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      Biden Makes Focused Appeal to Black Voters in South Carolina

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      The president’s campaign is putting money and staff into South Carolina ahead of its primary in an effort to energize Black voters, who are critical to his re-election effort.President Biden’s campaign and affiliated groups are amping up their efforts in South Carolina, pouring in money and staff ahead of the first Democratic primary in February in an effort to generate excitement for his campaign in the state.It seems, at first glance, to be a curious political strategy. Few incumbent presidents have invested so much in an early primary state — particularly one like South Carolina, where Mr. Biden faces no serious primary challenger, and where no Democratic presidential candidate has won in a general election since Jimmy Carter in 1976.But the Biden campaign sees the effort as more than just notching a big win in the state that helped revive his struggling campaign in 2020, putting him on the path to winning the nomination. It hopes to energize Black voters, who are crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election bid nationally, at a moment when his standing with Black Americans is particularly fraught.“One of the things that we have not done a good job of doing is showing the successes of this administration,” said Marvin Pendarvis, a state representative from North Charleston. He added that the campaign will need to curate a message “so that Black voters understand that this administration has done some of the most transformational things as it relates to Black communities, to minority communities.”Four years after Mr. Biden vowed to have the backs of the voters he said helped deliver him the White House, Black Americans in polls and focus groups are expressing frustration with Democrats for what they perceive as a failure to deliver on campaign promises. They also say that they have seen few improvements to their well-being under Mr. Biden’s presidency. Some are unsure whether they will vote at all.To counter that pessimism and boost Black turnout, Democrats are hitting the Palmetto State with a six-figure cash infusion from the Democratic National Committee, a slew of campaign events and an army of staffers and surrogates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Why Biden Could Lose Georgia Next Year

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      Far from the hustle of modern Atlanta and its rapidly growing suburbs is an older Georgia, a rural land of cotton fields and vacant storefronts, of low-wage jobs and shuttered swimming pools, of underfunded Black colleges and American promises ever deferred.In 2020, strong turnout among Black voters in these isolated regions of the state was key to the coalition that turned Georgia blue and ousted Donald Trump from office. Though Atlanta and its suburbs have drawn much of the national attention, Black Democrats in rural Georgia were just as critical: Voting in large numbers in 2020, they reduced the margin of victory in Republican strongholds.Three years later, ahead of a presidential election that could determine whether the United States slides toward autocracy, there are signs this coalition is on the brink of collapse. Many Black voters say President Biden and the Democratic Party have so far failed to deliver the changes they need to improve their lives, from higher-paid jobs to student debt relief and voting protections. They want Mr. Trump out of the White House for good. But indifference and even disdain are growing toward a Democratic Party that relies assiduously on Black Americans’ support yet rarely seems in a hurry to deliver results for them in return.“The Black Hills,” a print by Jason Hunt, hangs at Major’s Barber & Beauty in Fort Valley, Ga.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesA shuttered business in downtown Fort Valley.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York Times“What does he know about my life?” Kyla Johnson, 19, told me of Mr. Biden outside the Dollar General grocery store in Fort Valley, a tiny town in central Georgia home to Fort Valley State University. Ms. Johnson said she had no plans to vote next year.To better understand this discontent, I set out to talk to Black voters across rural Georgia. What I found were many people who are largely living in poverty and say they feel forgotten by Mr. Biden and national Democrats, though almost all did vote for Mr. Biden in 2020. They say they won’t vote for Republicans, whom they see as embodying the spirit of the Old South. But so far, many voters told me, they have seen and heard nothing to suggest that the Democratic Party understands their problems, is committed to improving their lives or even cares about them at all.In dozens of interviews across rural Georgia, younger Black Americans in the region said they are struggling to put food on the table amid soaring prices. They are grappling with suddenly surging housing costs in areas that had long been affordable. Many are carrying tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, debts they have no idea how they can repay working the jobs available in the region, which are extremely limited and low paying. The bounty from a booming Wall Street is nowhere to be found.In Peach County, home to Fort Valley, nearly one in three Black Americans is living below the federal poverty line, according to U.S. census data, compared to 16 percent of white residents in the county and 12.5 percent of Americans nationally. In Lowndes County, which includes Valdosta, about one in three Black Americans is living below the poverty line, compared to just 12.5 percent of white residents.Ms. Johnson’s friend Zayln Young, 18, said she would consider voting, but had so far heard nothing from Mr. Biden about the issues she cared about the most. “For instance, I can’t get food stamps because I’m on my meal plan. Why?” Ms. Young asked, adding that her school meal plan at Fort Valley State University is hard for her to afford and doesn’t provide enough food. (Under federal rules, students who receive the majority of their meals from a school meal plan are ineligible for food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.)Inside the grocery store moments later, Kem Harris, a social worker, told me she had come to buy items to make gift baskets for Fort Valley State University students who were in need. “Some of them don’t have family nearby and they can’t afford basics, like food,” said Ms. Harris, 56. “Today is toiletries, like toothpaste.”In national polls, Black voters appear to be moving away from Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party while expressing growing support for Mr. Trump. In one October poll, just 71 percent of Black voters in battleground states said they would vote for Mr. Biden, compared to the 87 percent that voted for him nationwide in 2020. Nearly a third of Black men said they support Mr. Trump, while 17 percent of Black women do. In another poll, one in five Black voters said they wanted someone other than Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden.What’s going on? Trumpism has proved to be a powerful force in American politics, so it should come as little surprise that some Black Americans — especially Black men — might also be drawn to its authoritarianism, faux populism and toxic masculinity, as so many White Americans have been, particularly as the economy has grown increasingly unequal.Given Mr. Trump’s open embrace of white supremacy, however, that appeal is severely limited. What’s more likely is not a widespread shift of Black voters toward Mr. Trump but a vote of no confidence in Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Black Americans know they make up the backbone of the party. They believe — correctly — that it has long taken them for granted. And now they seem to be reaching a breaking point.Melinee Calhoun.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York Times“Overall, I hear this sense of apathy,” said Melinee Calhoun, the state organizing manager for Black Voters Matter, a nonpartisan voting rights group with a large presence in rural Georgia. “It’s: We did what we were asked to do, and nothing has changed.” In many communities, organizers like Dr. Calhoun are the only ones building a relationship with Black voters.Biden campaign officials say the president and Democrats have enacted policies, like the infrastructure bill and $2.2 billion in relief aimed at helping Black farmers, that directly benefit these communities. Part of the challenge, they say, is explaining that they could do more were it not for Republican opposition in Congress.“We want to point out the fact that the Republicans have stood in the way,” Quentin Fulks, Mr. Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager, told me in a phone interview. But, he said, “we have to do a better job of taking credit for the work we’ve been doing.”In rural Georgia, this disconnect is vast. Organizers, voters and others here say there has been little investment from national Democrats in the region. Mr. Fulks said that it’s early, and that the campaign was still hiring and planned to spend significant resources in the state. Nevertheless, as Mr. Biden campaigns for a second term, likely against a would-be autocrat, he is speaking about democracy in sweeping terms and lauding the strength of an economy whose fruits are far removed from the daily realities of Black Americans in rural Georgia.Whipping up fears over Mr. Trump and taking a victory lap on standard Democratic policies may not be enough to win back these voters. Instead, Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party will have to get serious about taking bolder measures to help a group of people who, descended from Americans once enslaved in the very same region, remain largely without access to financial capital, under constant threat of political disenfranchisement and, too often, in poverty.When the gentlemen at Major’s Barber & Beauty Shop in downtown Fort Valley learned a journalist from The New York Times was in town, one of them stepped out onto the mostly empty street and beckoned me in. Inside, one of the customers, a regular, welcomed me to what he described as “our country club.”“If it’s Trump, I’ll vote twice,” Major McKenzie, 72, joked. But across the room one barber, Shaun William, 38, carefully affixed a Louis Vuitton-themed cape around a client’s neck and shook his head. Mr. William was worried. Many of his clients, he said, couldn’t stand Mr. Trump. But in recent years under Mr. Biden, they had only seen their lives become harder with rising inflation.Major’s Barber & Beauty Shop in Fort Valley.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York Times“Bad as things were, people say they felt money was circulating with Trump in office, those stimulus checks,” he said. “Now there is no money circulating. Prices are up. The cost of food is up.”Throughout the region, opportunities for jobs are extremely limited. Many voters told me they are forced to make a choice: working menial jobs for local businesses owned by a handful of White Republican families, fast food or Wal-Mart. Given the grinding poverty around them, some voters here also said the recent headlines about the United States sending billions to Israel to bomb Gaza are hard to swallow.“I think he should stay out of other people’s business and focus more on problems here at home,” said Kameron White, a 33-year-old forklift operator. “We need help here. We need better education. More jobs. There’s drugs, there’s gang violence. There’s very few grocery stores. I want to see more change at home.”The state of Georgia stands to receive more than $9 billion under the infrastructure plan championed by Mr. Biden, money for roads, bridges, airports, public transit and cleaner water. But Black voters in Georgia, which has two Democratic senators but a Republican governor and legislature, say they have yet to see that money flow into their own communities. In Valdosta, not far from the Florida border, several residents told me they were angry the city was spending $1.8 million to build pickleball courts even as it keeps threadbare hours for a public swimming pool in a largely Black neighborhood throughout the sweltering South Georgia summer. Though Black residents make up a modest majority in Valdosta, the city’s mayor is a white right-wing talk-show host.The pool at the Mildred Hunter Community Center, in Valdosta, Ga., is open only on Saturdays during the weekends and for limited hours each weekday during the summer.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesVoter enthusiasm is critical in Georgia, where a spirited campaign of suppression and disenfranchisement driven by Republicans and conservative activists both local and national makes exercising the right to vote harder than in many places. In 2005, the state became among the first in the country to enact a measure requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote. In recent years, right-wing activists and Republican Party officials in the state have led an effort to remove voters from the rolls.In a quiet neighborhood of Valdosta near Barack Obama Boulevard, Erica Jordan, 29, greeted me on the porch of her aging white bungalow.She is behind on the rent, as she recently lost her job at Pizza Hut. Because of this, she lost her car, severely limiting her ability to work and be a parent in Valdosta, which has no regular citywide public transit system. Over the past year, the monthly rent on her small house went up by $100, to $750. In late August, floodwaters from Hurricane Idalia entered her home, damaging some of her belongings.Erica Jordan with her daughter.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesMs. Jordan is now working a telecommunications job from home, but she says she earns too much for food stamps and not enough to make ends meet or afford food at the one grocery store within walking distance. At the end of every month, Ms. Jordan says, she asks to babysit or do hair just to eke by.“I’m not complaining, but I pay the bills on my own. I’m a single mother. I need help,” she said.She plans to vote next year, but wonders aloud if it will ever bring the change she needs. “All my life, I been played,” she says. “Every year it gets harder. It makes me wonder why I vote.”It was these voters, some of the poorest in the country, who played a key role in denying Mr. Trump a second term and preserving American democracy. It’s in America’s best interest to make sure they have a reason — and a right — to keep showing up to vote.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      As Biden Struggles With Black Men, Allies Gather at White House

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      Aides of the president met with influential Black male Democrats to discuss how to shore up his standing with a crucial group of voters before 2024.As President Biden’s allies grow more worried that his standing is slipping among Black men, his aides met on Tuesday at the White House with influential Black male Democrats to discuss how to increase his popularity with a crucial group of voters before the 2024 election.Several attendees said there was general agreement that Mr. Biden, during both his 2020 campaign and his first three years in office, had paid more attention to Black female voters than to Black male ones. These people said they had suggested to Mr. Biden’s aides that the president needed to make a specific argument about how his administration had improved the lives of Black men.“It’s clear that there’s been a focus on Black women and the question becomes, has there been an equal focus on Black men?” said Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman and Biden administration official who is now a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee and who was at the meeting.He added: “There’s been a mantra that Black women are the base of the party and, I think, it’s Black families that are the base of the party. That has the potential to separate the family unit by gender, which I think is just unfortunate.”The afternoon meeting included, among others, Representative Steven Horsford of Nevada, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus; Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania, who has warned publicly that Mr. Biden’s standing with Black voters has fallen; and Antjuan Seawright and Clay Middleton, political operatives from South Carolina who are closely associated with Representative James E. Clyburn, a key Biden ally in the state.The group agreed that Mr. Biden had many accomplishments that had helped Black men. Democrats, he said, are falling short in telling this story.“We left the room acknowledging that we collectively have to do a better job communicating,” said Kwame Raoul, the attorney general of Illinois. “Sometimes being awakened to a challenge is a good thing.”The White House session followed months of nail-biting among Democrats about rising skepticism of Mr. Biden among Black voters, especially Black men. Republicans have aimed to drive a wedge between Black voters and the Democratic Party in recent cycles, arguing that former President Donald J. Trump’s record on the economy and his passage of a criminal justice law were more beneficial for Black communities — arguments that Democrats have dismissed as disinformation.Polling released by The New York Times and Siena College last month found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of the most important presidential battleground states said they would support Mr. Trump against Mr. Biden next year, an alarming figure for Democrats given Black voters’ decades-long loyalty to the party.At the meeting on Tuesday — led by Steve Benjamin, the director of the White House’s public engagement office — the Black male allies of Mr. Biden were encouraged to recount what people in their communities and home districts had been saying about his administration and whether they would support him for a second term.“There have been communication gaps,” said Harold Love, a Tennessee state representative who is the incoming president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. He said the administration needed to tell people what Mr. Biden had done “in plain language so they can understand.”The White House declined to comment about the meeting.In interviews and focus groups, Black men who express openness to supporting Mr. Trump have pointed to the former president’s record on the economy and said their businesses and families fared better during his administration. Black Democrats have rebutted this idea, in some cases arguing that Black men have been targeted by disinformation that, if crystallized in enough voters’ minds, could endanger the president’s already shaky standing with them.Mr. Raoul, the Illinois attorney general, said that part of Mr. Biden’s problem was that he had articulated a complex message that often ended up competing with easier-to-digest misinformation.“Sometimes when you do a lot, it’s difficult to convey it to folks who are used to consuming things in sound bites and who have been at times recipients of intentionally targeted misinformation,” Mr. Raoul said on Tuesday.Democrats have emphasized earlier and more frequent outreach to Black communities as important to winning their voters.Vice President Kamala Harris has frequently met with small groups of Black men as she has traveled the country and, last month, hosted a group of 10 Black men in the news media and politics for dinner at her home in Washington. The party has also bought advertisements on Black radio stations and placed digital ads geared toward young Black voters.Mr. Benjamin’s office in the White House has held frequent meetings with a variety of constituency groups.But the meeting on Tuesday followed a particularly bad stretch of polling for Mr. Biden. CNN polls released Monday found Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump by 10 percentage points in Michigan and five points in Georgia — both battleground states with large numbers of Black voters.Even though Mr. Biden has no serious Democratic presidential challengers, the party’s primary election in South Carolina on Feb. 3 will be an early test of Black voters’ enthusiasm. Black voters made up nearly 60 percent of the Democratic electorate in the state in 2020, when Mr. Biden’s victory there set him on the path to the White House.No other Democrats have made a significant investment in the state’s primary this year, but the South Carolina Democratic Party on Monday nevertheless began a statewide voter outreach program, complete with a 50-person staff and a six-figure investment.Mr. Middleton, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden’s South Carolina campaign, said the meeting was ultimately meant to help determine how best to relay the president’s accomplishments and his plans for a second term to Black men across the country, with a focus on battleground states.“If we ignore what Black men are saying, then we would have some problems,” Mr. Middleton said. “This is to say, ‘We will not ignore.’” More

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      Pardon Recipients Seek to Sell Trump on His Own Sentencing Law

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      The Republican front-runner has a history of making racist statements, but some advisers think highlighting his signature law could help increase support among Black voters and potentially swing the election.In early July, former President Donald J. Trump received a somewhat unlikely visitor at his golf club and estate in Bedminster, N.J.: Michael Harris, the founder of Death Row Records, who had been imprisoned for drug trafficking and attempted murder, came to meet privately with the man who had pardoned him.Mr. Harris was connected to the former president by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump, who had helped push him as a pardon candidate, according to two people familiar with the process. The couple were staying at Mr. Trump’s club at Bedminster when the meeting took place, and Mr. Kushner joined, two people briefed on the matter said.But their lunch served another purpose for some people close to Mr. Trump: Mr. Harris is the type of high-profile Black celebrity that some Trump associates hope will next year highlight the former president’s signature criminal justice reform law, the First Step Act, which was one of Mr. Kushner’s key priorities during his time as an adviser in the White House.Although Mr. Harris is not a beneficiary of the sentencing law, having received his pardon on Mr. Trump’s last full day in office after serving decades in prison as part of a series of clemency grants, he has nonetheless become an evangelist for it.Mr. Trump, who has shown gains among Black voters in some recent polls, is hoping to win a slightly larger margin than he has in the past, with the potential to swing key states. He has been indicted four times, a fact that his advisers and allies insist — without offering any evidence — will somehow be helpful with Black voters because he asserts that he’s a victim of overzealous prosecution. (He has also repeatedly called the three Black prosecutors investigating him “racist.”)But some of his closest allies who have been trying to impress on him the value of boasting his own record on the issue insist that he has absorbed their message, though it is unclear whether that’s true or more of a projection of their own wishes.Mr. Harris declined to discuss what took place in their meeting, but he expressed gratitude toward the Trump administration in a statement and praised the sentencing law. “The passing of the First Step Act and similar initiatives surrounding” criminal justice reform “has provided much needed relief for so many deserving individuals and families,” he said.An aide to Mr. Kushner and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.Not everyone around the former president believes that he should highlight the First Step Act, which Mr. Trump himself soured on soon after signing it. Mr. Trump, who is often influenced by what he thinks his core voters want, felt affirmed in that view after a number of hard-core Republicans began to criticize it in 2021 and 2022 amid a rise in crime. Some of his conservative associates, who see the bill as problematic with Republicans, said privately that they were unhappy that he had met with Mr. Harris.While the issue poses a potential challenge for Mr. Trump’s team, the discussions also underscore a broader challenge for President Biden’s team heading into 2024: how to pin down an opponent who has a four-year record as well as decades’ worth of statements on almost every issue that are contradictory.Michael Harris, the founder of Death Row Records, was pardoned on Mr. Trump’s last full day in office.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Trump has a long history of making racist statements, including attacking a judge’s Mexican heritage; calling for the death penalty for the teenagers who were arrested and later coerced into giving confessions in a case of brutal rape in Central Park in 1989; telling a group of congresswomen of color — almost all of whom were born in the United States — to go back to their countries; and, perhaps most famously, insisting that the first Black president might not have been born in the United States.He has also grown increasingly violent in his rhetoric about crime in America, saying that he admires the freedom that despots have to execute drug dealers and that shoplifters should be shot on the spot.At the same time, he has made clear that he viewed the law, which, among other things, sought to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for some crimes, as something that should have won him support from Black voters.“Did it for African Americans,” he wrote to this reporter for a book in 2022 when asked about his repeated expressions of regret about the law. “Nobody else could have gotten it done. Got zero credit.”But the Democratic coalition of Black, Latino and younger voters has frayed since Mr. Biden’s victory, with Mr. Trump picking up support from those groups. And one difficulty in holding Mr. Trump to account is that he often has a contradictory set of words and actions that different people can latch onto.And the bipartisan First Step Act, which Mr. Trump signed in December 2018, is one part of his record that some of his allies believe they can use in 2024 to downplay his strongman rhetoric and actions around race and violence.“Trump was both bloodthirsty in his rhetoric but signed the First Step Act, which was significant sentencing reform,” said Michael Waldman, the president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice, who also served in the White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “Whether he truly believed in it or not, he did it.”While Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, attacked Mr. Trump over the law, calling it a “jailbreak” bill despite voting for an early version of it, his criticisms didn’t dent Mr. Trump’s support. And Republican criticisms of the law have become more muted as the party has coalesced around him.Both praising the legislation and making racist statements would be in keeping with Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, which was a mix of demagoguing immigrants and small-time criminals, using law-and-order rhetoric, and accusing Hillary Clinton of racism against Black men.It is also far from the only issue on which Mr. Trump has decades of action and statements he can point to that allow different people to read what they want into his behavior, and will happily play to whatever audience he’s in front of.Other than Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, no person is more responsible than Mr. Trump, who gave the Supreme Court its 6-3 conservative majority, for overturning the landmark decision that recognized abortion rights as constitutionally protected. Yet, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban signed by Mr. DeSantis a “terrible mistake,” and has refused to be specific about a national ban. That has alarmed Democrats, who worry he will try to appear moderate on the issue in a general election race against Mr. Biden.More recently, some of Mr. Biden’s allies watched angrily as the Spanish-language network Univision, which Mr. Trump has attacked in the past but now has new ownership, gave the former president a relatively soft interview, one that Mr. Kushner arranged, and minimized pushback from Mr. Biden’s team.It remains to be seen how willing Mr. Trump will be, if at all, to speak about the criminal justice law, or whether Mr. Harris might be asked to speak publicly.The same week that Mr. Harris met with Mr. Trump, the former president received a call from Alice Johnson, whose life sentence on charges related to cocaine possession and money laundering was commuted after a meeting between Mr. Trump and the celebrity Kim Kardashian. Ms. Johnson was the person who recommended to Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump that Mr. Harris be granted clemency.“My whole conversation was just encouragement” about the criminal justice reform bill, said Ms. Johnson, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2020 and was pardoned by Mr. Trump a short time later. She said no one had asked her to call him or engage in politics for him next year. But, she added, “he actually is proud of that piece of legislation.” More

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      We Talked to Some Kamala-but-Not-Joe Voters. Here’s What They Said.

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      A slice of voters would vote for Vice President Harris but not President Biden, reflecting his challenges and opportunities.Bridgette Miro, 52, a retired state employee in Glendale, Ariz., is a Republican, but said she would vote for President Biden because Kamala Harris was on the ticket.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesIn our recent poll of voters in battleground states, we asked how people would vote if Kamala Harris were running for president. Though Donald J. Trump still led in this hypothetical matchup, Vice President Harris performed slightly better than President Biden.She did particularly well among young and nonwhite voters — voters who were a key to Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory but who the poll suggests are less supportive of him this time.The voters who backed her but not Mr. Biden — about 5 percent of swing-state voters — would have given Mr. Biden the lead in the New York Times/Siena polls if they had supported him.We called back some of these Harris supporters to understand why they didn’t support Mr. Biden, and whether he could win them over.They show the serious challenges Mr. Biden faces. Some said he was too old, or they didn’t think he’d done much as president. Black voters in particular said they didn’t believe he was doing enough to help Black Americans.They also point to the opportunities for Mr. Biden. Though many said they’d probably vote for Mr. Trump, nearly all said that they weren’t excited about either option, and that Mr. Trump had personally offended them. For some, Democratic messaging on issues important to them, like abortion and the economy, hadn’t reached them.In a telling indication of how unsettled voters remain with a year to go, many of them expressed different opinions during the follow-up interviews than they did during the survey. In response to neutral questions, some who had said they were unsure became more sure of their support for either candidate by the end of the interview, and others switched their support after recalling their impressions of both candidates and talking more about their priority issues.A telephone call with a New York Times reporter is not the same as a conversation with friends or family. It’s not the same as a campaign advertisement, either. But it was an opportunity for a group of voters, some of them relatively disengaged, to think about the candidates, issues and campaigns.Here’s how the Harris supporters broke down:Harris superfansIf Ms. Harris were running for president, Bridgette Miro, 52, a retired state employee in Glendale, Ariz., who is Black, would vote for her “one hundred thousand percent.”She likes the work Ms. Harris did in California, where she was attorney general and a U.S. senator before she became vice president. She likes “the way she handles herself.” She likes that “her skin color is like my skin color.”In the poll and at the beginning of the interview, Ms. Miro said she would vote for Mr. Trump this election. She’s a Republican who said “I don’t have any feeling at all” about the job Mr. Biden has done as president. But by the end, she had switched her support to Mr. Biden, after recalling her negative views about Mr. Trump, who she said was racist and didn’t do enough to prevent police violence against Black people.“All of my frustration comes from the killing of Black individuals,” she said. “If we can have just someone in office who can control the police force just a little bit, that gives us a little bit of hope.”And then there was Ms. Harris: “If she’s on the ticket, I’m going to vote for her. It’s Kamala versus everybody.”‘She’s a Black woman’“I just think she has a lot more to offer than the standard straight old white dude,” said a 40-year-old artist in Georgia, who declined to share her name because she feared blowback given the country’s polarization. “I like the idea of a female lawyer.”A lifelong Democrat, she said in the poll that she would vote for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, whom she called “too old and a bit out of touch” and “a bit of a doofus.” Yet she believes the problems in the country had more to do with gerrymandered congressional districts than with Mr. Biden. By the end of the interview, she said she “will likely vote for him again — I’m just not happy about it.”Antonio Maxon, 25, a garbage collector and Ms. Harris supporter in Farrell, Pa., considers himself a Democrat. But he plans to vote for Mr. Trump because “he’s helped out countless Black people.”Justin Merriman for The New York TimesAntonio Maxon, 25, a garbage collector in Farrell, Pa., still plans to vote for Mr. Trump. But he likes Ms. Harris for a simple reason: “She’s a Black woman.” He said he lost faith in the political system after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. It’s important to him, he said, “just to see a female, a woman in power, being that I was raised mostly by females.” He added, “My father was not there, my mother raised me, my grandmother raised me.”Crime and police violenceFor some Black voters, Ms. Harris’s racial identity matters not only for representation, but because they say it gives her an understanding of the issues they face. It highlights a factor that may be driving some Black people from the Democratic Party. For years, it was seen as advancing the interests of Black voters, but these voters said Mr. Biden hadn’t done enough, while a Black president may have.“I feel like she would probably do more for us, because I feel like there’s not enough being done for Black people,” said Sonji Dunbar, 32, a program specialist for the Boys and Girls Club in Columbus, Ga. “I stay in a very urban area, there’s crime, so I feel like she could influence more programs to at least get that crime rate down, address police brutality.”Not Joe Biden“Honestly, it was more of a choice of it just not being Joe Biden,” said Clara Carrillo-Hinojosa, a 21-year-old financial analyst in Las Vegas, of her support for Ms. Harris. She said she would probably vote for Mr. Trump: “Personally, I think we were doing a lot better when he was in the presidency, price-wise, money-wise, income-wise.”Yet in some ways, Ms. Carrillo-Hinojosa is the kind of voter Mr. Biden hopes he can win once people start focusing on the race. Mr. Trump has offended her as a woman, she said, and she likes some of what Mr. Biden has done, including his support for Israel.Most of all, she said, she strongly supports abortion rights — and did not realize that Mr. Biden does, too. She said that because states’ abortion bans had gone into effect during his presidency, she assumed it was because of him. Ultimately, despite her misgivings about the economy, support for abortion rights would probably be what decided her vote, she said.Mr. Maxon, the 25-year-old garbage collector in Pennsylvania, considers himself a Democrat, though this election would be his first time voting. The Israel-Hamas war has made him doubt Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs, and he recalls policies under Mr. Trump that helped him.“My biggest thing is not seeing America fall in shambles,” he said. “With this war I think Biden is way too lenient — with Hamas, Iran, Iraq, the whole nine yards. What I like about Trump is he was keeping everybody at bay and not wanting to mess with America.”Mr. Maxon, who is Black, said Mr. Trump had made racist remarks, yet he plans to vote for him. “He’s helped out countless Black people, more than Biden did by a landslide,” he said. Specifically, he said, it was through pandemic unemployment assistance and other relief funding at the start of the pandemic (the Biden administration also distributed relief funding).No good optionMs. Dunbar, the 32-year-old from Georgia, is a Democrat, but did not have positive things to say about either candidate, and is unsure whom to vote for.“I don’t know too much or hear too much about what he’s doing,” she said of Mr. Biden’s presidency. She leaned toward Mr. Trump in the poll, but in the interview she said he seemed to carry too much baggage — comments he’s made about women, generalizations about racial or ethnic groups, the indictments against him.She says it’s important to vote, even when on the fence. Democrats have one thing going for them, she said: support for the issue most important to her, women’s rights.“Abortion comes into play with that,” she said. “I still like women to have their own choice with what to do with their bodies. And the way things have gone, it’s an agenda on women, period. Not just Black women, but women in general.” More

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      The Squandered Potential of Tim Scott

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this week having failed to make good on his early promise as a candidate who could broaden the party coalition in a general election. And while he could still have a long career ahead of him in Republican politics, his failure to connect with the primary electorate ought to trouble those pining for a more diverse and capacious G.O.P.Mr. Scott spent much of his campaign making hard-right appeals in a vain effort to wrest a portion of his party’s base from Donald Trump. For social conservatives, he offered a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks. For immigration and crime hard-liners, he supported ending birthright citizenship and committing troops to a war in Mexico against the drug cartels. In a recent appearance in Iowa, he even broadly alleged that Chinese college students studying in America could be “reporting back to the Chinese Communist Party.” And last month, he accused President Biden of having “blood on his hands” after Hamas attacked Israel, baselessly suggesting that by releasing Iranian oil revenue ⁠as part of a prisoner swap — for humanitarian uses, under American supervision — the president might have financed the massacre.None of this separated Mr. Scott, either in substance or in the polls, from the rest of the pack. But Mr. Scott did try make his candidacy distinctive in one important way: selling Republican voters, at every opportunity, a message of racial uplift that minimizes the extent to which racism still shapes American life.On paper, Mr. Scott was well positioned to deliver it.He could have been the first Black Republican nominee. Already, he is not only the South’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, but the first the region has ever popularly elected (he won a special election in 2014 after being appointed to his seat a year earlier by a rival 2024 candidate, Nikki Haley). And over the years, he has spoken often about his experiences as a Black man. He has described being pulled over on the road some 18 times in 20 years and being stopped by the Capitol Police on the way to work even as he wore a senator’s pin.Mr. Scott makes frequent reference, too, to voices on the left who have exposed their own racism by subjecting him to stereotypes and slurs and dismissing his agency. “When I fought back against their liberal agenda,” he said in the video announcing his presidential exploratory committee, “they called me a prop, a token, because I disrupt their narrative.”But Mr. Scott always sweetened these disclosures with a spoonful of sugar. “Is there racism in America?” he asked at a July campaign event. “Of course there is. Are the systems of our country racist? I don’t think so.” While racism lingers on, in other words, the strides we’ve made since slavery and the civil rights movement have been so great that we should deride those who argue it defines American identity or still structures our present.His own life story ⁠is, as far as he’s concerned, strong evidence in support of this idea. “Growing up in a single-parent household, I wondered if the American dream would work for a kid in the inner city,” he said at September’s Republican debate. “I’ve got good news for every single child, whether you’re in the inner cities of Chicago or the rural parts of Iowa. America and the dream — it is alive, it is well and it is healthy.”While most Republicans surely agreed that Mr. Scott’s background fatally undermined the critiques their opponents have been making of America and its history — “I am living proof that our founders were geniuses who should be celebrated, not canceled,” he told a crowd in Iowa early this year — they weren’t enthralled by his campaign, perhaps because Mr. Scott’s message of racial uplift doesn’t have more than a cerebral appeal to an overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate. Thus far, the party’s voters have preferred to get their defenses of American history straight and neat from Mr. Trump and Ron DeSantis, without the detours into personal narrative that Mr. Scott offered up.Mr. Scott insists often that he doesn’t want people to think about his race at all. “People are fixated on my color,” he said to Politico in a 2018 profile. “I’m just not.” There’s a similar line in “America: A Redemption Story,” Mr. Scott’s 2022 entry in a now-venerable genre, the pre-campaign memoir. “Today we live in a world that thrives on creating narratives of division,” it reads. “But my childhood and my life have not been defined by my blackness.”The book itself suggested otherwise — that Mr. Scott was not only as fixated on his own color as the critics he scorned but also as determined to make use of it. The words “Black” or “African American” appear 75 times, or once every three-and-a-half pages — often within its capsule biographies of Black figures like Jackie Robinson and Madam C.J. Walker, whom Mr. Scott evidently sees as his historic peers. In truth and by design, the book is as much a kind of Black History Month reader as it is about Mr. Scott’s own life. And even that material begins with his grandfather teaching his mother how to pick cotton.Ben Carson’s more successful run for the Republican nomination in 2016 seemed to have some of what Mr. Scott’s campaign lacked — though almost forgotten today, Mr. Carson, unlike Mr. Scott, actually found his way to the top tier of contenders for a time. To be sure, the substance of Mr. Carson’s commentary on race did resemble Mr. Scott’s. In a representative interview with the conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, he both denied the persistence of deep racial inequality in American society — “Race doesn’t really keep you down in this country if you get a good education” — and argued that the racism worth worrying about was coming from his progressive critics. “It’s mostly with the progressive movement who will look at someone like me, and because of the color of my pigment, they decide that there’s a certain way that I’m supposed to think,” he said. “And if I don’t think that way, I’m an Uncle Tom and they heap all kinds of hatred on you. That, to me, is racism.”But unlike Mr. Scott, Mr. Carson rarely discussed race of his own volition, on or off the stump. “Asked about it,” Molly Ball observed in The Atlantic, “he tends to deflect, rejecting racial distinctions as divisive.” And to the extent that Mr. Carson’s campaign did attempt to harness race to its advantage, as it did in a pair of conservative talk radio ads it aired before South Carolina’s primary that year, it did so the old-fashioned way: appealing to the racial anxieties and outright racism of white right-of-center voters. One of the South Carolina ads “inveighed against affirmative action as ‘racial entitlement’ while the other depicted Black crime as a ‘crisis,’” Ms. Ball wrote. “Taken together, the ads were a striking attempt to provoke white voters’ racial attitudes by a candidate who has otherwise avoided the subject.”Mr. Carson’s own bootstraps story, meanwhile, mirrors Mr. Scott’s in certain respects — both men came to success from poverty and broken homes — but Mr. Carson’s personal narrative was also a tale of Christian redemption. As he tells it, he worked past the anger and violence of his youth through studying the Bible, which made him famous among the conservative evangelicals who would take an interest in his campaign long before he entered politics.Mr. Scott has nothing like that story in his own narrative — a comparatively simple rags-to-Republican tale about the virtues of hard work and rejecting racial victimhood that, while appealing in the abstract to essentially everyone on the right, wasn’t compelling enough to excite any important constituency in particular. So where Mr. Carson ran largely as a conventional evangelical Republican candidate — racial dog whistles and all — Mr. Scott actively tried and failed to make a race-based message connect.It is important to note that Mr. Scott — a descendant of slaves who is, by all accounts, still warmly received in the North Charleston community where he grew up — is no less fully and authentically Black for being a conservative or having used his identity to sell conservatism. Criticisms of Mr. Scott on this front are inane. The Black community is ideologically diverse — and, in fact, substantively more conservative than the Democratic margins among Black voters might suggest.The pool of Black voters who are skeptical or hostile to the progressive movements that Mr. Scott reviles or who believe, as he does, that unshackling capitalism further might liberate struggling Black communities, may be even larger — and it includes Democrats and independents. This is what might have made Mr. Scott such a formidable general election contender: Given the thin electoral margins in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, even mild slippage rightward among Black voters could be potentially catastrophic for Democrats.But luckily for them, the G.O.P. is still Donald Trump’s party, and nothing Mr. Scott could have said or done would have changed that.Mr. Scott, in fact, has taken pains to frame himself as an occasionally critical but generally loyal friend of the former president, going as far as absolving him of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In his campaign memoir, Mr. Scott describes being invited to the White House for a conciliatory chat after publicly condemning Mr. Trump for what he said after the violence in Charlottesville. When Mr. Trump asked him what he could to do make amends to those he’d offended, Mr. Scott sensed an opportunity to plug Opportunity Zones — tax incentives for private investment in specific high poverty areas, a policy idea he’d nurtured for some time.“The next day, I was stunned to read about President Trump answering a question as he boarded Air Force One,” he writes. “When asked about how our meeting went, he started talking about the importance of rebuilding lower-income neighborhoods through Opportunity Zones.”Opportunity Zones eventually found their way into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and are talked up today, by Mr. Scott, as an example of how rejecting the politics of racial outrage — and, implicitly, countenancing the racism of Republican politicians like Mr. Trump — might pave the way toward making material, market-driven gains for racial minorities. The fact that nearly half of the tax breaks offered under the program thus far had gone to just 1 percent of the designated zones by the end of 2020 — and to projects like a $600 million Ritz-Carlton development in Portland, Ore. — is of no consequence to him.This is Mr. Scott’s dream and, by his lights, America’s: the notion that we might continue making racial progress (even though there’s not much left to make) with the business-friendly policy tools already available to us, and without fundamentally reworking our politics or our economy. It is a thoroughly conservative vision that was offered by a capable conservative spokesman — one who won the respect of Republican voters but not nearly enough of their support.Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Black Voters’ Shift to Trump Is a Warning Sign for Biden, Strategists Say

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      New York Times/Siena College polling painted a worrisome picture of the president’s standing with a crucial constituency. Democratic strategists warned that the erosion could threaten his re-election.Black voters are more disconnected from the Democratic Party than they have been in decades, frustrated with what many see as inaction on their political priorities and unhappy with President Biden, a candidate they helped lift to the White House just three years ago.New polls by The New York Times and Siena College found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of the most important battleground states said they would support former President Donald J. Trump in next year’s election, and 71 percent would back Mr. Biden.The drift in support is striking, given that Mr. Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters nationally in 2020 and 6 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. A Republican presidential candidate has not won more than 12 percent of the Black vote in nearly half a century.Mr. Biden has a year to shore up his standing, but if numbers like these held up across the country in November 2024, they would amount to a historic shift: No Democratic presidential candidate since the civil rights era has earned less than 80 percent of the Black vote.The new polling offers an early warning sign about the erosion of Mr. Biden’s coalition, Democratic strategists said, cautioning that the president will probably lose his re-election bid if he cannot increase his support from this pivotal voting bloc.A number of Democratic strategists acknowledged that the downbeat numbers in battleground states extended beyond Black voters to the party’s core constituencies, warning that the Biden campaign had to take steps to improve its standing, particularly with Black, Latino and younger voters. The Times/Siena polls surveyed registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster for Mr. Biden’s campaign in 2020, said the president’s political operation had not been “present enough” for Black Americans and younger voters.“I don’t think we’ve been voicing what we delivered to the African American community and particularly among younger African American men,” she said. “We have to get the numbers up and we have to get African American voters out to vote, and we have to get the numbers up with young people and we have to get them out to vote.”Mr. Biden’s numbers in the polling were particularly low among Black men. Twenty-seven percent of Black men supported Mr. Trump, compared with 17 percent of Black women.Still, there are signs that Democrats’ hurdles with Black voters, however alarming for the party, leave room for improvement. About a quarter of Black voters who said they planned to support Mr. Trump said there was some chance they would end up backing Mr. Biden.Cornell Belcher, who worked as a pollster for former President Barack Obama, said he doubted that many Black voters would switch their support to Mr. Trump. His bigger fear, he said, is that they might not vote at all.“I’m not worried about Trump doubling his support with Black and brown voters,” said Mr. Belcher, who focuses particularly on surveying voters of color. “What I am worried about is turnout.”He added: “But that’s what campaigns are for. We build a campaign to solve for that problem.”Karen Wright, a business consultant in McDonough, Ga., who immigrated to the United States from Jamaica in 1982, said she had always voted for Democrats, seeing them as the best option for younger immigrants, particularly those from predominantly Black countries like hers.Now, though, she believes Mr. Biden has not followed through on his campaign promises on immigration, worries that Democrats have gone too far in their embrace of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and faults them for books used in public education that she believes are too sexually explicit.Next year, Ms. Wright, 53, said that she planned to support Republicans up and down the ballot — and that she was not alone.“My clients are mostly Black,” she said. “They voted Democrat last year and they all said next election they’re going to vote Republican.”Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, a group that aims to mobilize Black voters in Milwaukee, said canvassers who worked with her organization had encountered an overwhelming number of Black voters who did not want to vote or did not see the value in turning out again.“People are like: ‘Why should I vote? I don’t feel like voting. Voting doesn’t do anything. My life hasn’t changed,’” she said, adding that the group had found that high prices and housing instability had fed people’s pessimism. “If your basic needs aren’t being met, it’s difficult to pay attention to politics and it’s difficult to have faith in that system when you voted before but you’re still struggling day to day.”Still, Cliff Albright, a veteran progressive organizer and a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said Democrats had time to get back on track. Black voters, he said, are responding to the same fears about economic and global uncertainty that many Americans are confronting.“We’re a year out from the election,” Mr. Albright said. “If you ask the very same people the same question a year from now, when the choice is very clear, the same 22 percent might have a very different answer.”He added: “Is there work to be done? Yes. But is the sky falling? No.”Black voters have long powered Democratic presidential victories. Their support in South Carolina in 2020 set Mr. Biden on the path to becoming the nominee. During the general election, Black voters were again crucial to his victory.Officials with Mr. Biden’s campaign acknowledge that they have work to do to shore up the president’s standing with Black voters. Erin Schaff for The New York TimesBiden campaign officials now say they recognize they have work to do with Black voters, and they and their allies have begun multimillion-dollar engagement campaigns targeting them.Last month, the Biden campaign started an organizing program in Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The campaign has dispatched top surrogates to hold events aimed at Black voters and has bought advertising on Black radio programs that promotes the “real difference for Black America” his policies have made. “President Biden is getting it done,” a narrator says. “For us. And that’s the facts.”Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said, “We know we have to get to work and we have to communicate with these voters and we have to do it earlier than ever before.”In interviews, Black voters said they had seen little progress from the Biden administration on some of their top priorities, including student loan debt relief, affordable housing and accountability for the police.Some worried that Mr. Biden was more focused on foreign policy than on domestic issues like inflation. In the Times/Siena poll, 80 percent of Black voters rated the economy as “only fair” or “poor.”A few said that their openness to supporting Mr. Trump, despite his offensive comments about Black communities and the 91 felony charges he faces in several criminal cases, reflected their disaffection with Mr. Biden and his party more than any real affinity for the former president.Keyon Reynolds-Martin, a father of one in Milwaukee, praised what he saw as Mr. Trump’s prioritizing of the economy and domestic policy, recalling the stimulus checks he received during the pandemic. Mr. Trump initially did not support the relief checks, which were spearheaded by Democrats. He later affixed his signature to them, representing the first time a president’s name had appeared on an Internal Revenue Service disbursement.Mr. Reynolds-Martin, 25, said he planned to vote for Mr. Trump next fall, when he casts his first ballot ever.Of Mr. Biden, he said, “He’s not giving money to help the United States, but he’s giving money to other countries,” adding, “At least Donald Trump was trying to help the United States.”Talitha McLaren, 45, a home health aide in Philadelphia, said she was undecided about whether to vote in 2024.She worries about a total erosion of democracy under a second Trump administration, but she is also frustrated with Mr. Biden and his party for failing to tackle rising costs that have not kept pace with her income and for not providing help with her student loan debt. On Tuesday, she plans to vote for the Democrat running for mayor of her hometown.“Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to support the Democrats,” she said. “But they haven’t won me over yet on what they’re trying to do for the country. Because what they’re doing now ain’t working.”Alyce McFadden More

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      Why Biden Is Behind, and How He Could Come Back

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      A polling deficit against Trump across six key states is mainly about younger, nonwhite and less engaged voters. Kamala Harris performs slightly better.Four years ago, Joe Biden was the electability candidate — the broadly appealing, moderate Democrat from Scranton who promised to win the white working-class voters who elected Donald J. Trump.There are few signs of that electoral strength today. More