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      Las lecciones de las campañas de Bush y Obama para Biden

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      En manos de un candidato hábil, las encuestas preliminares pueden ser un mapa de ruta para darle un giro total a una campaña en dificultades.Mucho antes del día de las elecciones en 2004, algunos estrategas le advirtieron al presidente George W. Bush que tendría una campaña difícil porque los electores estaban angustiados por la guerra en Irak y la economía, dos temas que esperaba sortear para llegar a un segundo mandato.Los asesores de Bush se apresuraron a restructurar la campaña. Su meta fue evitar que el público centrara su atención en el presidente y su historial y lograr, más bien, presentar al opositor demócrata más probable, el senador de Massachusetts, John Kerry, veterano de la guerra de Vietnam, como alguien que cambiaba de opinión con facilidad, que no era de fiar en temas de seguridad nacional y que no podía guiar a la nación, que todavía estaba recuperándose de los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre.“Identificamos una debilidad que sin duda podríamos explotar en nuestro beneficio en unas elecciones que se esperaba que fueran cerradas”, explicó Karl Rove, asesor político sénior de Bush durante mucho tiempo.Ocho años después, los asesores de otro presidente en funciones, Barack Obama, gracias a su análisis de varias encuestas públicas y privadas, llegaron a la conclusión de que las inquietudes de los votantes en torno a los efectos persistentes de la Gran Recesión y la dirección de la nación podrían arruinar sus posibilidades de llegar a un segundo mandato.Siguiendo el ejemplo de Bush, Obama ajustó su campaña y, en vez de poner énfasis en los logros obtenidos durante su primer mandato, se concentró en desacreditar a su opositor, el exgobernador de Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, presentándolo como un empresario adinerado totalmente desconectado de los estadounidenses de clase trabajadora.En esta era de división y polarización, el presidente Joe Biden no es el primero en recibir datos que parecen indicar que su reelección está en riesgo. El problema es que las campañas de reelección de Bush y Obama, quienes lograron ganar un segundo mandato en la Casa Blanca, ahora más bien son prueba de que las encuestas realizadas con tanta anticipación no pueden predecir lo que ocurrirá el día de las elecciones. En manos de un candidato hábil, incluso pueden ser un mapa de ruta para darle un giro total a una campaña en dificultades.Bush y Obama eran candidatos diferentes y enfrentaban obstáculos distintos: en el caso de Bush, el embrollo de una guerra; en el de Obama, una economía nacional sacudida por la crisis financiera global de 2008. Sin embargo, ambos decidieron transformar su campana de reelección de un referendo sobre el presidente en funciones a una operación para resaltar cuánto contrastaban con un opositor que ellos mismos definieron, con anuncios televisivos fulminantes, meses antes de que Romney o Kerry fueran nominados en las convenciones de sus partidos.En el caso contrario, un presidente republicano de la era moderna que perdió las elecciones para un segundo mandato, George H.W. Bush en 1992, cometió el error de ignorar los datos mostrados por las encuestas sobre la angustia de los electores en el tema de la economía y su avidez de un cambio tras 12 años de republicanos en la Casa Blanca.Bush padre, según dijeron sus asesores en entrevistas recientes, se confió por el reconocimiento del que fue objeto por su papel al frente de la coalición que expulsó a Saddam Hussein e Irak de Kuwait, además del desdén que sentía por su opositor, un joven gobernador demócrata que había evitado el reclutamiento militar y tenía un historial de relaciones extramaritales.El expresidente Barack Obama reformuló su campaña para centrarse en desacreditar a su oponente, Mitt Romney, y mostrarlo como un empresario adinerado totalmente desconectado de los estadounidenses de clase trabajadora.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Biden tiene grandes dificultades, pero creo que es posible ganar la contienda”, aseveró David Plouffe, antiguo asesor sénior en la campaña de reelección de Obama. “Claro que comprendo que un presidente o gobernador en funciones piense que las personas deban saber más sobre sus logros. Es cierto, pero, a fin de cuentas, esto es un ejercicio comparativo. Eso fue lo que descubrimos”.La Casa Blanca de Biden ha desestimado las encuestas —incluida una realizada por The New York Times en colaboración con el Siena College que se dio a conocer recientemente— por considerarlas poco significativas tanto tiempo antes de las elecciones. Los asesores del presidente indicaron que las victorias demócratas en las elecciones de este mes demuestran que el partido y su abanderado están en una buena posición.Sin embargo, después de meses de una campaña basada en sus logros económicos con pocas señales de éxito, Biden ha comenzado a centrar su atención en Donald Trump, el expresidente republicano que probablemente sea su opositor, en particular en sus políticas de inmigración y derecho al aborto. Por este motivo ahora se transmite un anuncio en el que el expresidente aparece caminando por un campo de golf mientras se escucha al anunciante decir que Trump apoyó los recortes fiscales “para sus amigos ricos”, mientras que las empresas estadounidenses fabricantes de automóviles tuvieron que cerrar plantas.“Por supuesto que estamos considerando opciones para propiciar conversaciones en torno a Trump y MAGA (sigla del eslogan “Hagamos a Estados Unidos grandioso de nuevo”) lo más que se pueda”, comentó Kevin Munoz, vocero para la campaña de Biden. No obstante, Munoz añadió: “Estamos en una posición diferente a la de Obama y Bush. Tuvimos excelentes resultados en las elecciones de medio mandato. Hemos tenido elecciones especiales muy exitosas. Nuestra teoría se demostró de nuevo el martes pasado”.Cambiar drásticamente la dinámica de la contienda puede resultar menos fructífero para Biden que para sus predecesores. Obama y George W. Bush lograron desacreditar a Romney y Kerry porque los electores, en esa etapa temprana de la campaña para las elecciones generales, no sabían mucho de ellos.En cambio, no hay mucho que la campaña de Biden pueda decirles a los electores acerca de Trump que no sepan ya (de hecho, tampoco pueden decirles mucho sobre Biden que no sepan ya). Además, al menos hasta ahora, Trump no ha pagado ningún costo político por el tipo de declaraciones (como cuando se refirió a sus críticos como “alimañas”) que en el pasado podrían haber estropeado las probabilidades de un candidato más convencional. Hasta ahora, el hecho de que se hayan presentado acusaciones formales en su contra por 91 delitos del ámbito penal en cuatro casos solo ha afianzado su apoyo.Cuando la campaña de Bush comenzó a planificar su reelección, se enfrentó a cifras de encuestas que, si bien no eran tan inquietantes para el presidente como algunas que han salido a la luz en las últimas semanas sobre Biden, sí eran motivo de preocupación. Una encuesta realizada por el Centro de Investigaciones Pew reveló que el 46 por ciento de los encuestados dijo que las políticas económicas de Bush habían empeorado la economía y el 39 por ciento dijo que las tropas estadounidenses debían regresar de Irak lo antes posible; frente al 32 por ciento del mes anterior.“Decidimos desde el principio que queríamos que las elecciones giraran en torno a la seguridad nacional, aunque la economía fuera el tema número uno”, dijo Matthew Dowd, el principal estratega de la campaña de Bush en 2004. “Estábamos en desventaja respecto a los demócratas en materia económica. Y como parte de esa estrategia, deseábamos definir a Kerry negativamente en materia de seguridad nacional desde el principio, y como un líder débil e inseguro para poder posicionar a Bush como un líder fuerte y sólido en materia de seguridad nacional”.Al poco tiempo, la campaña de Bush estaba al aire con anuncios que atacaban a Kerry por comprometerse a revertir la Ley Patriota, la cual le otorgaba al gobierno federal mayores poderes para perseguir a terroristas. Esa ley fue aprobada poco después de los ataques del 11 de septiembre con un apoyo abrumador en el Congreso, incluido Kerry.“John Kerry. Jugando a la política con la seguridad nacional”, decía un locutor.El expresidente George W. Bush se enfrentó a cifras de encuestas que, si bien no eran tan inquietantes para el presidente como algunas que han salido a la luz en las últimas semanas sobre Biden, sí eran motivo de preocupación.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOcho años más tarde, mientras Obama preparaba su campaña de reelección, muchos estadounidenses le dijeron a los encuestadores que el país iba en la dirección equivocada y que su situación financiera era peor que antes de que Obama asumiera el cargo. Por ejemplo, una encuesta del Washington Post/ABC News encontró que tres cuartas partes de los estadounidenses decían que el país iba en la dirección equivocada.Los asesores de Obama estudiaron las campañas de reelección de otros presidentes en funciones en problemas. “Sabíamos que la mayoría de las campañas de reelección eran un referéndum”, dijo Joel Benenson, quien fue el encuestador del equipo de Obama.“También sabíamos que teníamos una crisis económica masiva que no fue en absoluto culpa de Obama. Pero también sabíamos que era el presidente en funciones y no podía culpar a su predecesor por ello. No podíamos convencerlos de que la economía estaba mejorando”.Pero Romney, dijo, “no estaba completamente formado entre los votantes”, lo que presentó una oportunidad para resaltar su riqueza y retratarlo como alguien cuyas políticas favorecerían a los ricos.Por el contrario, George H.W. Bush, dijeron sus asesores, ignoró las advertencias, confiando en que el índice de aprobación de los votantes cercano al 90 por ciento que registró después de la guerra en Kuwait hacía que su reelección estuviera casi garantizada. “La adulación de la guerra de alguna manera silenció los instintos políticos normales de muchas personas cercanas al presidente”, dijo Ron Kaufman, quien fue asesor principal de esa campaña.Rove subrayó que la posición de Biden está más deteriorada en este momento que la de Bush padre en 1992. “Bush parecía no tener ideas para el futuro, pero la gente lo consideraba un ser humano admirable”, explicó Rove. “El problema de Biden es que la gente ha llegado a la conclusión de que no puede desempeñar el trabajo, pues es demasiado viejo y no tiene ni el vigor ni la agudeza mental necesarios para hacerlo”.En encuestas recientes conducidas por el Times y el Siena College en cinco estados clave, el 71 por ciento de los participantes respondió que Biden era “demasiado viejo” para ser un presidente efectivo.Plouffe afirmó que la campaña de Biden debería aprovechar la lección que aprendió el equipo de Obama después de estudiar la campaña perdedora de Bush padre. “La gente de Bush intentó convencer a los ciudadanos de que la economía estaba en mejores condiciones de lo que pensaban”, indicó. “Algo que he aprendido es que no puedes decirles a las personas qué pensar de la economía. Ellos te dirán lo que piensan de la economía”.“Yo empezaría cada discurso con la frase: ‘Estados Unidos tiene una decisión frente a sí, ambos somos hombres blancos mayores’”, afirmó Plouffe. “‘Pero hasta ahí llegan las similitudes’”.Adam Nagourney cubre política nacional para el Times, en especial la campaña de 2024. Más de Adam Nagourney More

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      The Bush-Obama Blueprint That Gives Biden Hope for ’24

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      President Biden isn’t the first incumbent to face grim polling a year out from Election Day.Well before Election Day in 2004, President George W. Bush was warned by strategists that he would face a tough campaign battle because of voter distress over the war in Iraq and over the economy — two issues he had once hoped to ride to a second term.Mr. Bush’s aides moved quickly to retool the campaign. They turned attention away from the president and his record and set out to portray his likely Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Vietnam War veteran, as a flip-flopper, unreliable on national security and unfit to lead a nation still reeling from the terror attacks of Sept. 11.“We saw a weakness we knew we could exploit to our advantage in what was going to be a close election,” said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s longtime senior political adviser.Eight years later, aides to another sitting president, Barack Obama, reviewing public and private polls, concluded that concern among voters about the lingering effects of the Great Recession and the direction of the nation could derail his hopes for a second term.Taking a lesson from Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama recast his campaign away from his first-term record and set out to discredit his opponent, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, as a wealthy businessman unsympathetic to working-class Americans.President Biden is hardly the first president during this era of division and polarization to be confronted with polling data suggesting his re-election was at risk. But the re-election campaigns rolled out by Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama, who both returned to second terms in the White House, stand today as reminders that polls this early are not predictions of what will happen on Election Day. In the hands of a nimble candidate, they can even be a road map for turning around a struggling campaign.Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama were different candidates facing different obstacles: a quagmire of a war for Mr. Bush, a domestic economy shaken by the global financial crisis of 2008 for Mr. Obama. But both moved to transform their re-election campaigns from a referendum on the incumbent into a contrast with an opponent they defined, with slashing television advertisements, months before either Mr. Romney or Mr. Kerry were nominated at their party conventions.By contrast, a modern-day Republican president who lost a bid for a second term, George H.W. Bush in 1992, failed to heed polls showing voters distressed about the economy and ready for a change after 12 years of Republicans in the White House.The elder Mr. Bush, his aides said in recent interviews, was lulled by the accolades for leading the coalition that repelled Saddam Hussein and Iraq out of Kuwait, and contempt for his opponent, a young Democratic governor who had avoided the draft and had a history of extramarital liaisons.Former President Barack Obama recast his campaign to discredit his opponent, Mitt Romney, as a wealthy businessman unsympathetic to working-class Americans.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Biden has a very high degree of difficulty but I think the race is winnable,” said David Plouffe, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. “Listen, I have sympathy for an incumbent president or governor who says, ‘people need to know more about my accomplishments.’ That is true, but at the end of the day this is a comparative exercise. That’s the one thing we learned.”The Biden White House has dismissed polls — including a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week — as meaningless this far before Election Day. The president’s advisers pointed to Democratic gains in this month’s elections as evidence that the party and its standard-bearer are in fine shape.Yet, after months of trying to run on his economic record with little sign of success, Mr. Biden has begun turning his attention more to Donald J. Trump, the Republican former president and his likely opponent, particularly his policies on immigration and abortion rights. That includes an advertisement that shows Mr. Trump plodding through a golf course as the announcer said that Mr. Trump pushed through tax cuts “for his rich friends” while U.S. automakers shut down plants.“We are absolutely looking at ways that we can help drive the conversation around Trump and MAGA as much as we can,” said Kevin Munoz, the Biden campaign spokesman. But, Mr. Munoz added, “We are in a different position than Obama and Bush. We had very strong midterms. We have had very strong special elections. Our theory of the case was proved again last Tuesday.”Upending the race dynamics might prove more daunting for Mr. Biden than for his predecessors. Mr. Obama and George W. Bush were able to discredit Mr. Romney and Mr. Kerry because voters, at this early stage of the general election campaign, did not know much about them.But there is not much the Biden campaign can tell voters about Mr. Trump that they don’t already know. (Or for that matter, not much Mr. Biden can tell voters about Mr. Biden that they don’t already know.) And Mr. Trump has, so far at least, not paid a political cost for the kind of statements — such as when he described his critics as “vermin” — that might have previously derailed a more conventional candidate. Being indicted on 91 criminal counts in four cases has, so far, only solidified his support.When Mr. Bush’s campaign began planning for his re-election, they confronted polling numbers that — while not as unnerving for the president as some that have come out in recent weeks about Mr. Biden — were cause for concern. A poll by the Pew Research Group found that 46 percent of respondents said Mr. Bush’s economic policies had made the economy worse and 39 percent said American troops should be brought back from Iraq as soon as possible; up from 32 percent the month before.“We decided early on that we wanted to make the election about national security even though the economy was the No. 1 issue,” said Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign. “We were at a disadvantage to Dems on the economy. And as part of that strategy, we desired to define Kerry negatively on national security early on, and as a weak flip-flopping leader so we could position Bush as a strong leader and strong on national security.”Before long, the Bush campaign was on the air with advertisements assailing Mr. Kerry for pledging to roll back the Patriot Act, giving the federal government expanded powers to go after terrorists. The Patriot Act was passed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks with overwhelming support in Congress — including Mr. Kerry.“John Kerry. Playing politics with national security,” an announcer said.Former President George W. Bush confronted polling numbers that — while not as unnerving for the president as some that have come out in recent weeks about Mr. Biden — were cause for concern.Doug Mills/The New York TimesEight years later, as Mr. Obama mounted his re-election campaign, many Americans were telling pollsters that the country was heading in the wrong direction and that they were worse off financially than they had been before Mr. Obama took office. For instance, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found three-quarters of Americans saying the country was heading in the wrong direction.Mr. Obama’s advisers studied the re-election campaigns of other embattled sitting presidents. “We knew that most re-elect campaigns were a referendum,” said Joel Benenson, who was the pollster for Mr. Obama’s team. “We also knew we had this massive economic crisis which absolutely was not all of Obama’s making. But we also knew you are the incumbent president, and you can’t blame it on your predecessor. We couldn’t convince them that the economy was getting better.”But Mr. Romney, he said, “was not fully formed with voters,” which was an opportunity to spotlight his wealth and portray him as someone whose policies would favor the rich.By contrast, George H.W. Bush, aides said, disregarded the warnings, confident the near 90 percent voter approval rating he registered after the war in Kuwait made his re-election all but certain. “The adulation from the war somehow muted the normal political instincts of a lot of people around the president,” said Ron Kaufman, who was a senior adviser to that campaign.Mr. Rove said Mr. Biden was in worse shape today than the elder Mr. Bush had been in 1992. “Bush seemed bereft of ideas for the future, but people saw him as an admirable human being,” Mr. Rove said. “The problem for Biden is that people have concluded he’s not up to the job — too old and lacking the necessary stamina and mental acuity.”In recent polls conducted in five battleground states by The New York Times and Siena College, 71 percent of respondents said Mr. Biden was “too old” to be an effective president.Mr. Plouffe said the Biden campaign should embrace the lesson the Obama campaign learned studying the losing campaign of the elder Mr. Bush. “The Bush people tried to convince people that the economy was better than they thought it was,” he said. “One thing I’ve learned is you can’t tell people what they think about the economy. They’ll tell you what they think about the economy.”“I’d start every speech saying, ‘America is faced with a choice, we are both old white men,’” Mr. Plouffe said. “‘But that’s where the similarities end.’” More

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      Democrats Need to Pick Up the Pace of Putting Judges on the Bench

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      With the outcome of the 2024 elections for the president and control of the Senate very much up in the air, Democrats must make a concerted effort to fill federal judicial vacancies before next November.Republicans did this very effectively before the end of the Trump presidency, leaving few vacancies for President Biden to fill when he took office. Now the Democrats must emulate that approach. And they must do so now.At the moment, there are two vacancies without nominees on appeals courts and 37 on district courts. Because the evaluation process of nominees takes time, it is imperative that the Biden administration quickly name nominees to those and future vacancies. The Senate then must work expeditiously to confirm those deemed suitable for the lifetime appointments.Mr. Biden has nominated 186 people to Article III judgeships, which include the Supreme Court and the federal appeals and district courts, according to the White House. At this point in their tenures, George W. Bush had nominated 211, followed by Mr. Trump’s 206, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Judicial Appointment Tracker. There have been inexplicable and troubling delays in this process. For example, two years ago, Judge Diana Motz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., announced that she would take senior status, a form of semiretirement, when a successor was confirmed. She took senior status last year, though no replacement had been named at that time. And still no one has been nominated for this important judgeship.Time may be running out for the Biden administration.It is critical for federal judges who would like to be replaced by a Democratic president to take senior status so that Mr. Biden can appoint their successors with sufficient time to allow them to be confirmed by the current Senate. A federal judge or justice may take senior status after meeting the age and service requirements of the “Rule of 80” — the judge must be at least 65 years old, and the judge’s age and years of service must add up to 80. A total of 121 federal judges are now eligible for senior status but have not announced their plans, according to the group Balls and Strikes, which tracks that information. Of those, 44 were appointed by Democratic presidents. By Jan. 20, 2025, the date of the next presidential inauguration, that number could rise to 69.There is little reason for judges not to take senior status. They can continue to hear cases, even carry a full load of cases. And taking senior status allows the president to fill that seat on the bench. The judge can condition taking senior status on the confirmation of a successor. A senior judge typically is not allowed to participate in en banc decisions, where all (or a significant number) of the judges on the court review a matter that is particularly significant or complex. But that is the main restriction on what a senior judge may do.We are long past the time when it could be said that judges appointed by Republican and by Democratic presidents were indistinguishable. This was made clear in an analysis of Supreme Court rulings published in July 2022 by the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight, which found the partisan divide among the current justices “is deeper than it’s been in the modern era.”And this partisan divide is not confined to the Supreme Court. There are often huge differences between how judges in the lower courts who were appointed by Democratic and by Republican presidents decide cases. For example, a federal appeals court recently upheld Tennessee and Kentucky laws prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors, with the two Republican-appointed judges siding with the states and a judge initially nominated by President Bill Clinton dissenting. Whether it is reproductive rights or gun rights or employee rights, or in countless other areas, the outcome often depends on which president appointed the judge or judges hearing the case.For that reason, I wrote an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times in March 2014 urging Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then 81, to retire so that President Barack Obama could replace her while there was a Democratic Senate and someone with progressive values would take her seat. She took offense at the suggestion, also raised by others, and remained on the bench until she died in September 2020, when President Trump replaced her with the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Ginsburg gambled, and America lost.Likewise, I think of the liberal federal court of appeals judges who did not take senior status, though they were eligible during the Obama presidency. For example, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit declined to take senior status; when he died at age 87 in 2017 President Trump replaced him with a conservative judge. By the time another liberal Ninth Circuit judge, Harry Pregerson, decided to take senior status in late 2015, he was 92, and though Mr. Obama quickly nominated a replacement, it was late in his term and got caught up in politics and President Trump ended up appointing another conservative to the seat.Creating vacancies will matter only if Mr. Biden quickly names replacements and the Senate confirms the nominees. If the president is not re-elected, the Republican president will fill any vacancies that exist upon taking office. And regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, if the Republicans take control of the Senate, the confirmation of judicial candidates nominated by a Democratic president will be far more difficult. That is why immediate action is imperative.A president’s most long-lasting legacy is arguably the judges he appoints. Many will serve for decades after the president leaves office. Republicans have tended to recognize this much more than Democrats. That needs to change, and quickly.Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.Source photographs by John Slater and SergeyChayko/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      It’s Not a Race, Yet, in the Republican Primary

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      Donald Trump is polling about as well as any candidate in the modern history of contested presidential primaries.Reba Saldanha/ReutersDonald J. Trump’s lead in the Republican primary just keeps growing.He breached 60 percent of the vote in Fox News and Quinnipiac polls last week, including 60-13 and 62-12 leads over his nearest rival, the not-so-near Ron DeSantis.Even more notable: His gains follow what would be considered a disastrous 50-day stretch for any other campaign. Since early August, he has faced new federal and state criminal indictments for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. He skipped the first presidential debate, which was nonetheless watched by over 10 million people. Not only did it not hurt him, but he came out stronger.With these latest gains, Mr. Trump is inching into rarefied territory. The latest surveys show him polling about as well as any candidate in the history of modern contested presidential primaries. He’s approaching the position of George W. Bush, who led John McCain by a similar margin at this stage of the 2000 race. And in the two aforementioned polls, he’s matching Mr. Bush’s position.The 2000 election is a helpful reminder that the race might still become more competitive. Mr. Bush skipped the first two debates, but Mr. McCain ultimately won New Hampshire, cleared the field of significant opponents, and ultimately won six more contests. He didn’t win, of course. He didn’t come close. But it was at least a race. That’s more than can be said right now for Mr. Trump’s competition, which would probably go 0 for 50 if states voted today.On paper, Mr. Trump faces greater risks than Mr. Bush did — including the risk of imprisonment. On the trail, he’s relatively weak in Iowa, where his recent comments about abortion — he called a six-week ban a “terrible thing” — might raise additional skepticism from the state’s religious conservatives. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in Iowa (roughly 45-15) is quite similar to where Mr. Bush stood in New Hampshire at this time 24 years ago.Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Trump hasn’t consolidated the support of Republican elites. Unlike Mr. McCain, Mr. DeSantis is not a mere factional candidate. There remains a chance, unlikely though it may seem today, that Mr. Trump’s skeptics could consolidate against him, perhaps fueled by an unprecedented criminal trial in the heart of the primary season.But to this point, the theoretical risks to Mr. Trump haven’t materialized. More than anything, this probably reflects his unique strengths. He’s a former president, not the son of a former president. Perhaps this race is more like a president seeking re-election than a typical open, contested primary. At the very least, his resilience in the face of electoral defeat and criminal indictment is a powerful indication of his unusual standing.And in contrast with Mr. McCain at this stage in the 2000 race, Mr. Trump’s opposition is well known. It’s probably fair to say that Mr. DeSantis has faded more than he has been outright defeated, so there’s room for a resurgence — something like Mr. McCain’s comeback in 2008. But the easiest path to surge in a primary is usually to be discovered by voters for the first time, and that path will not be available to the likes of Mr. DeSantis, Mike Pence and Chris Christie.The winner of the first debate might have been Nikki Haley, but she represents something of a best case for Mr. Trump: moderate and strong enough to peel away anti-Trump votes from Mr. DeSantis; far too moderate to pose a serious threat to Mr. DeSantis or to win the nomination.So while history and today’s circumstances suggest a path toward a tighter race, it’s worth being frank about what we’re watching today. This race currently has many of the features of a noncompetitive contest, like an overwhelming polling lead, a leading candidate who doesn’t need to debate and party leadership that’s unwilling to attack the front-runner, despite major reservations. It’s a lot like what we see in the Democratic race, which is not considered competitive. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in the latest polls is getting about as large as President Biden’s recent leads over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Of course, there are several ways in which the Republican contest is different from the Democratic one. Unlike Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has mainstream challengers. The G.O.P. race is closer in the early states, where Mr. Trump is beneath 50 percent. If Mr. DeSantis beat Mr. Trump in Iowa, perhaps Republicans could rapidly coalesce around him, much as moderates did for Mr. Biden against Bernie Sanders in 2020. And there is the extraordinary prospect of a federal trial in March. Together, it’s easy to imagine how this becomes a competitive race again.But while the race might become hotly competitive in the future, it isn’t exactly a competitive one today. More

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      The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket

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      This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.The country needs a right-of-center party. But today, as the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.The Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.Along with that activism came the constriction of the party’s vision for the public good. Starting in the 1970s, Republicans won elections by marrying a regressive economic agenda with us-versus-them populist appeals. At moments like the “Reagan revolution,” Jack Kemp’s work to broaden conservatism’s appeal to more working-class voters or George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s ambition to build an enduring Republican majority around an “opportunity society,” the party’s collective effort could take on a confident and expansive cast.But the programmatic side of the party, under the leadership of figures like Paul Ryan (a Kemp protégé), came eventually to alienate even the party’s own base with an unpopular agenda more and more tailored to the affluent.By 2016, as a demagogue unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.But conspiracy and party have an even longer history, one that stretches back to the frenzied and unbounded politics of the early Republic. In the 1790s, the emergent parties of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans fell into personalized strife, but possessed neither the legitimacy nor the machinery to channel and stabilize the conflict. The organizers of new party activity on both sides were, to a one, avowedly antiparty politicians, and so they conceived of their efforts as a temporary expediency — emergency measures necessary to combat the nefarious conspiracies threatening to undermine the Constitution.In an era in which personal reputation was still inextricable from conflict over public matters, politicians refused to accept their opponents as legitimate, let alone as constituting a loyal opposition.For example, the vitriol and paranoia that attended the election of 1800, pitting the incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, underscored the danger that a politics unfettered by strong parties poses to the Republic. The election featured not merely epic bouts of mudslinging but credible threats of collective violence and secession from both sides.The construction of mass political parties in subsequent generations — organizations with huge electoral bases and institutions like nominating conventions for party decision-making — channeled individual ambition into collective public purposes. At times, to be sure, as when Democratic pioneers of the mass party of the 19th century aimed for a cross-sectional politics that would sideline the divisive slavery question, the stability achieved through party politics actually suppressed conflict necessary to providing genuine political alternatives.But with mass parties came a shared understanding that the erosion of collective party principle could threaten a reversion to the 18th century’s politics-as-cabal. As the early political scientist Francis Lieber put it in 1839, “all parties are exposed to the danger of passing over into factions, which, if carried still farther, may become conspiracies.”The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to that danger, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.This is not to impugn every Republican. As confirmed by both the federal and Georgia election-related indictments, many Republican officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, resisted intense pressure to interfere with the election and did their duty. And for all their defenses of Mr. Trump against his several indictments, his Republican presidential rivals have generally shied away from taking the critical step of saying they would have acted differently from Mike Pence when the Electoral College votes were counted at the Capitol on Jan. 6.But these responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.Might that project emerge from Republican governors? Lacking the option of substituting antics for governance, they have forged viable approaches in power. Indeed, many of the country’s most popular governors are Republicans.But our polarized political system is also a nationalized one, where state-level success as a problem solver too often obstructs rather than clears a path to national influence within the Republican Party. And we have no illusions that behavior dangerous to democracy will lead to long-lasting punishment at the polls.To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.Sam Rosenfeld, an associate professor of political science at Colgate, and Daniel Schlozman, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, are the authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”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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      With DeSantis Reeling, What About Tim Scott?

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      Last Sunday, I argued that despite his stagnation in the polls, for Republicans (and non-Republicans) who would prefer that Donald Trump not be renominated for the presidency, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida remains pretty much the only possible alternative.Naturally the week that followed was the worst yet for DeSantis, beginning with a campaign staff purge that featured a Nazi-symbol subplot and ending with the candidate doing damage control for his suggestion that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might run his Food and Drug Administration.The worst news for DeSantis, though, was new polls out of Iowa showing Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina creeping up on him, with around 10 percent support, to the governor’s roughly 15 percent.One of my arguments a week ago was that no other Republican, Scott included, had yet shown any capacity to build the support that even a stagnant DeSantis enjoys. But if the governor falls into a sustained battle for second place, he’s probably finished, and Trump can probably just cruise.Unless that battle results in a DeSantis collapse and a chance for someone else to go up against the front-runner. After all, why should DeSantis be the only non-Trump hope just because he seemed potent early on? Why not, well, Tim Scott?Say this for Scott: He has an obvious asset that DeSantis is missing, a fundamental good cheer that Americans favor in their presidents. Say this as well: He has the profile of a potent general-election candidate, an African American and youthful-seeming generic Republican to set against Joe Biden’s senescence. Say this, finally: Scott sits in the sweet spot for the Republican donor class, as a George W. Bush-style conservative untouched by the rabble-rousing and edgelord memes of Trump-era populism.But all of these strengths are connected to primary-campaign weaknesses. To beat Trump, you eventually need around half the Republican electorate to vote for you (depending on the wrinkles of delegate allocation). And there’s no indication that half of Republican primary voters want to return to pre-2016 conservatism, that they would favor a generic-Republican alternative to Trump’s crush-your-enemies style or that they especially value winsomeness and optimism, as opposed to a style suited to a pessimistic mood.The reason that DeSantis seemed like the best hope against Trump was a record and persona that seemed to meet Republican voters where they are. His success was built after Trump’s election, on issues that mattered to current G.O.P. voters, not those of 30 years ago. He could claim to be better at the pugilistic style than Trump — with more to show for his battles substantively and more political success as well. On certain issues, Covid policy especially, he could claim to represent the views of Trump’s supporters better than Trump himself. And with DeSantis’s war on Disney, nobody would confuse him for a creature of the donor class.All this set up a plausible strategy for pulling some Trump voters to DeSantis’s side by casting himself as the fulfiller of Trump’s promise — more competent, more politically able, bolder, younger and better suited to the times.This strategy was working five months ago, and now it’s failing. But its failure doesn’t reveal an alternative pitch, and certainly Scott doesn’t appear to have one. Indeed, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last points out, Scott isn’t really casting himself as a Trump alternative; he’s mostly been “positioning himself as an attractive running mate for Trump, should the Almighty not intervene” and remove the former president from the race.So for him to surpass DeSantis and become Trump’s main adversary could be what Last describes as a “catastrophic success.” It might lead to a weird sacrificial-lamb campaign, in which Scott contents himself with the quarter of the primary electorate that currently supports him in head-to-head polling against Trump. Or it could push him to come up with a pitch to be Trump’s successor. But it’s hard to see what would make that pitch stronger than the one that isn’t currently working for DeSantis.After all, the governor has a substantial record of policy victories; Scott has rather fewer. DeSantis has been successful in a contested political environment; Scott is a safe-seat senator. DeSantis was arguably as important a Republican as Trump during the crucial months of the Covid era; Scott was insignificant. DeSantis has struggled to expand his policy pitch beyond Covid and anti-wokeness; Scott doesn’t even have that kind of base to build on.For DeSantis to defeat Trump would make sense in light of the G.O.P. landscape as we know it. For Scott to win would require a total re-evaluation of what we think we know about Republicans today.Such re-evaluations happen, or else Trump himself wouldn’t have been president. Success creates unexpected conditions; if Scott surpasses DeSantis, he will have the chance to make the most of them.But for now, his climb in the polls looks like a modest victory for his own campaign and a bigger one for Trump’s.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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      It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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      In the summer of 2006, I jumped into the ring for a few rounds of debate with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was peddling reckless claims about an important issue on which he lacked expertise. It wasn’t vaccines. It was the 2004 presidential race. In an article for Rolling Stone, Kennedy suggested that the election had been stolen from John Kerry — a suggestion that, after thorough reporting, didn’t hold up.But now I see where I went wrong. Not on the merits; there’s still no case that Kerry actually won in 2004. My mistake was attempting to debate and debunk Kennedy in the first place. At best, the effort was a waste of time and energy; at worst, a big bow-wrapped gift of the thing a conspiracy theorist desires most — recognition that his arguments are important enough to merit serious debate.After getting in the mud with Kennedy all those years ago, I realized something important that we’d do well to remember now, as Kennedy mounts a long-shot run against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination: You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there’s no real way to “win” an argument. For people whose views aren’t anchored to facts, winning is simply getting attention — and when you publicly argue with someone like Kennedy, you’ve already lost.I got to thinking about all of this last week, when Kennedy went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and served up a helping of misinformation on the issue for which he is best known, his conviction that several common, widely-used vaccines are harmful.When Peter Hotez, a well-known vaccine researcher, tweeted a link to a Vice story critical of Rogan’s anti-vaccine statements and Kennedy’s appearance on the show, Rogan offered a $100,000 charitable donation if Hotez would come on the podcast to debate Kennedy. Not long after, Elon Musk chimed in, and soon an avalanche of Twitterati were pledging money for a debate; according to one Twitter user who claims to have been tracking the pledges, the pot is now over $2 million.So far, Hotez has courageously refused to take the bait, rejecting, as a physician and scientist, an effort to goad him into defending his work from a skeptic who has for years resisted evidence on vaccines. A back-and-forth between Kennedy and Hotez or another vaccine expert wouldn’t prove anything. And that’s not scientists’ method, anyway. They have established ways of assessing empirical questions — you know, things like lab experiments and clinical trials — and none of them involve owning an interlocutor on a popular podcast.And what would winning a debate with Kennedy even mean? As I learned when I argued with him about the 2004 election, trying to fight misinformation with facts is a tricky business. One side is bound by clearly documented evidence; the other side is free to cherry pick factoids from anywhere, to assert that establishment institutions are inherently suspect and that efforts to fact-check their claims amount to nit-picking, and that anyone who doesn’t see a bigger narrative in a collection of loosely related stories is, in effect, a naïf.I was a reporter at Salon during the 2004 election cycle. I’d spent several months before Election Day covering the ways America had been changing its voting systems since the fiasco of 2000, including the adoption in some places of electronic voting machines that could be vulnerable to hackers or other security lapses. Throughout that time I’d cultivated many sources in the insular, nerdy world of election administration and I’d become familiar with the minutiae of how elections are run.This left me well-prepared for what happened after Election Day — a barrage of theories from people on the left that, due to the electronic voting machines or other problems, the election had been stolen. In his Rolling Stone piece, referring to George W. Bush, Kennedy wrote that he’d “become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004.” He argued that in Ohio, where Bush’s victory put him over the top in the Electoral College, enough Kerry votes were uncounted, flipped or otherwise kept out of the race to cast doubt on Bush’s roughly 118,000-vote margin in that state.I investigated many of these theories, often by consulting the sources I’d cultivated. Kennedy was right that the 2004 election had been rife with irregularities and efforts at disenfranchising voters, particularly in Ohio, where a partisan secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, had overseen several divisive voting measures and obstacles. But pretty much every expert I talked to said that none of the issues were likely big enough to have undone Bush’s win. An investigation by the Democratic National Committee which looked at precinct level voting counts found that the data “does not suggest the occurrence of widespread fraud that systematically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.”And so: I wrote a point-by-point debunking of Kennedy’s breathless claims. Then Kennedy wrote a rebuttal to my rebuttal, which I, again, rebutted.For a week or two this dust-up took over my life. Salon, a generally liberal-leaning publication, was deluged by letters from readers angry that I was defending Bush’s win. Thankfully, my editors supported me, and I remember coming away from the episode feeling bruised but journalistically vindicated: A man with a famous political name was wrong on the internet, and, armed with the facts, I had stepped in to correct the record.Looking back, though, I cringe. The other day I went back and listened to a debate I had with Kennedy on public radio’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” Lehrer opened the program by asking Kennedy for his big-picture case. But whether Kennedy is talking about vaccines, elections or other out-there topics (he told Rogan he is “aware” that he could be assassinated by the American government) he tends to present his theories in a particular way. He starts with a few sprinkles of truth — Ohio’s vote was run by a partisan official, some vaccines have serious side effects — and then swirls them up with enough exaggerations, omissions and leaps of logic to create a veritable McFlurry of doubt.Such was his effort when we met on Lehrer: Kennedy offered an assortment of claims about the election that, in big and small ways, were unsubstantiated. So when Lehrer turned to me, I felt I had no choice but to start out by correcting Kennedy’s misstatements. I did so pretty handily, but because I had to point to sources and tease out the nuances Kennedy had elided, I couldn’t help but sound like the boring, persnickety nerd stuck in the weeds. After a few rounds of this back-and-forth, I can’t imagine that much of anything had been clarified for the audience. Instead, the impression was one of earnest complexity: One side says X, the other says Y, but whoever is right, it sure seems like this is a debate we should be having.At one point, Kennedy even made this plain: “You’ll be able to dispute the numbers till the end of time,” he told Lehrer of the faults I found in his case. “Mr. Manjoo,” he continued, “has made a cottage industry of reciting the Republican talking points” by bringing up “arcane disputes of each of these numbers.” “The numbers are correct,” Kennedy claimed, but the arguments over facts were “almost a side issue.” The real story, he said, is that Republicans tried to suppress Democratic votes and “they probably succeeded or may or may not have succeeded in shifting the vote to President Bush, but they certainly tried, and the press has not covered this issue.”In other words: Each side has their own numbers. We’ll never know what actually happened. This guy sounds like a Republican. My story could be right. And isn’t it suspicious that no one is talking about it?Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.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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      Mike Pence Is ‘a Rebuke of Trump’s Presidency’: Our Columnists and Writers Weigh In on His Candidacy

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Mike Pence, the former vice president.Candidate strength averagesRon DeSantis: 6.1Tim Scott: 4.6Nikki Haley: 3.5Mike Pence: 3.0Asa Hutchinson: 2.3How seriously should we take Mike Pence’s candidacy?Frank Bruni At least a bit more seriously than the fly that colonized his coiffure during his 2020 debate with Kamala Harris did. He is polling well enough to be part of the Republican primary debates. Let’s hope that Chris Licht at CNN has an entomologist at the ready for the post-debate panel.Jane Coaston Not very.Michelle Cottle As seriously as the wet dishrag he impersonated for most of his term as V.P.Ross Douthat On paper, a former vice president known for his evangelical faith sounds like a plausible Republican candidate for president. But in practice, because of Pence’s role on Jan. 6 and his break with Donald Trump thereafter, to vote for Trump’s vice president is to actively repudiate Trump himself. So until there’s evidence the G.O.P. voters are ready for such an overt repudiation (as opposed to just moving on to another candidate), there isn’t good reason to take Pence’s chances seriously.David French Nothing signals G.O.P. loyalty to Trump more than G.O.P. anger at Mike Pence. And what sin has he committed in Republican eyes? After years of faithful service to Trump, he refused to violate the law and risk the unity of the Republic by wrongly overturning an American election. We can’t take Pence seriously until Republicans stop taking Trump seriously.Michelle Goldberg One clue to Mike Pence’s standing among Republican base voters is that many of them have made heroes out of a mob chanting “hang Mike Pence.”Nicole Hemmer On the one hand, he’s the former vice president, which has to count for something. On the other hand, a mob whipped up by the former president wanted to hang him in front of Congress, so his candidacy is a high-risk proposition.Katherine Mangu-Ward Mike Pence is a serious person. He is seriously not going to be president.Daniel McCarthy As things stand, his candidacy isn’t very serious. If calamity befalls Donald Trump, however, the former vice president could gain favor as the G.O.P. old guard’s alternative to Ron DeSantis.What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Bruni He was Trump’s No. 2, so the fact of his candidacy is a rebuke of Trump’s presidency. He has a warm history with evangelical voters, whom he will assiduously court. And if squaring off against Trump somehow prods Pence to be more candid about what he saw at the fair, his words could theoretically wound.Coaston It is a candidacy no one wants.Cottle He’s a uniter: Everyone dislikes him.Douthat As long as he’s polling in the single digits, he matters only as a condensed symbol of the Republican electorate’s resilient loyalty to Trump. What could matter, come the debates, is that he’s the Republican with the strongest incentive to attack his former boss on character and fitness rather than just on issues — because his history with Trump sets him apart from the other non-Trump candidates, and his only possible path to the nomination involves persuading primary voters that he was right on Jan. 6 and Trump was wrong. If he sees it this way, his clashes with Trump could be interesting theater, and they might even help someone beat the former president; that someone, however, is still unlikely to be Pence himself.French Pence’s stand on Jan. 6 is defining him. In a healthy party, his integrity at that moment would be an asset. In the modern G.O.P., it’s a crippling liability.Goldberg It’s notable that Trump’s former vice president, the man chosen, in part, to reassure the Christian right, is now running against him. If Pence were willing to call out the treachery and mayhem he saw up close, it would be a useful intervention into our politics. But so far, he still seems cowed by his former boss.Hemmer In a rational world, he’d be a plausible candidate because of his strong connection to white evangelicals and time as V.P. But in this world, he’s the scapegoat for Trump’s failed effort to overthrow the 2020 election.Mangu-Ward Pence is an old-school Republican. The likely failure of his campaign will demonstrate how dead that version of the party really is. There was lots to hate about that party — including the punitive social conservatism demonstrated in his positions on abortion and gay rights — but I will confess to some nostalgia for the rhetoric of limited government and fiscal conservatism that still sometimes crosses Pence’s lips, seemingly in earnest.McCarthy His experience and calm demeanor give him a gravitas most rivals lack. He puts Governor DeSantis at risk of seeming too young to be president, even as the 44-year-old governor suggests Trump is too old.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?Bruni I’m unsettled by how strongly Pence has always let his deeply conservative version of Christianity inform his policy positions. I respect people of faith, very much, but in a country with no official church and enormous diversity, he makes inadequate distinction between personal theology and public governance.Coaston He might be the most uninspiring candidate currently running.Cottle He wants to ram his conservative religious views down the nation’s throat.Douthat To the extent that Pence has a distinctive vision, it overlaps with both Nikki Haley’s and Tim Scott’s, albeit with a bit more piety worked in. Like them, he’s selling an upbeat Reaganism that seems out of step with both the concerns of G.O.P. voters and the challenges of the moment. The fact that Pence wants to revive George W. Bush’s push for private Social Security accounts is neither inspiring nor unsettling; it’s just quixotic, which so far feels like the spirit of his entire presidential run.French It’s plain that Pence wants to turn from Trumpism in both tone and in key elements of substance. He’s far more of a Reagan conservative than Trump ever was. Yet his accommodations to Trump remain unsettling even after Jan. 6. One can appreciate his stand for the Constitution while also recognizing that it’s a bit like applauding an arsonist for putting out a fire he helped start.Goldberg Pence would like to impose his religious absolutism on the entire country. As he said last year, after Roe v. Wade was overturned, “We must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land.”Hemmer Pence doesn’t stir up culture wars to win elections — he earnestly believes in a strictly patriarchal, overtly Christian version of the United States. (He was bashing Disney for suggesting women could serve in combat back when DeSantis was still in college.)Mangu-Ward Pence’s vision for America includes the peaceful transfer of power. He was willing to say these words: “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” This shouldn’t be inspiring; it should be the bare minimum for a viable political career. But here we are.McCarthy What’s unsettling about Pence’s vision is how similar it is to George W. Bush’s. It’s a vision that substitutes moralism for realism in foreign policy and is too deferential to the Chamber of Commerce at home — to the detriment of religious liberty as well as working-class families.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Pence candidacy?Bruni He was loyal to Trump until that would have been disloyal to democracy. No porn stars or hush money here. He has presidential hair. Even flies think so.Coaston The former governor of Indiana has some thoughts he’d like to share.Cottle He has high name recognition — and great hair.Douthat There are lots of Republicans who claimed they liked Trump’s conservative policies but didn’t like all the feuds, tweets and drama. Well, a vote for Pence is a vote for his administration’s second term, but this time drama-free.French G.O.P. voters, if you’re proud of the Trump administration’s accomplishments yet tired of Trump’s drama, Pence is your man.Goldberg Honestly, it’s not easy to come up with one, but I guess he’s qualified and he looks the part.Hemmer No one is better prepared to face down the woke mob than the candidate who survived an actual mob two years ago.Mangu-Ward Mike Pence: If he loses, he’ll admit that he lost!McCarthy Mike Pence means no drama and no disruption — a return to business as usual. Doesn’t that sound good right now?Ross Douthat, David French and Michelle Goldberg are Times columnists.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer.Michelle Cottle (@mcottle) is a member of The Times’s editorial board.Jane Coaston is a Times Opinion writer.Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) is an associate professor of history and director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of “Modern Age: A Conservative Review.”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