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      Would a 3-Way Arizona Senate Race Help Kari Lake? Her Party Isn’t So Sure.

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      Kyrsten Sinema, the independent incumbent, has not announced whether she will run for re-election. But as both parties in Arizona prepare for that outcome, Republicans are worried.Republicans are growing anxious that their chances of capturing a Senate seat in Arizona would be diminished in a potential three-way race that included Kyrsten Sinema, the independent incumbent.While Ms. Sinema hasn’t announced whether she will run for re-election, the race already includes Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, and Kari Lake, a Republican scheduled to host her first campaign rally on Tuesday.Many political strategists had figured that a re-election bid from Ms. Sinema, who dropped her Democratic affiliation last year, would split votes in her former party and increase the odds that Ms. Lake, the controversial front-runner for the Republican nomination, would be sworn in to the Senate. Arizona, along with West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, has been seen as among the best opportunities for Republicans to pick up Senate seats next year and win back a majority.But private and public polling has suggested that Ms. Sinema is viewed much more favorably by Republican voters than by Democrats. Those surveys indicated that Mr. Gallego would benefit in a three-way race.“Some of the early conventional wisdom about this race assumed there would be more Democratic defections,” said Austin Stumpf, a Democratic consultant in Arizona. “But party unity among Democrats is hard to overstate. It’s a real phenomenon right now.”Republicans expressed their concerns as Ms. Lake, a TV-anchor-turned-conservative-firebrand, made an otherwise amicable visit to Washington last week. While she met with a half-dozen Republican senators, many of whom offered campaign assistance or asked to have their photos taken with her, conversations among aides revealed worries about current polling. One Lake adviser described being surprised by the level of “freaking out” by Washington Republicans.In response, Ms. Lake’s campaign has produced a nine-page internal memo aimed at reassuring the party that she stands to benefit the most from a three-way race. She was also expected to take aim at Ms. Sinema with some of her most withering attacks during her opening campaign event on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the planning, in an attempt to address the concerns that an independent bid by the senator could siphon off a significant share of Republican votes.The previously unreported memo relies largely on recent turnout trends in Arizona to point to built-in advantages for Republicans.While Republicans account for roughly 35 percent of registered voters in the state, they typically make up about 40 percent of turnout, according to the memo. Arizona’s unusually large bloc of independent voters accounts for 34 percent of the voter rolls, but makes up a smaller share of turnout, typically between 26 percent and 29 percent, according to the memo.That means that Ms. Lake — who struggled to unite Republicans during her unsuccessful bid for governor last year as she attacked fellow Republicans, falsely insisted that former President Donald J. Trump had won the 2020 election and later refused to accept her own defeat — should have “significantly more elasticity in shedding Republican voters” than Democrats, according to the memo. (First, Ms. Lake will have to win the Republican primary race; her early rivals include Mark Lamb, a right-wing sheriff and fellow Trump ally.)Kari Lake, who lost the Arizona governor’s race last year and has continued to dispute the results, is running for Senate. Mario Tama/Getty ImagesThe memo also calculates that if Mr. Trump captures another Republican presidential nomination — and wins roughly the same number of votes in Arizona next year as he did in 2020 — then Ms. Sinema’s best path to victory would require more than 600,000 Arizonans to split their ballots between him and the incumbent senator. That total would be about 35 percent of Mr. Trump’s votes.“This is incredibly unlikely in the Trump era of American politics,” the memo says, noting that split-ticket voting is “near all-time lows.”One of the private polls that showed Mr. Gallego leading the race, in part because Ms. Lake appeared to be losing Republican votes to Ms. Sinema, was from Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Arizona operative, according to people briefed on the survey. Mr. Coughlin declined to comment on specific findings in his poll, but said that while Ms. Sinema would be a significant underdog if she sought re-election, it would also be foolish to count her out.“Kyrsten is a monstrously strong campaigner, a very effective fund-raiser and has shown a lot of personal strength to do what she’s done in politics, and I don’t want to underestimate that,” Mr. Coughlin said. “All of that is going to be necessary and a lot more for her to be successful.”The ambiguity about Ms. Sinema’s plans for re-election has confounded political professionals across three time zones separating Arizona and Washington.Some of those who anticipate she will retire point to fund-raising numbers showing that Mr. Gallego has consistently out-raised her this year. Ms. Sinema is sitting on a considerable war chest of nearly $11 million, but the Arizona Senate race last year drew more than $230 million in spending from the two major-party candidates and multiple outside groups.Some of those convinced she will seek a second term pointed to a fund-raiser she hosted this year at the Phoenix Open. The annual golf outing attracts a mix of rowdy partygoers and avid golfers, far from the typical Sinema crowd. “That’s like nails on the chalkboard for Sinema,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican operative in Arizona.Others were encouraged about her prospects after an internal fund-raising prospectus surfaced last month that signaled she and her team were actively charting a path to a second term, telling donors she could win a competitive three-way race as an independent, which is practically unheard-of in modern American politics.“Kyrsten promised Arizonans she’d be an independent voice who wouldn’t answer to party bosses and would deliver real, lasting solutions to the challenges Arizonans face,” said Hannah Hurley, an aide to Ms. Sinema. “Instead of engaging in name-calling and stupid political insults, Kyrsten has worked with anyone to make Arizonans’ lives better and then get government out of the way — and that’s exactly what she’s done and will continue to do as Arizona’s senior senator.”Ms. Sinema’s path relies on an unusual coalition of voters, according to the document, which was first reported by NBC News: winning between 10 percent and 20 percent of Democrats, 25 percent to 35 percent of Republicans and 60 percent to 70 percent of independent voters in the state.The most difficult benchmark may be the projection among independents. Even Senator John McCain — who was famously popular among independent voters — won just 50 percent of that group in his sixth and final victory in the state in 2016, according to exit polls.Independents also figure to be a top target for Mr. Gallego, an engaging politician with an inspiring personal story who is running to be the state’s first Latino senator. His campaign projects that Latinos account for about 30 percent of unaffiliated voters in Arizona, and he was ahead of both Ms. Sinema and Ms. Lake in the one public poll that has tested all three candidates this year.Some public and private polling has shown that Representative Ruben Gallego, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, would benefit in a three-way race.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times“Ruben is in a good spot and he knows it,” said Mike Noble, an Arizona pollster. He noted that early polls showed that people who had heard of Mr. Gallego generally liked him, while Arizonans tended to have negative views of both Ms. Lake and Ms. Sinema.Still, Mr. Gallego is running his first statewide campaign since first being elected to the state’s most liberal House district in 2014.He has collected a handful of endorsements from local officials and public encouragement from Yolanda Bejarano, the chairwoman of the Arizona Democratic Party, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Senate Majority PAC — which combined to spend nearly $40 million in the Arizona Senate race last year — have both remained silent on the prospect of a three-way race.Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant and former Arizona state legislator, said a potential three-way race offered a unique opportunity for voters because the top candidates would rely on compelling personalities as they pursued their own silos of voters.“It is about the most exciting thing I have seen in terms of politics in Arizona in the three decades I have seen,” Mr. Barnes said. 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      Nikki Haley Raises $11 Million, Battling With DeSantis to Take on Trump

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      The former South Carolina governor has made gains in recent months — in fund-raising and polling — that have helped her compete for the No. 2 spot in the primary field.Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has ramped up her fund-raising in recent months, a sign that her performance in the early presidential debates may have invigorated her 2024 candidacy.Ms. Haley, who, according to her campaign, has raised $11 million across her political committees, entered October with significantly more cash on hand that can be spent on the 2024 primary than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — $9.1 million to roughly his $5 million — even as he out-raised her overall.But both Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis’s fund-raising figures were dwarfed by the man they are chasing in the polls: Former President Donald J. Trump announced in recent days that he had raised $45.5 million in the quarter and had $36 million on hand that is eligible to be spent on the primary.Ms. Haley’s campaign provided her fund-raising figures for the third quarter, from July 1 to the end of September, to The New York Times in advance of the Oct. 15 disclosure deadline. The numbers underscore not just her financial gains from the debates, but the extent to which she has run a lean operation, keeping a limited payroll and eschewing campaign-backed television ads so far. Her campaign said it had saved roughly half of every dollar it had raised into her 2024 account in the last three months.“We have seen a big surge in support and have real momentum,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for Ms. Haley. “Nikki is emerging as the candidate who can move America beyond the chaos and drama of the past and present, and we have the resources we need to do it.”Her campaign said it had received more than 165,000 donations in July, August and September, including from 40,000 new donors. Overall, her campaign has topped 100,000 unique contributors.The next stage of the 2024 Republican race has in many ways become a primary within the primary between Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley as they compete for the role of chief rival to Mr. Trump.At the start of the summer, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina had appeared poised to benefit as Mr. DeSantis slid in the polls. Mr. Scott was emerging as a favorite among major donors, and he already had ample funds in his campaign coffers. But his poll numbers have remained stagnant. His campaign has not yet released third-quarter fund-raising numbers — it had more than $21 million cash on hand at the end of June, much of which had been drawn from his senate campaign fund.For the first half of 2023, the position of second to Mr. Trump had been held by Mr. DeSantis. But Mr. DeSantis’s campaign momentum stalled over the summer, and his support has deteriorated. In some surveys in New Hampshire and in her home state of South Carolina, Ms. Haley has taken the second spot. As he retools his campaign, Mr. DeSantis recently announced he was shifting staff from his Tallahassee headquarters to Iowa after raising $15 million in the third quarter.Advisers to both Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley are headed to Texas this week for an important gathering of major Republican donors, a group known as the American Opportunity Alliance, to convince those contributors of their path forward against Mr. Trump. The former president’s apparently impermeable poll numbers and robust grass-roots fund-raising have led to desperation and frustration among some donors.Among the talking points that Ms. Haley’s team will arrive armed with in Texas is that her fund-raising has ticked up while Mr. DeSantis has gone down in recent months, and that he remains more strapped than her overall. Both have supportive super PACs, but Mr. DeSantis’s allies have reported far more money — a $130 million war chest that is more than everyone else in the field — and have created a robust infrastructure in Iowa that is unrivaled in the race.Ms. Haley’s recent rise in the polls has been accompanied by television ad spending from her super PAC, Stand for America, a major advertiser in the early states over the summer.For Ms. Haley, the coming report will show that her campaign’s overall cash on hand grew to $11.6 million from $6.8 million at the end of the previous quarter. Most of that money, $9.1 million, is eligible to be spent in the primary; the rest is earmarked for her only if she becomes the Republican nominee. More

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      Biden Allies Try to Squash Third-Party Candidates

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      With Democrats worried that a third-party bid could throw a tight race to Donald Trump, President Biden’s top aides have blessed a broad offensive to starve such efforts of cash and ballot access.Powerful allies of President Biden are aggressively working to stop third-party and independent presidential candidacies, fearing that an outside bid could cost Democrats an election that many believe will again come down to a few percentage points in key battleground states.As attempts to mount outside campaigns multiply, a broad coalition has accelerated a multipronged assault to starve such efforts of financial and political support and warn fellow Democrats that supporting outsider candidacies, including the centrist organization No Labels, could throw the election to former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Biden’s top aides have blessed the multimillion-dollar offensive, which cuts across the party, tapping the resources of the Democratic National Committee, labor unions, abortion rights groups, top donors and advocacy groups backing moderate and liberal Democrats. Even the president has helped spread the word: Mr. Biden, in an interview with ProPublica, said a No Labels candidacy would “help the other guy.”The endeavor is far-reaching. In Washington, Democratic allies are working alongside top party strategists to spread negative information about possible outsider candidates. Across the country, lawyers have begun researching moves to limit ballot access — or at least make it more costly to qualify.At expensive resorts and closed-door conferences, Democratic donors are urging their friends not to fund potential spoiler candidates. And in key swing states, lone-wolf operators, including a librarian from Arizona, are trying their own tactics to make life difficult for third-party contenders.The anxiety over candidates and parties traditionally consigned to the fringes of American politics reflects voters’ deep dissatisfaction with both men who are likely to become the major parties’ nominees. No third-party candidate has risen out of the single digits in three decades, since Ross Perot captured nearly a fifth of the vote in 1992. Given the devotion of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters, Democrats fear that most of the attrition would come from Mr. Biden’s fragile coalition.“They’ve got to understand the risk that they are exposing the country to by doing this,” said Richard A. Gephardt, a former House majority leader and a Democratic Party graybeard who has formed a super PAC to attack outsider campaigns. “This is too dangerous of an idea to put in play in this context, in this year. These are not normal times.”Mr. Gephardt warned that third-party candidates threatened not only Mr. Biden’s chances of victory but also the stability of American democracy. Internal polling conducted by his group found that an independent centrist candidate could attract more than 20 percent of the vote in competitive states, helping Mr. Trump in all but one of them.Richard A. Gephardt, a Democratic former House majority leader, has warned that third-party candidates threaten not only President Biden’s chances of victory but also the stability of American democracy.Steve Jennings/Getty Images for Square RootsIn recent days, two candidates have taken steps toward mounting independent bids. Cornel West, the left-wing Harvard professor, announced on Thursday that he would run as an independent candidate. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hinted that he may announce on Monday that he is leaving the Democratic presidential primary race to run as an independent. Already, a super PAC backing his bid has raised $17 million, according to Tony Lyons, the group’s treasurer.Still, most of the Biden allies’ attention is directed at No Labels, the best-funded outsider organization, which after years of sponsoring bipartisan congressional caucuses is working to gain ballot access for a presidential candidate for the first time.The group’s chief executive, Nancy Jacobson, has told potential donors and allies that the No Labels candidate will be a moderate Republican, according to three people familiar with the conversations. That decision would rule out Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat whose flirtation with the idea has prompted a wave of angst within his party.No Labels has already raised $60 million, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, and has qualified for the ballot in 11 states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina. The group plans to spend about half of the money on securing ballot access across all 50 states.Ms. Jacobson said her organization was devoted to presenting voters with an option beyond Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. No Labels is in the process of vetting potential candidates now and will announce its delegate selection process in the coming weeks, she said. The plan is to hold a nominating convention in April in Dallas and anoint a presidential ticket if it is clear the country is heading toward a 2020 rematch.Ms. Jacobson and her chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, insist that their effort is in good faith and is not a secret plot to help Mr. Trump win.“We’re never going to be a party to something that would spoil it for Trump,” Mr. Clancy said.No Labels has focused its recent polling on eight states that are expected to be competitive in a Biden-Trump contest, though Mr. Clancy said he believed a No Labels ticket would be viable in 25 states. If a third-party or independent candidate were to gain serious traction, it could reshuffle the entire presidential map, potentially turning states like New York or Texas into true battlegrounds.Mr. Kennedy has also been a source of concern for Democrats, who worry that his anti-corporate politics and famous last name could pull some of their voters away from Mr. Biden. But some of Mr. Biden’s top allies also believe that Mr. Kennedy, who has increasingly pushed right-wing ideas, would hurt Mr. Trump.The broad Democratic unease is rooted in a core belief that Mr. Trump has both a low ceiling and a high floor of general-election support — meaning that his voters are less likely to be swayed by a third-party or independent candidate. Mr. Biden has wider appeal, but his supporters are not as loyal, and polling has suggested that they could be persuaded to back someone else if given more options.Cornel West, the left-wing Harvard professor, announced on Thursday that he would run as an independent candidate.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hinted that he may leave the Democratic presidential primary race to run for the White House as an independent.Public and private surveys point to increased interest in alternatives this election. In polling released this week by Monmouth University, majorities of voters said that they were not enthusiastic about Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden being at the top of their party’s ticket and that they would not back either man if the race became a rematch.Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the center-left group Third Way who is serving as a clearinghouse for Democrats’ effort to block third-party and independent candidates, is working with the progressive organization MoveOn and a host of like-minded Biden allies to dissuade anyone from having any association with No Labels. Those efforts are bankrolled by more than $1 million from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic megadonor.Mr. Bennett is using Third Way’s connections with centrist donors to try to block No Labels’ access to money, while Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn, has been briefing other progressive groups and labor unions about the dangers of their members’ supporting third-party candidates instead of Mr. Biden.“Anything that divides the anti-Trump coalition is bad,” Mr. Bennett said.Marc Elias, one of the party’s most dogged and litigious election lawyers, has been retained by American Bridge, the Democratic Party’s primary opposition research organization, to vet ballot-qualification efforts by No Labels and other third-party efforts.And the Democratic National Committee has instructed state and county party leaders to say nothing in public about No Labels, according to an email the Utah Democratic Party sent to county leaders in the state.“We need to do everything we can to stop this effort NOW, and not wait until they name a ticket and this becomes a runaway train,” Thom DeSirant, the executive director of the Utah Democratic Party, wrote in a missive that included links to Third Way’s talking points about how to speak about No Labels.The efforts resemble hand-to-hand political combat in both public and private. The abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All wrote on social media that Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a Republican former governor of Utah who has been linked to the No Labels bid, is an “abortion extremist,” based on anti-abortion views he articulated during his 2012 presidential campaign.And Michael Steele, who served as a lieutenant governor of Maryland and as Republican National Committee chairman, has assumed the portfolio of persuading former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a moderate Republican who has publicly toyed with accepting the No Labels nomination, to end his association with the group.“I’ve told the governor what I think he should do,” Mr. Steele said.Perhaps nowhere has No Labels run into as many real-world roadblocks as in Arizona.After the group successfully qualified for the presidential ballot, the Arizona Democratic Party sued to remove it. That legal effort failed, but the attention led two people to submit candidate statements to run for down-ballot offices on the No Labels ticket — something the group had tried to block so as to avoid being categorized as a political party, which could trigger requirements to disclose No Labels donors, who have so far been kept secret.For different reasons, the Arizona candidates who are seeking the No Labels line could prove awkward for the movement.One of them, Tyson Draper, a high school coach from Thatcher, Ariz., is seeking the group’s line to run for the Senate. In an interview last week, he called himself a centrist political newcomer who had never sought public office before. A day later, he filed papers to begin a movement to recall Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.The other would-be No Labeler is Richard Grayson, an assistant librarian at a community college south of Phoenix.Richard Grayson, a librarian from Arizona, is trying his own tactics to make life difficult for No Labels.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesMr. Grayson, 72, is seeking the No Labels nomination for the state’s Corporation Commission, which regulates public utilities. He has appeared as a candidate for office dozens of times since 1982, and said he was a Biden supporter.“I’m a perennial candidate whose goal is to torture No Labels,” he said. “I’m enjoying it immensely. I’m tormenting them.”Rebecca Davis O’Brien More

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      Scalise and Jordan Seek House Speaker Backing as Trump Hangs Over Race

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      The two lawmakers sought support from members of their fractured party as the former president threatened to get involved in a potentially fierce struggle over who will lead the House.The two leading candidates to become the next Republican speaker of the House worked the phones and the halls of the Capitol on Thursday, vying for support from within their party’s fractured ranks as the chamber remained in a state of paralysis after the ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California.Representatives Steve Scalise, the majority leader, and Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chairman, had each landed more than a dozen endorsements by the afternoon as they raced toward a vote of Republicans tentatively scheduled for Tuesday. An election on the House floor could follow the next day, though the process could stretch much longer if no consensus can be reached.Far from the Capitol, former President Donald J. Trump, whose far-right acolytes in Congress helped lead the rebellion that has plunged the House into chaos, weighed in on what could become an epic struggle.Representative Troy Nehls of Texas wrote Thursday evening on X, formerly Twitter, that he had spoken with Mr. Trump, and that he had said he was endorsing Mr. Jordan. “I believe Congress should listen to the leader of our party,” Mr. Nehls said. “I fully support Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House.”Mr. Jordan picked up an important G.O.P. backer and cleared a potential challenger from the field with the endorsement of Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who had previously been exploring his own run for speaker, according to a person familiar with his calls to lawmakers. Mr. Donalds said on the social media site X that Mr. Jordan “has my full support to become the next Speaker of the House!”Both Mr. Scalise and Mr. Jordan are faced with the difficult challenge of attempting to unite a fractious Republican conference that is reeling after Mr. McCarthy’s removal from the speakership.For Mr. Jordan, an Ohioan and co-founder of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, the task will be to convince more mainstream Republicans that he can govern and not simply tear things down. He met on Thursday with members of the Main Street Caucus, a group of business-minded Republicans.For Mr. Scalise, a Louisianian who has won conference elections before as majority leader, the challenge will be to stay one step ahead of Mr. Jordan, and make better inroads with the right wing of the party.Both men are considered further to the right than Mr. McCarthy, a point Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who led the drive to oust Mr. McCarthy, has noted with a sense of satisfaction.“If it’s Speaker Jim Jordan or Speaker Steve Scalise, there will be very few conservatives in the country who don’t see that as a monumental upgrade over Speaker McCarthy,” Mr. Gaetz said on Newsmax.Casting a long shadow over the race is Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. presidential front-runner who holds heavy sway among congressional Republicans because of his strong standing with the party base, including many of their constituents.Some right-wing Republicans had been encouraging Mr. Trump to make a run for speaker himself, though the party’s current conference rules would block him from doing so because he is under multiple felony indictments and facing the possibility of significant prison time. Speaking Wednesday outside a Manhattan courthouse where he is facing a civil fraud case, Mr. Trump seemed to enjoy dangling the possibility of a run for speaker, telling reporters: “Lot of people have been calling me about speaker. All I can say is we’ll do whatever is best for the country and for the Republican Party.”“If I can help them during the process,” he added, “I’ll do it.”Back in the halls of the Congress, a serious race was taking shape.Mr. Scalise, who has been in leadership since 2014, has built relationships across the Republican conference. He has been quietly securing commitments through one-on-one calls with members.On such calls seeking support, Mr. Scalise has emphasized that he is second only to Mr. McCarthy in fund-raising prowess, and he has locked up a string of commitments from the south and the Midwest, according to a person familiar with his private calls, who described them on the condition of anonymity.“Not only is Steve a principled conservative, he has overcome adversity far beyond the infighting in our conference right now,” said Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa, who endorsed Mr. Scalise after speaking with him.One clear point of contrast between Mr. Scalise and Mr. Jordan is their dueling positions on continued aid to Ukraine for its war against Russian aggression, which has become increasingly politicized and is now regarded by many Republicans as toxic.Mr. Jordan was one of 117 Republicans who voted last week against continuing a program to train and equip Ukrainian troops, while Mr. Scalise sided with 101 Republicans in supporting it.“Why should we be sending American tax dollars to Ukraine when we don’t even know what the goal is?” Mr. Jordan said Thursday on Fox News. “No one can tell me what the objective is.”Several Republicans said they were waiting to hear more from the candidates before deciding whom to support.Representative Marc Molinaro of New York said he had spoken with both Mr. Scalise and Mr. Jordan by phone.“There really wasn’t any one person in Congress who worked harder to help me get to Congress or to earn my support than Kevin McCarthy,” Mr. Molinaro said.“We now have individuals who have a week,” he added. “And so I’m going to observe, I’m going to listen, and I’m going to demand that members like me and the people we represent have a seat at the table, and then make a decision.”Robert Jimison More

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      Trump Announces $45.5 Million Fund-Raising Haul, Tripling DeSantis

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign announced on Wednesday that it had raised $45.5 million from July through September, an enormous sum that tripled what his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, had revealed raising earlier in the day.The Trump haul, which was built in part by an outpouring of money after his mug shot in Georgia became public following his fourth indictment, gives the former president a critical financial edge at the most important juncture of the campaign.Mr. Trump’s campaign said that he entered October with $37.5 million on hand, $36 million of which was eligible to be spent on the 2024 primary race. Top aides to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign had said earlier on Wednesday that his operation had raised $15 million in the quarter and entered October with only $5 million on hand that could be spent in the primary.The Trump campaign said in a statement that the figures were “a grave indication that Ron’s candidacy may not live to see the Iowa caucuses in January, or even the end of this month.”No other campaigns have announced their fund-raising for July, August and September; any numbers released by the campaigns cannot be independently verified until the filing of public reports, which are due on Oct. 15.The Trump campaign’s fund-raising has risen each quarter this year. Mr. DeSantis raised less in the most recent quarter than in the previous one, as his campaign has slipped in the polls and faced a barrage of coverage of its shortcomings and struggles, including two rounds of staff layoffs over the summer.The DeSantis team told staff members on Wednesday that about a third of them would be relocating from the current Tallahassee headquarters in Florida to Iowa, the kickoff state where he is increasingly trying to make a stand against Mr. Trump.In some polls, Mr. DeSantis has fallen behind a third rival, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, in two of the other early states, New Hampshire and South Carolina.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said the $45.5 million haul did not include any refunds that the former president’s political action committee might have received from an allied super PAC.Mr. Trump’s PAC, which has covered his legal fees as he fends off his four indictments, requested a refund of a $60 million transfer it had given the super PAC last year. It gave back more than $12 million in the first half of the year. More

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      Can the Next GOP Debate Amount to More Than a Race for Second Place?

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      The most important audience might be Republican donors who are waiting to put their money behind a candidate who can take on Donald Trump.The second Republican presidential debate without Donald J. Trump is missing the front-runner’s star power, but the performances of his rivals on Wednesday are still expected to be deeply consequential — forecasting whether the 2024 field of Republicans will consolidate around a single Trump alternative.For months, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has been the chief challenger to Mr. Trump. But the governor’s downward slope in the polls — some surveys in the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina have shown him dipping to third place, or worse — have provided a potential opening to wrest that title from him for the rest of the field at Wednesday night’s debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.Among those watching at home will be some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors who have so far held out from backing any of the candidates. Major contributors are planning to watch the second debate carefully, according to people in contact with several of them, in order to see who, if anyone, they might rally behind in the coming months.All seven candidates at the debate are facing the dual-track challenge of trying to emerge as a singular rival of Mr. Trump without letting the former president entirely run away with the contest before that happens. His criminal indictments — now at 91 counts across four jurisdictions — have not slowed his momentum, with each week bringing new surveys showing Mr. Trump above 50 percent nationally among Republicans, and no rival registering even half that level of support.Those who have qualified for Wednesday’s debate are: Mr. DeSantis; former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; former Vice President Mike Pence; former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey; the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy; and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. Mr. Trump is skipping the debate to travel to Michigan for an event with union workers.The most immediate stakes of the debate are likely financial. The last, major public fund-raising deadline before voting in the primary begins is at the end of September. Few events can generate waves of small donations — or help fence-sitting multimillionaires pick a candidate — quite like a powerful showing on the debate stage.After landing some lines at the first debate, Ms. Haley boasted of raising more than $1 million in the next 72 hours. Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in 24 hours, his campaign said. And Mr. Scott, who struggled for airtime, was among those not to say anything about his post-debate haul.Gov. Ron DeSantis has slipped in recent polling.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesFor Mr. DeSantis, a superlative showing could quiet the chorus of critics who worry he doesn’t have what it takes to stop Mr. Trump, despite a $130 million super PAC and his standing as the next-most-popular Republican candidate. For others, like Ms. Haley, whom some of the party’s most influential donors are said to be taking a fresh look at after the first debate, it is a chance to try to supplant Mr. DeSantis’s persistent second-place standing.“You need the field to narrow, so this debate and every debate is important because people are getting to see the options they have,” said Jay Zeidman, a DeSantis donor and fund-raiser in Texas who hosted a recent event for the governor.Mr. Zeidman’s father, Fred, a veteran fund-raiser in several presidential races, has been an early backer of Ms. Haley, underscoring the divide among donors who would like to see an alternative to Mr. Trump as the nominee.“Nobody really paid attention to her or knew who she was until the first debate,” said the elder Mr. Zeidman, a fixture in G.O.P. fund-raising circles who was appointed by President George W. Bush as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.“I was with her in New York at a fund-raiser last week and it was a room packed with major New York donors who were really hearing her for the first time,” he added. “This is a pivotal week.”Still, there are questions about how much money will even matter in a race that Mr. Trump leads by so large a margin that many G.O.P. donors have grown fatalistic about the final result.Campaigning in South Carolina on Monday, Mr. Trump said his opponents “ought to stop wasting their time.” He added: “They’re wasting a lot of time with these ridiculous debates that nobody’s watching.”Donald Trump campaigning on Monday in South Carolina.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnother key factor in shaping the size of the field will be the Republican National Committee’s debate criteria. Candidates must hit a 3 percent polling threshold to be on the stage in California and have amassed 50,000 donors. One candidate at the last debate, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, failed to qualify on Wednesday.The debate thresholds will rise to 4 percent in polling and 70,000 donors for a Nov. 8 debate in Miami.Ms. Haley has ticked up in the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire in recent weeks but that rise could be as much about a television advertising blitz from her super PAC as her showing in the first debate. In the last two months, her super PAC was the biggest advertiser in both states, spending $6.5 million in Iowa and close to $5 million in New Hampshire — more than her closest competitors, according to data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.She capitalized on the perception of a rising candidate as she went on a fund-raising spree through New York, Florida and Texas, where she has made inroads with some of the same donors who backed Mr. Bush and his father, according to people who have attended her events and are familiar with her fund-raising. She has support from the state’s prosperous Indian American community and from major figures in the energy sector. Texans supporting her include members of the oil-rich Hunt family, the textiles magnate Arun Agarwal and the real estate developer Harlan Crow, who was revealed recently as a longtime benefactor of Justice Clarence Thomas.Such busy fund-raising trips, however, illustrate an unseen advantage that Mr. Trump holds: He raises all his money online — which requires virtually nothing from the candidate himself — while the rest of the field is making mad dashes across the nation to attend fund-raisers.Mr. Pence, according to an adviser, spent 15 days in September raising money — more than half the month. And Mr. DeSantis, who had multiple events across Texas last week, is following up the debate with a trip to Northern California to raise more money ahead of the crucial Sept. 30 deadline.Nikki Haley is looking to build on her momentum from the first debate.Travis Dove for The New York TimesStill, even if Ms. Haley delivers another donor-approved performance on Wednesday night, there’s little chance the field will narrow as much as Republican donors and leaders are hoping. And this is good news for Mr. Trump, who benefits from a large field dividing up the non-Trump vote.Campaigns have been lobbying aggressively for favorable rules in future debates both publicly and behind the scenes. Mr. Scott, for instance, has argued that stage placement should be determined by a candidate’s standing in early state polling, not national surveys. The DeSantis team has pressed for even higher polling thresholds — even 8 percent — to further narrow the stage as the primaries near.Debate rules can make a big impact in how television audiences perceive the candidates. In Milwaukee at the first debate, Mr. Christie faced audible boos in the audience after he was critical of Mr. Trump. But the crowd will be much different, and much smaller, in California. A person familiar with the event planning said around 700 people would attend on Wednesday.Mr. Christie has signaled to several people that he plans to make Mr. Trump more central to his argument at this debate. At the last one, he spent more time trading barbs with Mr. Ramaswamy when the moderators generally avoided mentioning Mr. Trump’s name, calling him “the elephant not in the room.”Tim Scott campaigning in New Hampshire in early September. His team said he intended to take a more aggressive approach at the next debate.Mel Musto for The New York TimesMr. Scott, who had an underwhelming first debate and is polling in the single digits in both national and early state polls, is still raising plenty of campaign cash, including from a New York fund-raising event last week hosted by the billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller. Mr. Scott will be saturating the airwaves over the fall — his super PAC has already reserved $40 million in advertising, the most of any candidate in the primary.Mr. Scott’s team has signaled he will take a more aggressive approach in the second debate. In the first debate, Mr. Scott declined to take shots at his competitors. Since then, he has called out Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis over their positions on abortion and has said that Mr. Ramaswamy has taken the “wrong” positions on U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and Taiwan.But a more confrontational posture would be out of character for Mr. Scott, who told the radio host Hugh Hewitt to expect the “same optimistic, positive approach to debating” in an interview last week. “If we’re going to have a food fight, someone has to bring us back to the issues that are germane to the American people,” Mr. Scott said.Anjali Huynh More

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      Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson May Not Make the Next GOP Debate

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      Low poll numbers could keep the long-shot Republicans off the stage next Wednesday in the second presidential primary debate.After eking their way into the first Republican presidential debate last month, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, long-shot candidates, appear to be in jeopardy of failing to qualify for the party’s second debate next week.Both have been registering support in the low single digits in national polls and in the polls from early nominating states that the Republican National Committee uses to determine eligibility.The threshold is higher for this debate, happening on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Several better-known G.O.P. rivals are expected to make the cut — but the candidate who is perhaps best known, former President Donald J. Trump, is again planning to skip the debate.Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming front-runner for the party’s nomination despite a maelstrom of indictments against him, will instead give a speech to striking union autoworkers in Michigan.Who Has Qualified for the Second Republican Presidential Debate?Six candidates appear to have made the cut for the next debate. Donald J. Trump is not expected to attend.Some of Mr. Trump’s harshest critics in the G.O.P. have stepped up calls for the party’s bottom-tier candidates to leave the crowded race, consolidating support for a more viable alternative to the former president.Lance Trover, a spokesman for the Burgum campaign, contended in an email on Wednesday that Mr. Burgum was still positioned to qualify for the debate. Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said in an email on Wednesday that candidates have until 48 hours before the debate to qualify. She declined to comment further about which ones had already done so.Before the first debate on Aug. 23, the R.N.C. announced it was raising its polling and fund-raising thresholds to qualify for the second debate, which will be televised by Fox Business. Candidates must now register at least 3 percent support in a minimum of two national polls accepted by the R.N.C. The threshold for the first debate was 1 percent.Debate organizers will also recognize a combination of one national poll and polls from at least two of the following early nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.“While debate stages are nice, we know there is no such thing as a national primary,” Mr. Trover said in a statement, adding, “Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are the real people that narrow the field.”Mr. Burgum’s campaign has a plan to give him a boost just before the debate, Mr. Trover added, targeting certain Republicans and conservative-leaning independents through video text messages. A super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running a distant second to Mr. Trump in Republican polls, has used a similar text messaging strategy.Mr. Burgum, a former software executive, is also harnessing his wealth to introduce himself to Republicans through television — and at considerable expense. Since the first debate, a super PAC aligned with him has booked about $8 million in national broadcast, live sports and radio advertising, including a $2 million infusion last week, according to Mr. Burgum’s campaign, which is a separate entity. His TV ads appeared during Monday Night Football on ESPN.As of Wednesday, there were six Republicans who appeared to be meeting the national polling requirement, according to FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregation site.That list was led by Mr. Trump, who is ahead of Mr. DeSantis by an average of more than 40 percentage points. The list also includes the multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador; former Vice President Mike Pence; and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was averaging only 2.4 percent support nationally as of Wednesday, he is also expected to make the debate stage by relying on a combination of national and early nominating state polls to qualify.Mr. Scott has performed better in places like Iowa and his home state than in national polls, and his campaign has pressed the R.N.C. to place more emphasis on early nominating states.The R.N.C. also lifted its fund-raising benchmarks for the second debate. Only candidates who have received financial support from 50,000 donors will make the debate stage — 10,000 more than they needed for the first debate. They must also have at least 200 donors in 20 or more states or territories.While Mr. Burgum’s campaign said that it had reached the fund-raising threshold, it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Hutchinson had.Both candidates resorted to some unusual tactics to qualify for the first debate.Mr. Burgum offered $20 gift cards to anyone who gave at least $1 to his campaign, while Politico reported that Mr. Hutchinson had paid college students for each person they could persuade to contribute to his campaign.Candidates will still be required to sign a loyalty pledge promising to support the eventual Republican nominee, something that Mr. Trump refused to do before skipping the first debate.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Where Has All the Left-Wing Money Gone?

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