination coverage among young children has remained high and stable for most vaccines, although disparities persist. The National Immunization Survey-Child identified no decline overall in routine vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic among children born during 2018-2019, although declines were observed among children living below the federal poverty level and in rural areas.Per the C.D.C., for children born in 2018 and 2019, coverage was over 90 percent for the polio, M.M.R., hepatitis B and varicella (chickenpox) vaccines. A major barrier to receiving vaccines seems to be access to health care — according to the C.D.C., “The proportion of children who were unvaccinated by age 24 months was eight times higher for uninsured compared with privately insured children.”Even for children who missed routine visits and vaccine doses in the darkest days of 2020, the C.D.C. “did not identify any consistent or persistent decline in vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.” When there were “transient declines” in coverage of some vaccines, children appeared to catch up with their doses at later dates.Acceptance of Covid vaccines is also one the rise in the United States. In a survey of Covid vaccine acceptance in 23 countries in 2022, published in January in the journal Nature, researchers found that 80.2 percent of Americans accepted the Covid vaccine, higher than the global average of 79.1 percent. (Vaccine acceptance was defined as “having received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and, if not, willingness to take the Covid-19 vaccine when it is available to them.”)Still, parents in the United States are more hesitant about getting the vaccines for their kids than for themselves. Though 33.1 percent of American parents were hesitant about the vaccine in 2022, that was a nearly 12.9 percent decrease in hesitancy from 2021 — with time, more parents are able to trust that the vaccines’ benefits matter. (Hesitancy for children among parents was defined as “having reported ‘no’ to the question of whether children received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and also ‘unsure/no opinion’, ‘somewhat disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ to the question of whether children will take a Covid-19 vaccine when available to them.”That it was going to take time for parents to get comfortable with Covid vaccines for their kids was predictable. As Dr. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and the chief health officer at Indiana University, wrote for The Atlantic in 2021: “Parents tend to be skeptical of new vaccines. Whenever one is introduced, many of them are initially hesitant to adopt it.” He went on to explain that though the highly effective varicella vaccine was approved in 1995, “uptake levels were initially low, with only 34 percent of eligible adolescents fully immunized by 2008,” despite recipients showing few side effects. But now, as noted above, the vaccination rate for varicella is over 90 percent.Two years ago, when I talked to parents who were skeptical about Covid vaccines for their children, they weren’t broadly anti-vaccine. They were worried about the newness of the vaccines, about allergies and about side effects. As one mom put it, “I’m not anti-vax but this all seems just too fast for me. I don’t want my children to be responding to those lawyer ads you see on TV 25 years from now. You know the ones: ‘If you were under the age of 16 in the years 2021-2022 and received the Covid-19 vaccination you could be entitled to compensation …’.”I know there’s some concern that amplifying Kennedy’s beliefs about vaccines will make the vaccine hesitant even more hesitant. But I wonder if all of the attention paid to vaccine skeptics in recent years could be having the opposite effect — that people are being exposed to skeptics’ unfettered theories on podcasts and social media and ultimately finding those views unconvincing. In June, my Opinion colleague Michelle Goldberg went to a Kennedy rally to talk to some of his supporters and she wrote: “As media coverage has made Democrats more aware of Kennedy’s conspiratorial views, his support has fallen; a recent St. Anselm poll had him at only 9 percent” among registered voters in the early and influential primary state of New Hampshire.Many scientific experts have worked to promote accurate and up-to-date information about vaccines, including Covid vaccines. In some cases, they’ve spent a lot of social capital in their efforts to debunk falsehoods. Many journalists have asked vaccine skeptics tough questions. Simply shaming those who don’t want to get their children vaccinated, for whatever reason, is not effective.What does work? As Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Dr. Kristen Panthagani write for the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, some people have serious, good-faith questions about vaccines, and they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand:Legitimate concerns exist. In fact, the vast majority of people who have questions or doubts about vaccines don’t outright deny vaccines as beneficial. They are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.Answering people with valid questions needs to be scientists’ priority. We need to meet them where they are, answer their questions from a place of empathy not condescension, equip trusted messengers, and anticipate concerns so we can prevent information voids that will otherwise be filled with false rumors.This is happening all the time. And looking at the data, I have confidence that it’s working. More

Last December, the 30-odd members of the Democratic Party’s rules and bylaws committee filed in to the Omni Shoreham, the glittering resort hotel that once hosted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural ball. All of the Democrats, many of them gray-haired habitués of the rubber-chicken circuit, knew they had come to Washington to hash out, after months of debate, what the presidential-primary calendar would look like come 2024. Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to make two big transitions at once: First, we have to generate all of our electricity from clean sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, rather than power plants that run on coal and methane gas. Second, we have to retool nearly everything else that burns oil and gas — like cars, buses and furnaces that heat buildings — to run on that clean electricity.These changes are underway, but their speed and ultimate success depend greatly on one kind of company: the utilities that have monopolies to sell us electricity and gas.But around the country, utility companies are using their outsize political power to slow down the clean energy transition, and they are probably using your money to do it.State regulators are supposed to make sure that customers’ monthly utility bills cover only the cost of delivering electricity or gas and to set limits on how much utilities can profit. But large investor-owned utilities, with legions of lawyers to help them evade scrutiny, bake many of their political costs into rates right alongside their investments in electrical poles and wires. In doing so, they are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy.Fortunately, Colorado, Connecticut and Maine passed laws this spring that prohibit utilities from charging customers for their lobbying, public relations spending and dues to political trade associations like the American Gas Association and the Edison Electric Institute. Regulators in Louisiana are considering similar policy changes. Every state in the country should follow those leads.These reforms are crucial because while all corporations in the United States can spend money on politics, in most cases, consumers who don’t approve can take their business elsewhere. Utilities — as regulated monopolies — have the unique ability to force customers to participate.It’s not that utilities aren’t interested in building and profiting from clean energy. Many are doing so, and the Inflation Reduction Act offers utilities extensive tax incentives to increase their investments in wind, solar and batteries. But that does not mean that utilities want others to do the same. They will support a clean energy transition only if it happens exclusively on their terms and at their pace — a stance at odds with the scope and urgency of the herculean task of decarbonizing our electric grid.Most electric utilities view distributed energy — technologies owned by customers that generate electricity in smaller amounts — as a threat to their business. They have tried for years to stop their customers in many states from investing in rooftop solar by rigging rates to make it less economically attractive. They’ve also funded opposition to policies that would speed clean energy.Florida Power & Light spent millions of dollars on political consultants who are accused of engineering a scheme to siphon votes to third-party ghost candidates, according to reporting by The Orlando Sentinel. The ghost candidates never campaigned, but their names appeared on ballots for competitive State Senate seats in an effort to spoil the chances of Democrats who had been critical of the utilities. One of the Democrats had repeatedly introduced legislation supportive of rooftop solar power, which Florida Power & Light has crusaded against for years, including writing legislation in 2021 that would have slowed its growth. “I want you to make his life a living hell,” the utility’s chief executive wrote in an internal email. The legislator lost by fewer than 40 votes. Florida Power & Light has denied wrongdoing in the ghost candidate scandal.Utilities also have also fought to cling to plants powered by fossil fuels as long as possible. In Ohio the utility FirstEnergy concealed $60 million in bribes through a web of dark-money groups to the political organization of the state’s speaker of the House. Before his conviction and sentencing for this instance of racketeering, he helped pass a law that secured a $1.3 billion ratepayer-funded bailout for FirstEnergy’s bankrupt nuclear and coal plants, gutted the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards for utilities and bailed out coal plants owned by other utilities. Audits showed that FirstEnergy used money collected from ratepayers in its scheme.Electric utilities have even opposed policies to hasten the development of desperately needed long-range transmission wires for clean energy, as NextEra Energy, Florida Power & Light’s parent company, spent millions to do in New England, where NextEra generates and sells power from oil and gas.And many utility conglomerates don’t just sell electricity; they also sell methane gas, a serious threat to decarbonization efforts. Many of those gas utilities are fighting tooth and nail against local communities’ efforts to electrify our buildings and using ratepayers’ money to do so. In California, SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas distribution utility, has been caught illicitly and repeatedly misusing ratepayer money to fight cities’ building electrification plans. In New York the gas utility National Fuel reportedly made its customers pay for advocacy materials directing New Yorkers to oppose pro-electrification policies.The Colorado, Connecticut and Maine laws address these tactics by prohibiting utilities from charging customers for a suite of political activities. Other states and the federal government should go further in two ways:First, they should add mandatory enforcement provisions so that if utilities illegally charge customers for political activities, stiff and automatic fines would kick in.Second, policymakers should, at minimum, require that utilities disclose all political spending. The recently passed state laws won’t stop utilities from spending their profits on politics. The post-Citizens United campaign finance landscape makes it difficult to restrict such expenditures, but it does not protect companies’ ability to spend secretly, which is how utilities like FirstEnergy, Florida Power & Light and SoCalGas have attempted their most noxious influence campaigns.Utilities are too central to the clean energy transition to be allowed to dictate our energy and climate policies based on their profit motives. Limiting their influence gives us the best chance to move quickly and affordably to a safer and cleaner future.David Pomerantz is the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization.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

Donald J. Trump loomed large over the campaign trail, even though he was among the few G.O.P. contenders who stayed away from it.At a high school cafeteria in Merrimack, N.H., on Tuesday, where patriotic music blasted from the speakers and the lunch tables were decked in star-spangled napery, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota mingled with families who were digging into eggs, sausage and pancakes at a Fourth of July breakfast hosted by the local Rotary Club.Nelson Disco, 88, one of the prospective voters in the small crowd, had a couple of questions for him. What was he running for? And with which party?“You’ve got some competition,” Mr. Disco exclaimed, as the North Dakota governor told him he was seeking the Republican nomination for president.But Mr. Burgum was undeterred: “Feeling great” about the race, he said.It was the final Fourth of July before New Hampshire’s first-in-the nation Republican primary, set for February, and the famed kingmaking caucuses in Iowa — plenty of time to make up ground, but it was clear for the darkest of dark horses who were burning shoe leather on Tuesday that there was a lot of ground to make up.Some better-known competitors were in New Hampshire too. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is in a distant second place in the Republican primary polls to former President Donald J. Trump, walked in two parades, including one that also drew Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is still well back in the pack. The weather was less than agreeable: Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Scott and others walking in the afternoon parade in Merrimack, N.H., were soaked when a rainstorm swept through.Independence Day campaigning is a tradition in New Hampshire and Iowa, as old as the caucuses and the primary in those states. That would be more than a century of front-runners and also-rans at the parades, picnics and pancake breakfasts of the Granite State. This year, however, there was a twist: The prohibitive front-runner, Mr. Trump, skipped the hustings, staying home with his family and firing off vulgar social media posts.Yet the minions of his campaign and his own bulky shadow still hung heavily over his competition.Former Vice President Mike Pence greeted spectators at an Independence Day parade in Urbandale, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesIn Urbandale, Iowa, where Mr. Trump’s former vice president and current competitor, Mike Pence, was marching in the parade, spectators broke into a chant — “Trump, Trump, Trump” — as he passed by.Melody Krejci, 60, of Urbandale, said: “My whole family is Trump supporters, even down to our grandbabies. They also wear Trump clothing and Trump hats.” There are posters of Trump in their rooms, too, she said.She added, “I think Pence is a coward,” alluding to the erroneous belief, still pushed by Mr. Trump, that his vice president could have rejected enough electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to send the 2020 election back to the states, and possibly overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.In the old days — before super PACs flooded the airwaves, social media brought politicians’ messages directly to voters’ smartphones and partisans were glued to their favored cable news shows — showing up on the Fourth of July really mattered.“Retail has always been mostly theater, but now it’s all a performance for the cameras, not about meeting regular people and listening to their concerns,” said Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee.This year, Mr. Trump’s rivals hoped it still did matter. In Merrimack, N.H., volunteers and supporters backing Mr. DeSantis waited to walk with their candidate in the Fourth of the July parade there, standing near a dance troupe in hot pink shirts, a wooden float filled with members of the Bektash Shrine Clowns and a yellow school bus decorated as the boat from the Boston Tea Party.But it was another Republican presidential hopeful, Mr. Scott, who caused a stir first, showing up on the parade route trailed by a passel of photographers and television cameras.“Hopefully some of those voters will become our voters,” Mr. Scott told reporters when asked his thoughts on the people in DeSantis and Trump gear who were coming up to shake his hand. “But at the end of the day, we thank God that we have folks that are committed to the country, committed to the concept that the conservative values always work.”Outside a pancake breakfast in Merrimack, N.H., former Representative Will Hurd of Texas and his wife, Lynlie Wallace, mixed with runners at a road race.Mr. Hurd, a moderate Republican and a fierce critic of Mr. Trump’s who is trying to get his fledgling presidential campaign out of the starting gate, said he had just finished touring the northern border near Vermont, which he said faces problems similar to those at the southern border in his home state: low resources and increased drug trafficking. Those were the sorts of issues he wanted to tackle, he said. But for now, he added, he was just happy to simply be out shaking hands.“Today is about meeting people, right?” Mr. Hurd said. “Not everybody is doom scrolling on social media or consuming cable news.”And Trump? “I’m sure people are thankful he’s not out,” he said. “He comes with a lot of baggage.”If there were glimmers of hope for the dark horses, it came from voter acknowledgment of that baggage, which now includes felony charges in New York connected to the payment of hush money to a porn star and federal felony charges in Miami accusing him of misusing highly classified documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.Senator Tim Scott joked with a Trump supporter before walking in the July Fourth parade in Merrimack, N.H., on Tuesday.Reba Saldanha/Associated Press PhotoIn Iowa, Jim Miller, 73, was sitting along the Urbandale parade route with his wife and other family members. He said he had voted for Mr. Trump twice but had been disappointed in his attitude. He wants a candidate who puts being American ahead of being a Republican or a Democrat.Asked to compare Mr. Pence with Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller said: “Not even close. I’d take Pence any day.”As for Mr. Burgum, he expressed an understanding of just how steep his climb would be to even get into contention for his party’s presidential nomination. The name recognition challenge is “familiar,” he said. But he also noted that people had underestimated him when he left a lifelong career in the private sector to run for governor in 2016.He won that race by 20 percentage points, and he has not been seriously challenged in North Dakota since.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota in Iowa last month. Mr. Burgum was among a number of Republican presidential hopefuls who spent the July Fourth holiday in New Hampshire.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressNot everyone was in the dark on his campaign. A volunteer, Maureen Tracey, 55, rushed up from the back of the room to ask for a selfie with him. She said she liked Mr. Burgum because, like Mr. Trump, he seemed “different from a politician.” But unlike Mr. Trump, she added, Mr. Burgum seemed to be someone she could trust.Mr. Trump “has hurt too many people, and when you hurt so many people, there is no trust,” Ms. Tracey said.Mr. Burgum, contrasting himself with the highest-profile Republican in the race, Mr. Trump, without mentioning him, said that he had decided to run because the country needed a leader who would work for every American, regardless of political affiliation.“Republicans, Independents, Democrats — they all drive on the U.S. roads, they all go to U.S. schools, they all get health care in America,” he said. “Today’s the day to really reflect on that.”Ann Hinga Klein More