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      Biden and the Increasingly Anxious Democrats

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      Michael D. Shear, a longtime White House reporter for The New York Times, talks about recent staff turnover in the administration and frustration around the president.Despite signs that Democrats may be in better shape in the midterms than many expected six months ago, a widespread malaise is setting in within the White House. There is a growing sense that President Biden is not prosecuting a political case against Republicans aggressively enough.I spoke today with Michael D. Shear, a longtime political reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner who has covered the White House for the past 13 years.Shear has seen plenty of drama over that time: He covered all four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, including two impeachment inquiries, and he and Julie Hirschfeld Davis wrote “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration.”Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:You wrote this week: “At a moment of broad political tumult and economic distress, Mr. Biden has appeared far less engaged than many of his supporters had hoped. While many Democrats are pleading for a fighter who gives voice to their anger, Mr. Biden has chosen a more passive path — blaming Congress, urging people to vote and avoiding heated rhetorical battles.” What are your sources telling you?The concern among Democrats about the White House, and in particular about President Biden’s political skills, is palpable. The main issue seems to be a performative one. Democrats want Biden to seem tougher, more engaged and more in the moment.It was striking to me that in a week when there were so many big, sweeping issues — Roe v. Wade, inflation, recession fears, mass shootings — you wouldn’t have known it from the president’s schedule. He awarded the Medal of Honor to four Vietnam-era soldiers (a worthy thing, for sure), gave a speech on pensions and then awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 17 people.There has been a string of departures and arrivals at the White House lately. Cedric Richmond, the director of the Office of Public Engagement, and Jen Psaki, the press secretary, have left. Kate Bedingfield, the communications director, is departing. Anita Dunn, who was a top aide to both Barack Obama and Biden, is returning from her consulting firm.What’s going on here? Is this connected to a feeling of low morale inside the White House? Or just the usual personnel turmoil that happens inside every administration?I think the turnover in the communications shop is a bit of both.There is burnout in every administration around this time; many of the people who start an administration worked like crazy on the campaign, and they are tired.And Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, has made it clear to people that if they wanted to leave, they should do it sooner rather than later in an election year. Thus Psaki and Richmond have left recently.The Biden PresidencyWith midterm elections looming, here’s where President Biden stands.Struggling to Inspire: At a time of political tumult and economic distress, President Biden has appeared less engaged than Democrats had hoped.Low Approval Rating: Despite early warnings from his pollster, Mr. Biden’s approval among Americans has reached the lowest level of his presidency.Rallying Allies: Faced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has set out to bolster the West and outline a more muscular NATO.Staff Changes: An increasing number of West Wing departures has added to the sense of frustration inside the Biden White House.Looking Ahead to 2024: Amid doubts from Democrats, aides say Mr. Biden is irked by persistent questions over his plans to seek re-election.Bedingfield has been working nonstop for Biden since 2015, and I’m told she has been debating when to leave for a while. The fact that Anita Dunn — a veteran communications czar for Democratic presidents — was recently brought back on was the writing on the wall.But having said all that, I do think morale is low right now. The president’s polling numbers are low, the problems are myriad and one of the first places that critics look to place blame is with the communications staff. The problem for this White House is that if predictions come true and Republicans take over in Congress, things will just get bleaker.What do people in and around Biden’s political operation make of all the reporting, including from our colleagues, that shows Trump is weighing the announcement of a 2024 bid earlier than expected?There is no question that the White House is paying close attention to this question.There is a belief among some people close to the president that a formal Trump candidacy will provide an effective foil for Biden and will energize him much the way he was energized during the 2020 campaign. The threat of Trump was, after all, Biden’s stated reason for running in the first place.There’s also a belief — maybe more of a hope — that an early decision by Trump to announce that he is running could hurt Republican candidates this fall. It would force the political discourse away from issues that benefit Republicans, like inflation, and toward subjects that are more favorable to Democrats, like Trump’s rantings about Jan. 6 and a “stolen” 2020 election.There also will be legal issues and questions about whether the president needs to start a re-election effort sooner as a result — so he can start to raise money. But those questions are still being hashed out.Cedric Richmond, a former top White House aide, pushed back against Democratic criticism of President Biden. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesWhen I speak with Democrats running campaigns or working at party committees, I hear a lot of frustration with the White House and a lot of criticism, specifically about Biden’s political acumen. Are White House officials aware of the extent of the complaints?David Plouffe, one of the architects of Obama’s presidential campaigns, famously dismissed complaints from Democrats as “bed-wetting” by overly anxious partisans.The current White House doesn’t use that phrase, but the sentiment is basically the same.I talked this week to Cedric Richmond, one of Biden’s earliest and most fervent supporters, who was a top White House aide until he departed recently for the Democratic National Committee.He did not hold back.“We have to have some discipline as Democrats in what we’re talking about, and not be going off on tangents that are destructive to where we want to be,” Richmond said, referring to the sniping at Biden from members of his own party.“So go out there and show the difference between the two parties,” he said. “But the circular firing squad, I think, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”What are people inside the White House most optimistic about regarding 2022 and 2024? What do they think, or hope, the main drivers of the midterm elections will be?For a long time, there was a hope inside the West Wing that inflation would subside by the time the election came around.That is no longer a realistic hope, given the situation internationally, including the Russia-Ukraine war. The president’s advisers are mostly cleareyed about how the deck is stacked against them in 2022.But they are optimistic about a few things: They think — hope — that Covid is receding as a major political issue, given the relative success of the vaccination program. They think the underlying economy — job growth, wage increases, manufacturing — is strong. And they argue that Biden has accomplished more than he currently gets credit for.The worry about all of those things is the possibility of reversal. Covid could surge again. Job growth could slow. And the accomplishments could fade further into the rearview mirror if the rest of the year is simply a political stalemate.We want to hear from you.Tell us about your experience with this newsletter by answering this short survey.What to read tonightBoris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, announced his plans to resign as unrest grows over his handling of inflation and the economic aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. Johnson was a close Trump ally.The I.R.S. said its commissioner asked the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration to look into audits of James B. Comey and Andrew G. McCabe, Michael S. Schmidt and Glenn Thrush report.The Atlantic has a fresh excerpt from the new book by Mark Leibovich, a former New York Times writer. Headlined “The Most Pathetic Men in America,” the excerpt skewers Senator Lindsey Graham, Representative Kevin McCarthy and, as Leibovich puts it, “so many other cowards in Congress.”SHENANIGANSGov. Gavin Newsom of California has been criticized for taking a personal trip to Montana.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesYou win some, you NewsomGavin Newsom, the governor of California, is being put through the political wringer once again — this time, over a family vacation in Montana.As On Politics has noted, Newsom has carved out a national role for himself as a leading critic of Republican-led states. Montana, despite having a Democratic-friendly, “prairie populist” streak, is deeply red: Trump won the state by more than 16 percentage points in the 2020 presidential election.It’s also a place that holds special meaning for Newsom, who married his second wife there. The couple even named their older daughter Montana. His in-laws own a ranch along the Bitterroot River and still live there.The problem, politically speaking, is that Montana is on liberal California’s travel ban list. State-funded travel to Montana and 21 other states is barred in California, through a law enacted in 2016 under Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown. The restrictions, which are enforced by the California Department of Justice, were put in place to punish states whose laws were deemed discriminatory toward the L.G.B.T.Q. community.Newsom paid for the trip himself, and the travel ban does not apply to personal vacations, as his aides have pointed out. Still Republicans have seized on the episode to accuse the governor of hypocrisy. Sometimes, when you poke the G.O.P. bear, as Newsom did when he joined Donald Trump’s social media network and ran ads on Fox News stations in Florida, the bear pokes back.It “must be hard for his family to meet all the woke rules that he and the ‘Regressives have created for themselves,” James Gallagher, the Republican leader of the State Assembly, posted on Twitter.The criticisms echoed one of the more politically potent attacks on Newsom. When the governor dined, indoors and without a mask, at a pricey Napa Valley restaurant in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus lockdowns, his critics said Newsom believed the rules didn’t apply to him.And while California did not pay for Newsom’s Montana trip, the state did pay for his security detail.Anthony York, a spokesman for Newsom, said the trip was very much a personal, and not political, one. “His kids are visiting their grandparents for his daughter’s birthday, as they do every year,” he said.York denied that Newsom’s office was being coy about his whereabouts, and said that the office was trying to balance transparency with safety. “On the security side, the law explicitly states there is an exemption for public safety, and the governor has to travel with security,” he said.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Biden Irked by Democrats Who Won’t Take ‘Yes’ for an Answer on 2024

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      The White House is trying to tamp down speculation about plans to seek re-election, while aides say President Biden is bristling at the persistent questions.WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, when Senator Bernie Sanders said he would not challenge President Biden in 2024, Mr. Biden was so relieved he invited his former rival to dinner at the White House the next night.Mr. Biden has been eager for signs of loyalty — and they have been few and far between. Facing intensifying skepticism about his capacity to run for re-election when he will be nearly 82, the president and his top aides have been stung by the questions about his plans, irritated at what they see as a lack of respect from their party and the press, and determined to tamp down suggestions that he’s effectively a lame duck a year and a half into his administration.Mr. Biden isn’t just intending to run, his aides argue, but he’s also laying the groundwork by building resources at the Democratic National Committee, restocking his operation in battleground states and looking to use his influence to shape the nomination process in his favor.This account of Mr. Biden’s preparation for re-election and his building frustration with his party’s doubt is based on interviews with numerous people who talk regularly to the president. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. But several said the president and his inner circle were confounded by Democrats’ discussions about a Plan B when the one person who has defeated Donald J. Trump has made clear he intends to run again.Mr. Biden has told advisers he sees a replay of the early days of his 2020 primary bid, when some Democrats dismissed him as too old or too moderate to win the nomination. He blames the same doubters for the current round of questioning.Those skeptics grew louder over the weekend, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, when Mr. Biden restated his opposition to expanding the ranks of the high court, the left’s preferred solution to the court’s current conservative tilt. The remarks angered critics who argue that the president, who has never been comfortable elevating abortion rights and positions himself as a consensus builder, doesn’t have the temperament for partisan combat.“Too many people in our party look at the glass as half-empty as opposed to the glass as half-full,” said former Representative Cedric Richmond, whom Mr. Biden dispatched from the White House to shore up the Democratic National Committee. Accusing other Democrats of “putting too much into these polling numbers,” an allusion to Mr. Biden’s standing below 40 percent in some surveys, Mr. Richmond said there was “a wing in our party who wanted a different candidate and I’m sure they’d love to have their candidate back in the mix again.”However, it’s hardly just the president’s progressive detractors who are nervous about soaring inflation, uneasy about Mr. Biden running again, and not convinced he even should.Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia at the Capitol in June.Anna Rose Layden Layden for The New York TimesSenator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who some wealthy donors are hoping will consider a third-party presidential bid, declined to say whether he would consider such a run or if he planned to back Mr. Biden. “We’re just trying to do our daily thing, brother,” Mr. Manchin said. “Trying to do what we got to do that’s good for the country.”Other interviews with Democratic lawmakers yield grave doubts about whether Mr. Biden ought to lead the party again with some concluding he should but only because there’s no clearly viable alternative.“I have been surprised at the number of people who are openly expressing concerns about 2024 and whether or not Biden should run,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, recounting a recent dinner of Democrats in the capital where several speculated about who could succeed the president.More worrisome for Mr. Biden, some ambitious Democrats have found that calling for the president to retire is a sure way to win attention. Former Representative Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, who’s hoping to unseat Gov. Henry McMaster, 75, said the president should cede the nomination “to a new generation of leadership,” as he put it on CNN last week.In some respects, Mr. Biden invited this moment. Running in the 2020 primary, the president presented himself as “a bridge, not as anything else” as he sought to rally skeptical Democrats to his candidacy. Consumed with ejecting Mr. Trump from office, the party’s voters answered that call but thought little of the implications of having an octogenarian in the Oval Office four years on.Now, over half of Democrats say they don’t want Mr. Biden to run again or aren’t sure he should, according to recent surveys.Mr. Biden’s top advisers reject the idea that an open primary would deliver Democrats a stronger standard-bearer. They fear his retirement would set off a sprint to the left. What’s more, while Vice President Kamala Harris would most likely garner substantial support, she’s unlikely to clear the field, leading to a messy race that could widen the party’s divisions on issues of race, gender and ideology.Mr. Biden has told aides he is determined to run again, although he has also noted he will take his family’s advice into account. Mr. Biden’s advisers recognize the political risk of being perceived as a one-term president and are intent on signaling that he intends to run for re-election.The president has made clear he wants a primary calendar that better reflects the party’s racial diversity, all but assuring the demise of first-in-the-nation status for the Iowa, which was hostile to Mr. Biden in his last two presidential bids. Senior Democrats are considering moving up Michigan, a critical general election state where the president has a number of allies in labor and elected office.The Democratic National Committee has been quietly preparing for the president’s re-election by pouring money and staff into eight battleground states that happen to have important midterm elections, an effort that began in the spring of last year. Mr. Biden has also accelerated his fund-raising, holding a pair of events for the committee in June that brought in $5 million, while also spending more time on Zoom sessions courting individual contributors.The president has moved to consolidate his hold on the D.N.C., and not just by sending Mr. Richmond to the committee. Mr. Biden has also shifted both his social media assets and his lucrative fund-raising list to the party, which has made the committee largely reliant on those channels for their contributions.Anita Dunn, center, speaking with Ron Klain, the chief of staff, last year during an event in the Rose Garden.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesEven more subtly, Mr. Biden has made personnel moves that indicate he’s at least preparing to run, most notably summoning Anita Dunn, a longtime adviser, back to the White House from her public affairs firm. Ms. Dunn, who helped revive the president’s moribund primary campaign in 2020; Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s top political aide; and senior adviser Mike Donilon are expected to help guide the re-election, though notably there has been no decision yet on who will formally manage the re-election outside the White House.What Mr. Biden will not do, aides say, is quiet the critics by filing his paperwork to run in 2024 before this year’s midterm elections, a step being considered by Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden’s advisers feel the move would suggest panic and create a significant fund-raising burden two years before the campaign. Should the midterms go poorly, however, the president may feel pressure to formalize his intentions sooner than what they see as the modern standard — former President Barack Obama’s April 2011 declaration.For now, the president is relying on personal diplomacy, as he did with Mr. Sanders, the Vermont independent, and the power of the presidency, to ward off would-be competitors.Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois speaking to abortion rights demonstrators in Chicago in May.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesEven before Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois arrived recently in New Hampshire, a traditional early voting state, Biden officials said that the governor’s office had given them a heads up about the eyebrow-raising travel and reassured them that the governor had no plan to mount a primary challenge against the president. The message was appreciated, a Biden official said, noting that Mr. Pritzker has been lobbying to get the Democrats’ 2024 convention to Chicago. Mr. Biden will make that decision later this year.White House aides have noticed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s repeated denunciations of his party leadership for not more robustly confronting Republicans. They dismissed the California governor’s critiques as those of a politician feeling his oats after easily thwarting a recall and said Mr. Newsom was in frequent contact with the West Wing. And one Biden adviser noted that Mr. Newsom feels enough affection for Mr. Biden to have posted pictures of his children with the president on social media during Mr. Biden’s trip to California last week.As for Hillary Clinton, few Biden advisers think she will mount a challenge against him, though her recent Financial Times interview made it clear she’s eager to have her voice in the political conversation. Mrs. Clinton has made little secret of her frustration that she has not been consulted more by Mr. Biden. But White House aides believe they can direct Mrs. Clinton’s energy toward assisting with the public response to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.When pressed about why Mr. Biden is so intent on running again, the president’s defenders point out he did what Mrs. Clinton did not, defeat Mr. Trump.Stung about their perceived treatment, they also recall other recent Democrats — President Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama — who rebounded from low approval numbers and rough midterm elections to win second terms.But Mr. Biden’s age — at 79, he is the oldest president in American history — has fueled skepticism those presidents didn’t face.“Trump is a senior citizen, too,” shoots back Fletcher Smith, a former South Carolina legislator, reprising a line White House officials use, as well.Democrats remain so alarmed by the threat that Mr. Trump, 76, represents that Mr. Biden’s aides argue they will be insulated from a primary because such a race will be perceived as effectively aiding the former president, a life-or-death question for American democracy.President Biden in Rehoboth Beach, Del., on Monday.Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesFor the most part, senior Democrats would rather avoid the question for now.Asked if he expected Mr. Biden to run again, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said: “If he runs, I’m for him.” Pressed if he thought Mr. Biden would do so, Mr. Schumer repeated the same line.One outside ally of the president and a regular White House visitor, the National Urban League president Marc Morial, played down questions about the president’s age, saying that “he still has the old Joe Biden fire.”But Mr. Morial urged the president not to dwell on the criticism. “I think sometimes if you overreact to it you give it air,” he said. 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      With Swag and Swagger, State Democrats Vie for Front of Presidential Primary Line

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      After Iowa’s disastrous 2020 caucuses, Democratic officials are weighing drastic changes to the 2024 calendar. States, angling for early attention, are waxing poetic. Behold, the New Jersey Turnpike!WASHINGTON — High-ranking Democrats distributed gift bags and glossy pamphlets, waxing poetic about New Hampshire’s Manchester Airport and the New Jersey Turnpike.Midwestern manners barely masked a deepening rivalry between Michigan and Minnesota.And state leaders deployed spirited surrogate operations and slickly produced advertisements as they barreled into a high-stakes process that will determine the most consequential phase of the Democratic presidential nominating calendar.After Iowa’s disastrous 2020 Democratic caucuses, in which the nation’s longtime leadoff caucus state struggled for days to deliver results, members of the Democratic National Committee are weighing drastic changes to how the party picks its presidential candidates. The most significant step in that process so far unfolded this week, as senators, governors and Democratic chairs from across the country traipsed through a Washington conference room to pitch members of a key party committee on their visions for the 2024 primary calendar.Democratic state parties have formed alliances, enlisted Republicans — and in Michigan’s case, turned to the retired basketball star Isiah Thomas — as they argued for major changes to the traditional process or strained to defend their early-state status.Signs denoting a polling location in Columbia, S.C., before the 2020 primary.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“Tradition is not a good enough reason to preserve the status quo,” said the narrators of Nevada’s video, as state officials bid to hold the first nominating contest. “Our country is changing. Our party is changing. The way we choose our nominee — that has to change, too.”Four states have kicked off the Democratic presidential nominating contest in recent years: early-state stalwarts Iowa and New Hampshire, followed by Nevada and South Carolina. But Iowa has faced sharp criticism over both the 2020 debacle and its lack of diversity, and in private conversations this week, Democrats grappled with whether Iowa belonged among the first four states at all.Mindful of the criticism, Iowa officials on Thursday proposed overhauling their caucus system, typically an in-person event that goes through multiple rounds of elimination. Instead, officials said, the presidential preference portion of the contest could be conducted primarily by mail or drop-offs of preference cards, with Iowans selecting just one candidate to support.“In order to continue growing our party, we need to make changes,” acknowledged Ross Wilburn, the Iowa Democratic Party chairman.But the plan drew skeptical questions from some committee members who suggested it might amount to a caucus in name only, and really more of a primary. That would butt it up against New Hampshire, which has passed legislation aimed at stopping other states from pre-empting its first-in-the-nation primary.New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada are generally expected to remain as early states, though the process is fluid and the order is up for debate, with Nevada directly challenging New Hampshire’s position on the calendar, a move the Granite State is unlikely to take lightly.In swag bags from New Hampshire’s delegation, which included maple syrup and a mug from the state’s popular Red Arrow Diner, there was also a brochure noting the history of New Hampshire’s primary, dating to 1916. And in a sign of how seriously New Hampshire takes being the first primary, both of the state’s U.S. senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, were on hand to make the case.“You cannot win a race in New Hampshire without speaking directly to voters, and listening and absorbing their concerns,” Ms. Hassan said, arguing for the benefits of having Democratic presidential contenders submit to the scrutiny of the small state’s famously discerning voters.The committee could weigh many permutations for the order of the states. It is also possible that the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee will recommend adding a fifth early-state slot as large, diverse states including Georgia bid for consideration.The committee is slated to make its recommendations in August, with final approval at the D.N.C.’s meeting in September.Earlier this year, the committee adopted a framework that emphasized racial, ethnic, geographic and economic diversity and labor representation; raised questions about feasibility; and stressed the importance of general election competitiveness. Some committee members this week also alluded to concerns about holding early contests in states where Republican election deniers hold, or may win, high state offices.Sixteen states and Puerto Rico made the cut to present this week, from New Jersey and Illinois to Washington State and Connecticut.The search process comes just over two years after President Biden came in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire but won the nomination on the strength of later-voting and more diverse states. The White House’s potential preferences in the process would be significant.“They know where we’re at,” said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, asked on Wednesday if she had spoken with Mr. Biden or the White House about Michigan’s bid. “I haven’t had a direct conversation, but our teams converse regularly.”She also said she had made “a number of phone calls to voice my support and urge the committee to strongly consider us.”Behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts of committee members and other stakeholders are expected to intensify in the coming weeks.The most pitched battle concerns representation from the Midwest, especially if Iowa loses its early-state slot. Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois are vying to emerge as the new Midwestern early-state standard-bearer. Michigan and Minnesota are thought to be favored over Illinois for reasons of both cost and general election competitiveness, though Illinois also made a forceful presentation, led by officials including Senator Dick Durbin.“The Minnesota Lutheran in us — if you do a good deed and talk about it, it doesn’t count — but we’re getting over that and talking about it,” said Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, whose Democratic colleagues kicked off their presentation with a song by Prince and distributed Senator Amy Klobuchar’s recipe for hot dish.Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, grappled head-on with concerns around diversity and relevance in a general election.“We’re going to disabuse you of two things: One, that we’re just a bunch of Scandinavians with no diversity, and two, that we’re not a competitive state,” he said, as his team distributed thick pamphlets highlighting the state’s racial and geographic diversity, including its rural population.Michigan’s presenters included Senator Debbie Stabenow and Representative Debbie Dingell, who signed handwritten notes to committee members. One read, “Michigan is the best place to pick a president!” Their gift bags featured local delicacies like dried cherries, and beer koozies commemorating the inauguration of Ms. Whitmer and Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II, a party spokesman said.“We have the clearest and best case that Michigan is an actual battleground, the most diverse battleground in the country,” Mr. Gilchrist said in an interview, calling it “a down payment on an apparatus for the general election.”Likewise, Ms. Dingell and Ms. Stabenow emphasized opportunities for retail politicking and the chance for candidates to familiarize themselves early with the concerns of one of the country’s biggest contested states.Both Minnesota and Michigan require varying degrees of cooperation from Republicans in order to move their primaries up. Minnesota officials were quick to note that they must simply convince the state Republican Party. Michigan requires the approval of the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Presenters from both states were questioned about the feasibility of getting the other side on board.Minnesota released a list of Republicans who support moving up the state’s contest, including former Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Senator Norm Coleman. Members of Michigan’s delegation noted the backing they had from former Republican chairs and organizations like the Michigan Chamber of Commerce.The Detroit News reported later Thursday that the Republican majority leader of the State Senate, Mike Shirkey, had indicated support for moving up Michigan’s primary, a significant development.(Officials from the two states were also asked about their plans for dealing with wintry weather. They emphasized their hardiness.)By contrast, Emanuel Chris Welch, the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, pointedly said that “in Illinois, there is no chance that Republican obstruction will distract, delay or deter us” from moving up the state’s primary.Some of Mr. Biden’s closest allies were also present on Thursday as his home state, Delaware, made the case for hosting an early primary.In an interview, Senator Chris Coons insisted that he had not discussed the prospect with Mr. Biden and that he was not speaking on the president’s behalf. But, he said: “Our state leadership is doing what I think is in Delaware’s best interest. And I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t be happy with the outcome.” More

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      How Trump Helped Transform Nebraska Into a Toxic Political Wasteland

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      LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”To state the obvious: This is not what political speech in Nebraska used to sound like.Mr. Herbster is challenging the allegations of eight women that he groped them.Mary Anne AndreiFor half a century, from 1959 to the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, my home state, the state near the geographical middle of the country, prided itself on being politically centrist as well. Over that span, it elected four Democrats and three Republicans to the U.S. Senate. We had six Republican governors and five Democratic. The congressional delegations were predominately Republican, but Omaha and Lincoln elected Democrats as their mayors more often than not. The Nebraska Legislature remains officially nonpartisan, and as the country’s only unicameral legislature, it forced lawmakers for many years to engage in a politics of pragmatism.Now, Nebraska is so unfailingly Republican that the party’s primaries most often determine the outcomes of statewide races. How did the state become so right wing and devoted to Mr. Trump?Part of the answer is that Nebraska’s Democrats of a generation ago were never very liberal. They were usually socially moderate, pro-business, pro-military white guys, making them all but indistinguishable from old-line, Chamber of Commerce Republicans from the coasts. Senator Edward Zorinsky aggressively advocated military aid for Nicaragua during the Carter years. Senator Bob Kerrey voted for NAFTA. Senator Ben Nelson cast his vote in favor of Obamacare only after Senator Harry Reid promised him tens of millions in federal funding for Nebraska that came to be known as the Cornhusker Kickback.But it wasn’t just the Democrats who were middle of the road. Even our Republican senators were sometimes so moderate that you could barely distinguish them from centrist Democrats. Chuck Hagel, for example, was a two-term Republican senator during Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies but later was Mr. Obama’s secretary of defense. Likewise, our Republican governors were fiscally and socially conservative, but they generally avoided the culture wars.Mr. Herbster told the crowd in Wahoo that that era is over. “This isn’t the good-old Dave Heineman days. This isn’t the good-old Charles Thone days. This isn’t the good-old Exon days,” he said, invoking the names of three centrist Nebraska governors, including J. James Exon, a Democrat who won over many Republicans by opposing tax increases and gay rights during the Carter administration.For half a century, Nebraska was politically centrist. According to Mr. Herbster, that era is over.Mary Anne AndreiIn Nebraska — as in the rest of the country — the polarization seemed to hasten about the time that Mr. Obama won the presidency. To be sure, much of the hardening against the Democratic Party specifically and ideals of tolerance and diversity more generally can be attributed to an unholy stew of angry commentary on Fox News, algorithmic political siloing on Facebook and the subsuming of Nebraska’s independent newspapers and television stations by Lee Enterprises and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.But Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, also attributes the extreme partisan vitriol to the Democratic National Committee’s decision to shift its resources away from rural red states like Nebraska, which was in part because Mr. Obama had slashed the committee’s resources.“Obama hated the D.N.C.,” Ms. Kleeb told me, “because he feels like they stabbed him in the back” by supporting Hillary Clinton over his upstart campaign in the 2008 presidential primary. Distrustful of the Democratic machine — and the party brand — Mr. Obama turned fund-raising efforts away from the D.N.C. and focused on building “progressive” organizations like Organizing for America, she said. But that created two problems.First, now cash-poor, the committee began to spend more selectively. In Nebraska, the monthly allotment went from $25,000 to $2,500. That 90 percent cut in party funding, Ms. Kleeb said, meant that Republican talking points often went unchallenged. “You’re not doing any organizing,” she said, “not because you don’t want to, not because you don’t know how to organize or create good messages, but because you don’t have the money to do it.”Second, Democrats were forced to push hard for bipartisan support on key issues, which often further muddled their messaging. Left-leaning state senators in Nebraska, for example, joined with conservative senators to ban the death penalty in 2015. (A subsequent ballot measure restored it.) In 2016 and 2017, the progressive environmentalist and pro-small-farm group Nebraska Communities United fought against the construction of a massive poultry-processing plant on the flood plain of the Lower Platte River by partnering with a local group that was afraid the plant would be staffed by Black Muslim immigrants from Somalia. Ms. Kleeb herself, when she was the director of Bold Nebraska, one of those progressive groups, helped to block the Keystone XL pipeline not by talking about its climate impact but by joining with conservative ranchers who were outraged that the power of eminent domain had been granted to a foreign corporation. The problem with that strategy over time, Ms. Kleeb acknowledges now, is that voters often walked away confused. “They don’t even know where the Democratic Party stands,” she said.Without a Democratic counterbalance, Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska, so candidates are pulled further and further to the right in order to appease and appeal to an increasingly radical and angry base. In this year’s governor’s race, for example, Mr. Herbster’s top competitor, Jim Pillen, would seem to check all of the appropriate boxes for a Republican nominee in Nebraska. He’s endorsed by the current governor, Pete Ricketts. He is one of the largest hog producers in the country. He even played football for the Nebraska Cornhuskers during the glory years under Tom Osborne, who later represented Nebraska’s Third Congressional District.But as Mr. Herbster’s poll numbers have surged, Mr. Pillen has veered to the right, attacking “liberal professor groups” (though he is a member and former chair of the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents) and running TV ads with an endorsement from the comedian Larry the Cable Guy. Last week, he posted on Twitter that he was the “only candidate to take action against CRT,” the “only candidate willing to fight the radical transgender agenda” and the “only candidate willing to call abortion what it is — murder.” (A third major candidate, Brett Lindstrom, has struck a less strident tone but holds many of the same beliefs.)Donald Trump praised Mr. Herbster at a rally in Greenwood, Neb., on May 1.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesThe crowd where Mr. Trump spoke.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesEven with that hard-line rhetoric, it will be hard for Mr. Pillen to beat Mr. Herbster’s direct endorsement from Mr. Trump. Thursday night, after the tables and chairs had been put away at the Starlite Event Center, the Herbster campaign hosted a call-in “telerally” with Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Trump praised the businessman as “a die-hard MAGA champ” and guaranteed that Mr. Herbster would “never bend to the RINOs” — Republicans in name only — like “Little Ben Sasse,” Nebraska’s junior senator, and Representative Don Bacon, whom Mr. Trump derided as “another beauty.” During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Sasse voted with him 85 percent of the time. Mr. Bacon voted with him 89 percent of the time. But Mr. Trump has considered both to be insufficiently loyal to him personally, and their political futures may be in jeopardy as a result. If so, they will be replaced by politicians who are more brazen in their contempt for the Democratic Party and for democratic ideals. That’s why the outcome of Nebraska’s Republican governor’s primary is almost immaterial.Yes, whoever emerges with the nomination will most likely become the next governor. And it would appear that Mr. Herbster retains the inside track, thanks to Mr. Trump — just as the former president has buoyed Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker to the top of their primary Senate races in Pennsylvania and Georgia and lifted J.D. Vance from a packed Republican field in the Senate primary in Ohio. But it doesn’t matter whether these candidates actually win or not, because their conspiratorial and inflammatory rhetoric has overtaken the discourse, pushing all Republican candidates further and further toward the fringe. Regardless of how the final balloting turns out in Nebraska on Tuesday, the real victor will be Donald Trump.Republican primaries now determine most state races in Nebraska.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesTed Genoways (@TedGenoways) is the author, most recently, of “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm.” Starting this fall, he will be a president’s professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.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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      What Democrats Don’t Understand About Rural America

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      NOBLEBORO, Maine — We say this with love to our fellow Democrats: Over the past decade, you willfully abandoned rural communities. As the party turned its focus to the cities and suburbs, its outreach became out of touch and impersonal. To rural voters, the message was clear: You don’t matter.Now, Republicans control dozens of state legislatures, and Democrats have only tenuous majorities in Congress at a time in history when we simply can’t afford to cede an inch. The party can’t wait to start correcting course. It may be too late to prevent a blowout in the fall, but the future of progressive politics — and indeed our democracy — demands that we revive our relationship with rural communities.As two young progressives raised in the country, we were dismayed as small towns like ours swung to the right. But we believed that Democrats could still win conservative rural districts if they took the time to drive down the long dirt roads where we grew up, have face-to-face conversations with moderate Republican and independent voters and speak a different language, one rooted in values rather than policy.It worked for us. As a 25-year-old climate activist with unabashedly progressive politics, Chloe was an unlikely choice to be competitive — let alone win — in a conservative district that falls mostly within the bounds of a rural Maine county that has the oldest population in the state. But in 2018, she won a State House seat there with almost 53 percent of the vote. Two years later, she ran for State Senate, challenging the highest-ranking Republican in state office, the Senate minority leader. And again, in one of the most rural districts in the state, voters chose the young, first-term Democrat who sponsored one of the first Green New Deal policies to pass a state legislature.To us, it was proof that the dogmas that have long governed American politics could and should be challenged. Over the past decade, many Democrats seem to have stopped trying to persuade people who disagreed with them, counting instead on demographic shifts they believed would carry them to victory — if only they could turn out their core supporters. The choice to prioritize turnout in Democratic strongholds over persuasion of moderate voters has cost the party election after election. But Democrats can run and win in communities that the party has written off — and they need not be Joe Manchin-like conservative Democrats to do so.This isn’t just a story about rural Maine. It’s about a nationwide pattern of neglect that goes back years. After the 2010 midterms, when the Democrats lost 63 House seats, Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, disbanded the House Democratic Rural Working Group. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada later eliminated the Senate’s rural outreach group. By 2016, according to Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich, the Clinton campaign had only a single staff person doing rural outreach from its headquarters, in Brooklyn; the staffer had been assigned to the role just weeks before the election. And in 2018, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, told MSNBC, “You can’t door-knock in rural America.”We saw this pattern for ourselves. In 2019, the Maine Senate Democratic Campaign Committee told us that it didn’t believe in talking to Republicans. (The group’s executive director did not respond to a request seeking comment by press time.)That blinkered strategy is holding the party back. When Democrats talk only to their own supporters, they see but a small fraction of the changes roiling this country. Since 2008, residents of small towns have fallen behind cities on many major economic benchmarks, and they watched helplessly as more and more power and wealth were consolidated in cities. We saw up close the loss, hopelessness and frustration that reality has instilled.The current Democratic strategy doesn’t just lead to bad policy but also to bad politics. Our democracy rewards the party that can win support over large geographic areas. Ceding rural America leaves a narrow path to victory even in the best circumstances. When the landscape is more difficult, Democrats set themselves up for catastrophic defeat. But we don’t have to cede these parts of the country. Democrats have to change the way they think about them and relate to the voters who live there.What much of the party establishment doesn’t understand is that rural life is rooted in shared values of independence, common sense, tradition, frugality, community and hard work. Democratic campaigns often seem to revolve around white papers and wonky policy. In our experience, politicians lose rural people when they regurgitate politically triangulated lines and talk about the vagaries of policy. Rural folks vote on what rings true and personal to them: Can this person be trusted? Is he authentic?While these defeats ought to prompt real soul-searching within the party, some political scientists and many mainstream Democrats have taken them as proof not that their own strategies must change, but rather that rural Republicans are too ignorant to vote in their own best interest. It’s a counterproductive, condescending story that serves only to drive the wedge between Democrats and rural communities deeper yet.Chloe has knocked on more than 20,000 doors over the last two cycles, listening to stories of loss and isolation. One man told her she was the first person to listen to him; most campaigns, he said, didn’t even bother to knock on his door — they judged him for what his house looked like. Another voter said she had been undecided between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump until Election Day but ultimately voted for Mr. Trump because, she said, at the Republican convention, he talked about regular American working people, and Ms. Clinton didn’t at her own convention.Something has to change. The Democrats need a profoundly different strategy if they are to restore their reputation as champions of working people, committed to improving their lives, undaunted by wealth and power. In our view, the only way for Democrats to regain traction in rural places is by running strong campaigns in districts that usually back Republicans. This change starts with having face-to-face conversations to rebuild trust and faith not only in Democrats but also in the democratic process. Even though it’s hard work with no guaranteed outcome, it is necessary — even if we don’t win.In our two campaigns, we turned down the party consultants and created our own canvassing universe — the targeted list of voters whom we talk to during the election season. In 2020, this universe was four times larger than what the state party recommended. It included thousands of Republicans and independents who had (literally) never been contacted by a Democratic campaign in their entire time voting.Our campaign signs? Hand-painted or made of scavenged wood pallets by volunteers, with images of loons, canoes and other hallmarks of the Maine countryside. Into the trash went consultant-created mailers. Instead, we designed and carried out our own direct mail program for half the price of what the party consultants wanted to charge while reaching 20 percent more voters.Volunteers wrote more than 5,000 personal postcards, handwritten and addressed to neighbors in their own community. And we defied traditional advice by refusing to say a negative word about our opponents, no matter how badly we wanted to fight back as the campaigns grew more heated.When we first embarked down this road, the path was rocky. Chloe came home from canvassing distraught one day and dictated a voice memo to herself: “I talked to a lot of people I’ve known my whole life, and they wouldn’t commit to vote for me.” They knew she was a good person; the only reason they refused to support her was that she was a Democrat.Another day she met a couple who thought people should be able to snowmobile and hunt and fish and ride ATVs on protected lands. Chloe told them she agreed; while she considers herself extremely progressive, there are some things she thinks the left is too rigid on. Then the conversation turned to immigration, and the couple told her that undocumented immigrants should be separated from their kids. “I literally have no idea what to say to that besides just not getting into it,” Chloe reflected. “But is that being disingenuous? Is that not fighting the fight?”We heard some rough stuff, and we didn’t tolerate hate. But through the simple act of listening, we discovered that we could almost always catch a glimpse of common ground if we focused on values, not party or even policy. If people said they were fed up with politics, we’d say: “Us, too! That’s why we’re here.” If they despised Democrats, we’d tell them how we had deep issues with the party as well, and we were trying to make it better. It was how we differentiated ourselves from the national party and forged a sense of collective purpose.Slowly but surely, we thought we might be able to turn things around. A young mom who opened her door said that she couldn’t afford to take her child to the emergency room. She had never voted for a Democrat, but she committed to vote for us. There was a man with a Trump bumper sticker on his truck who, after talking with Chloe, put a Chloe Maxmin bumper sticker on his tailgate, too. There was a preacher who had never put up a political sign in his life until our campaign.Perhaps the most memorable experience was in 2018 at the end of a winding driveway on a cold fall day. Several men were in the garage, working on their snowmobiles. Chloe stepped out to greet them. “Hi, I’m Chloe, and I’m running for state representative.” The owner immediately responded with a question: Did she support Medicaid expansion? Chloe answered honestly that she did. The man pointed an angry finger toward the road and told her to leave.Taken aback, Chloe asked: “Hold on a second. What just happened? I’m honestly just interested to hear your perspective, even if you don’t vote for me.”This gentleman went on to tell his story, how he grew up on that very property without any electricity or running water; how he had worked hard to build a life for himself and his family, which included paying for his own health care without any help from the government. This was his way of life and what he believed in. It was an honest conversation, and by the end, he said he would vote for Chloe.Gradually, our own volunteers learned from Chloe how to find common ground. Despite the many doors shut in their faces, they largely succeeded.“Talked with a 43-year-old guy who announced that he wasn’t voting, that he was so depressed at the quality of people in office,” an old-timer who was one of our volunteers recounted in an email. By the end of their conversation, he was going to vote just for Chloe. “The fact that an older person is optimistic and working to elect young people is a great thing,” the voter told him.Another volunteer once called these conversations “a connection with each other and with something bigger that each one of us craves.”When Covid hit in March 2020, we tried a new way of fostering these connections, pausing the campaign and pivoting all our resources to supporting seniors struggling with the isolation and upheaval of the pandemic. With some 200 volunteers, we made more than 13,500 calls to seniors in the district — regardless of their political affiliation — and offered them rides, pharmacy pickups, connections to food banks, and a buddy to call them every day or week to check in.A volunteer spoke with an elderly woman who depended on the library for large-print books, but the libraries were closed. We found a bookstore that delivered some. Another volunteer talked with a gentleman who had no internet and therefore no access to the news. She bought him a subscription to The New York Times.The Democratic campaign leadership was eager to replicate our success but also fundamentally unequipped to understand what we were doing. At the height of the pandemic, we told the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee about our approach. Almost immediately the committee’s staff was instructed to tell Democratic candidates to make similar calls, but only to seniors within their “persuasion universe” — people whose votes they thought they could win. Specifically, people over 60 who were likely Democratic voters. We read this in horror and immediately wrote back, imploring the leaders to not limit the scope of the calls. They brushed us off.It was far from the only time party leaders told us they knew better than we did. In the final stretch of the 2018 campaign, they insisted that as part of their turnout effort they would send their people to conservative households that had told us Chloe was the only Democrat they would support. We were terrified that volunteers reciting a generic script, pushing folks to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, would alienate the disaffected Republican voters whom we had worked so hard to persuade to vote for Chloe.We begged the party officials to reconsider. They refused. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Election Day that they backed down, telling us they were unable to mobilize enough volunteers to send down the back roads to the district. That experience only reinforced our belief that candidates should be able to control the resources that the party puts into districts, so that they can iterate and improve on the one-size-fits-all strategies that the Democrats tend to employ.After both successful campaigns, we asked ourselves: Is our strategy something that can be replicated? We scaled up our approach in 2020 to solidify some of our tactics, such as focusing on canvassing voters whom the party had given up on, eschewing consultants and leaning into values-driven messaging. But, at the same time, we knew that the back roads of Maine were unique; the roads of Georgia, Wisconsin, Washington or Utah might require their own strategy. A state or local campaign is an easier ship to turn than a U.S. Senate campaign and better situated to buck consultants and bring a different politics to folks’ doorsteps. We certainly don’t have all the answers; all we can hope is that our example will help persuade candidates to try, to recommit themselves to rural places, to listen, to learn and to evolve.As Democrats, we feel every day the profound urgency of our times, the existential necessity of racial justice, the impending doom of the climate crisis, the imperative to reform our criminal justice system, and so much more. At the same time, as a party we’ve made some big mistakes as we walk down the road to a better world. Abandoning rural voters could be one of the costliest.But it’s not too late to make amends, to rebuild our relationship with the quiet roads of rural America. We have to hit the ground running, today, this cycle, and recommit ourselves to the kind of politics that reaches every corner of our country.Chloe Maxmin (@chloemaxmin) is a state senator in Maine. Canyon Woodward (@CanyonWoodward) was her campaign manager in 2018 and 2020. Their book, “Dirt Road Revival,” comes out on May 10.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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      Democrats Agree to Pay $113,000 Over Campaign Spending Inquiry

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      Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party described payments to a law firm that commissioned scrutiny of Trump-Russia ties — leading to the Steele dossier — as legal services, not opposition research.WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic Party have agreed to pay $113,000 in fines to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether they violated a campaign finance disclosure law when they funded an opposition research effort into Donald J. Trump and Russia that resulted in a discredited document known as the Steele dossier.During the 2016 race, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained a law firm, Perkins Coie, which in turn hired a research group, Fusion GPS, that commissioned what became the dossier. In campaign spending disclosures, the campaign and the party said their payments to Perkins Coie were for legal services, not opposition research.Dan Backer, a conservative lawyer, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on behalf of a group he leads, the Coolidge Reagan Foundation. It accused the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party of illegally hiding that they had been funding an opposition research effort.The commission has not yet made public the findings of its investigation. But the agency sent a letter about the inquiry and its resolution to Mr. Backer on Tuesday, which he posted on his group’s website. The letter said the commission agreed that the campaign and the party had probably violated campaign finance law.“We’re thrilled to have caused some modicum of accountability against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee,” Mr. Backer said, arguing that the dossier had damaged American democracy. He added, “It’s not enough and it should be more.”Graham Wilson, a lawyer representing both the campaign and the party in the matter, did not respond to a request for comment. But Daniel Wessel, a Democratic National Committee spokesman, said in a statement, “We settled aging and silly complaints from the 2016 election about ‘purpose descriptions’ in our F.E.C. report.”So-called conciliation agreements attached to the letter sent to Mr. Backer showed that the campaign and the party disagreed that they had inaccurately described the purpose of their spending. They argued that the research Perkins Coie had commissioned was part of the legal services the law firm provided, including “in anticipation of litigation.”Nevertheless, the documents said, the campaign and the party agreed in February to pay civil penalties totaling $113,000 — $8,000 from the campaign and $105,000 from the party — to resolve the matter “expeditiously and to avoid further legal costs.” The agreements said the campaign and the party did not concede that the Federal Election Commission was correct that they probably violated campaign finance law but “will not further contest” that finding either.The commission documents said Perkins Coie — where a partner at the time, Marc Elias, was representing the Clinton campaign — paid Fusion GPS slightly more than $1 million in 2016, and the law firm was in turn paid $175,000 by the campaign and about $850,000 by the party during six weeks in July and August 2016. Campaign spending disclosure reports described most of those payments to Perkins Coie as having been for “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting.”The Washington Examiner earlier reported on the commission’s letter to Mr. Backer.The Steele dossier was a set of reports written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research firm was a subcontractor that Fusion GPS hired to look into Mr. Trump’s purported links to Russia. The reports cited unnamed sources who claimed that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia and that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes.In addition to giving his reports to Perkins Coie, Mr. Steele shared some with the F.B.I. and reporters. The F.B.I. — which had opened its investigation into Russia’s election interference operation and links to the Trump campaign on other grounds — used part of the dossier in applications to wiretap a Trump associate. BuzzFeed published the dossier in January 2017, heightening suspicion about Mr. Trump and Russia.It has become clear that the dossier’s sourcing was thin. No corroborating evidence emerged in the intervening years to support many of its claims, such as the purported sex tape, and investigators determined that one key allegation — that a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Michael D. Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign — was false.The primary source of information in the dossier was Igor Danchenko, a researcher hired by Mr. Steele to canvass for information about Mr. Trump and Russia from people he knew, including in Europe and Russia.Mr. Danchenko told the F.B.I. in 2017 that he thought the tenor of the dossier was more conclusive than was justified. He portrayed the story of the blackmail tape as speculation that he was unable to confirm; a key source had called him without identifying himself, he said, adding that he had guessed at the source’s identity.Last year, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the Russia inquiry, John H. Durham, indicted Mr. Danchenko on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of his sources.At the same time the Federal Election Commission decided that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party had probably violated campaign finance law, the agency dismissed related complaints against Mr. Elias, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS and Mr. Steele, according to the commission’s letter to Mr. Backer and a letter to Mr. Elias that was obtained by The New York Times. More

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      House Democrats Push Biden to Build a Better Midterm Message

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      House Democrats have been pressing the president to come up with a bumper-sticker-worthy slogan. The White House says it’s sharpening its message.WASHINGTON — After offering her customary lavish praise of President Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got to the business at hand at a White House meeting last month on the midterm elections.Democrats, Ms. Pelosi told Mr. Biden and a group of his aides, need a more succinct and consistent message. The speaker, who has long been fond of pithy, made-for-bumper-sticker mantras, offered a suggestion she had heard from members: Democrats deliver.What Ms. Pelosi did not fully detail that February evening was that some of her party’s most politically imperiled lawmakers were revolting against Mr. Biden’s preferred slogan, “Build back better,” believing it had come to be a toxic phrase that only reminded voters of the party’s failure to pass its sweeping social policy bill. And what the president and his advisers did not tell the speaker was that they had already surveyed “Democrats deliver” with voters — and the response to it was at the bottom of those for the potential slogans they tested, according to people familiar with the research.No new campaign message was agreed to that day — or since. Mr. Biden is now absorbed by the war in Europe. Facing the biggest foreign policy crisis of his presidency, he is hardly consumed with the looming midterm elections, let alone trying to devise a catchy slogan. Still, his advisers acknowledge that the crisis in Ukraine presents a chance for a reset, perhaps the president’s best opportunity to restore his standing before November.Democrats are pleading with him to come up with a sharper message. With inflation hitting another 40-year high and gas prices spiking because of the boycott on Russian oil, they remain angst-ridden about their prospects in the fall, in large part because the president’s approval ratings remain in the 40s, and even lower in some pivotal states, even after a recent bump.Democrats who once thought the key to their political success would be beating back the pandemic and restoring the economy are deflated to find that falling coronavirus positivity rates and rising employment numbers — and even foreign policy leadership — have barely moved public opinion.“The economy is strong, and America is once again leading in freedom’s fight against tyranny,” Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota said. “But we all know that politics isn’t predicated on what’s real, rather on how people feel.”Representative Dean Phillips at a news conference with fellow members of the Problem Solvers Caucus outside the U.S. Capitol in December.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesRepublicans have plenty of their own divisions over message — and messengers. As long as former President Donald J. Trump retains his grip on the party, Democrats have a chance to remind up-for-grabs voters what is at stake this year and beyond.Still, White House aides acknowledge the pressure to revamp their strategy. They have been frustrated by how little credit they have received for enacting major legislation such as the Covid relief bill or bipartisan infrastructure legislation.“You tell them about the American Rescue Plan, and they say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’” Mr. Biden, in a burst of candor, said at the House Democratic retreat on Friday, alluding to the $1.9 billion Covid measure he signed a year ago that is but a dim memory for most voters.The president’s advisers point to the State of the Union address — which emphasized pragmatism over bold progressive goals — as a blueprint for his message in coming months and note that, according to their research, cutting drug costs was among the most popular proposals in the speech.They also are considering a handful of executive orders that would please their base, on matters including the cancellation of some student loan debt, and are determined to enact legislation lowering the costs of prescription drugs, according to Democrats familiar with his plans.Some Democrats say they have been cheered by signs that the White House, and particularly Ron Klain, the chief of staff, are now focused on inflation after initially arguing last year that the increase was transitory. During a recent meeting with a group of House Democrats, Mr. Klain resisted a request to spend more federal dollars aiding restaurants in part because it could be seen as adding to inflationary pressures, according to an official at the meeting.To the relief of Democrats in Congress, the White House is dropping the “Build back better” catchphrase. The administration is also attempting to pin the blame on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for rising gas prices, hoping it will at least dilute Republican attacks over the issue.Mr. Biden’s midterm priorities aren’t taking a back seat to the war in Ukraine, the White House insists. Senior officials acknowledge that they regret their all-consuming focus on the Afghanistan withdrawal last summer, and as one said, they will not let the West Wing “become a bunker” at the expense of domestic politics.Democrats are counting on it.Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat who is on the ballot this fall, said he had privately urged Mr. Biden to put reducing consumer costs at the center of his agenda.“The president and the administration need to be attentive to the difficulties that real people are facing in the real world,” Mr. Polis said, recounting his message to the president on a phone call with other governors last month. “He’s a good listener. It’s just a matter of how it gets translated into policies, and we haven’t seen that yet from the White House.”Other prominent Democrats have also privately voiced discontent to Mr. Biden. Those ranks include Democrats who may also run for president and some who already have. Speaking to a friend last month, Hillary Clinton expressed concern that Mr. Biden was not offering a compelling narrative to voters about his presidency, according to a person familiar with the conversation.In addition to Mr. Biden’s policy plans, his advisers say they are taking steps to focus more aggressively on the election and on building good will with restive lawmakers.Biden officials said the president and Vice President Kamala Harris had both stepped up their fund-raising efforts for the Democratic National Committee in February, engaging major donors in one-on-one video conversations that had bolstered the committee’s coffers. There are discussions about expanding the White House political operation by dispatching a senior adviser, Cedric Richmond, to the D.N.C., which administration aides are frustrated with.Also, in hopes of quieting grumbles about Mr. Biden’s lack of engagement, his advisers say they plan to open up the White House to lawmakers, hosting them at the White House movie theater and bowling alley and reviving popular events like the Easter Egg Roll and West Wing tours.Nowhere is there more alarm in the party ranks than among House Democrats, many of whom have long felt that Mr. Biden and his aides, with their decades of service in the Senate, were overly focused on the other chamber.Most outspoken are incumbents facing difficult elections.Mr. Biden with Mayor Andy Schor and Representative Elissa Slotkin in Lansing, Mich., in October.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOne of them, Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, had been privately pushing party leaders to salvage some elements of the sweeping social welfare legislation that Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia appeared to have torpedoed at the end of last year. Ms. Slotkin’s idea: Hold a summit-style gathering with House and Senate leaders and find consensus.That did not happen. Ms. Pelosi did hold a meeting in her office last month with Ms. Slotkin and other Democrats from competitive districts. The gathering devolved into a session of griping about the White House and pleas with the speaker to tell Mr. Biden to stop using the phrase “Build back better.”Ms. Slotkin declined to discuss private conversations but was blunt about her exasperation. “It would be helpful if the White House, the Senate and the House were all on the same page on those priorities,” she said.Asked if she was happier after the State of the Union, she shot back, “Words are good; deeds are better.”Some of her colleagues are voting with their feet: 31 House Democrats have said they will not run for re-election, the highest number in the caucus since 1992.Not all of the ire is aimed at Mr. Biden. Lawmakers view Ms. Pelosi as a political force but a de facto lame duck who is all but certain to join the exodus if Republicans reclaim the majority. They complain that they have received little guidance from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has sought to mollify members by talking up better-than-expected results from the redistricting process.The new maps, though, are little comfort to the lawmakers like Representative Dina Titus of Nevada, a poster child for the anguish of congressional Democrats.Representative Dina Titus of Nevada. Her tourism-dependent district was hit hard by the pandemic; Nevada still has some of the highest unemployment levels in the country.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesMs. Titus sought an ambassadorship but didn’t get one because Democrats couldn’t risk losing her seat. Her district became more competitive through redistricting. She is facing a primary from the left despite her largely progressive record. And she is running in tourism-dependent Nevada, which still has some of the highest unemployment levels in the country.Mr. Biden has set foot in the state only once as president, when he flew in for former Senator Harry Reid’s funeral.“They haven’t had time to come up with a plan because every day is some new crisis,” Ms. Titus said of the White House. Maybe, she wondered, there is no return to normal in polarized times.“You get expectations up that you can bring people together, you can negotiate, you got international experience, and then it’s a new world,” she said.Representative Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, another Democrat who is facing a tough re-election campaign, used the same word.“Let’s manage expectations,” Ms. Wild said, conceding that “as a party we overshot on” the social welfare measure that ran aground with Mr. Manchin.It’s hardly just swing district Democrats who are frustrated. As Mr. Biden’s approval rating has taken a significant hit among younger and nonwhite voters, other party leaders are urging him to address the concerns of those constituencies.Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York had broader advice for the president going forward: “Speak to more progressive policies, and speak to issues that impact people of color specifically.”Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesRepresentative Jamaal Bowman of New York said he had called Mr. Klain after Mr. Biden’s State of the Union speech to relay his alarm that the president had made the case against defunding the police without more robustly addressing police misconduct. (White House aides noted that the president had explicitly pledged “to hold law enforcement accountable.”)Mr. Bowman offered this advice for the president: “Speak to more progressive policies, and speak to issues that impact people of color specifically.”At a closed-door retreat for Senate Democrats that Mr. Biden attended on Wednesday, Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia pressed the president to cancel student loan debt, according to Democrats in the room.“Good policy, good politics,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said of wiping away student debt.That advice, though, is bumping against the concerns of moderate Democrats, who are pushing Mr. Biden to pivot to the political center. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey has spearheaded what he calls a “common sense” agenda and shared it with Mr. Klain, who was interested in some elements but mostly wanted to know what could pass the Senate. More

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      Could Iowa and New Hampshire Lose First Spots in Primary Calendar?

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      After complaints about disenfranchisement and logistical snafus, the party is reconsidering Iowa and New Hampshire’s coveted spots in the presidential nominating process.For years, Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire have battled criticism from others in the party who argued that the two states are not racially diverse enough to kick off the Democratic nomination process.But after a disastrous 2020 cycle, in which Iowa officials struggled to tabulate votes and neither state proved predictive of President Biden’s eventual victory, Democratic leaders are exploring with new urgency whether to strip the two states of what has been a priceless political entitlement: their traditional perch at the start of the party’s presidential calendar.Several ideas are expected to be heard on Friday by the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee, which governs the nominating process. One calls for an application process for states based on several criteria, including diversity. Another idea, raised at a meeting in January, would consolidate all four of the current early-voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — into a single first voting day before Super Tuesday.The debate has taken on new urgency in response to a steady drumbeat of criticism by activists, elected officials and some members of the rules and bylaws committee. The concerns raised include fears that Iowa’s caucus system disenfranchises some voters and that neither Iowa nor New Hampshire is racially diverse enough to act as a stand-in for the Democratic voting base.In the last election cycle, logistical challenges including late-arriving votes and inaccurate data also highlighted the shortcomings of Iowa’s caucus process and muddied its ability to name a winner.“To me it’s not about one state, it’s not about punishing,” said Mo Elleithee, a former spokesman for the Democratic National Committee and for Hillary Clinton who serves on the rules and bylaws committee.“We have a chance to show our values in our process,” Mr. Elleithee said. “Diversity, inclusion, and, given the job of the D.N.C. is to elect Democrats, by putting our people in front of as many battleground states as possible.”Members of the rules and bylaws committee, several of whom did not respond to requests for comment, have been told to expect to work on the issue throughout the summer with the intention of setting a firm nomination calendar by the fall.“We are not close to making a decision,” said Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee who also serves on the rules and bylaws committee. On Friday, she said, “we start the conversation.”In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win the party’s presidential nomination without winning either the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primaries.David Degner for The New York TimesIn January, during a virtual meeting of the same body, Mr. Elleithee and others made the case for overhauling the nominating calendar and were met with relatively little pushback — which some members took as a sign that even the delegations from Iowa and New Hampshire recognized that some change may be inevitable.State officials in Iowa and New Hampshire have fiercely resisted previous proposals to downgrade their primacy in the party’s nominating calendar, publicly and privately whipping allies to their side, but they have not yet begun to do so, according to committee members. Still, they said that any change to the system would be expected to demonstrate the party’s acknowledgment of the importance of smaller states and rural voters.Scott Brennan, an Iowan who sits on the rules and bylaws committee, did not respond to a request for comment but argued after the January meeting that Iowa’s small-state status has allowed barrier-breaking politicians to thrive.“Barack Obama was able to come to Iowa, the little-known senator from Illinois, and ultimately become the nominee,” Mr. Brennan said then.Mr. Brennan also referenced Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who is now the secretary of transportation. When Iowa’s caucuses were eventually tabulated in 2020, Mr. Buttigieg became the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, with a narrow victory over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.“Folks like that have chances to really shine,” Mr. Brennan said. “If Iowa is not first in the process, I think that goes away.”Ms. Brazile, who in 2000 became the first Black woman to direct a major presidential campaign, said the party benefited when states like Nevada and South Carolina were added to the early nominating schedule to improve the representation of Black and Latino voters.Supporters in South Carolina waited to meet President Biden before the state’s Democratic primary in February 2020.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“It’s very important that our primary calendar reflect those values,” Ms. Brazile said at the rules and bylaws committee meeting in January. “We need to thank South Carolina and Nevada for giving us quality nominees over the years. That diversity has uplifted the party and also the values we hold as American citizens.”Previous efforts to change the nomination calendar to minimize the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire have hit political roadblocks. Ambitious elected officials, often eyeing the next presidential cycle, have sought to avoid upsetting state officials in Iowa and New Hampshire, who have historically guarded their first-in-the-nation status with extreme urgency. Presidents have often felt indebted to voters in those states, quelling criticisms before they reach the highest levels of the party.But Mr. Biden owes no such obligation. In 2020, he became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win the party’s presidential nomination without winning either in Iowa or New Hampshire. On the night of the New Hampshire primary — where Mr. Biden finished fifth — he fled to South Carolina and argued against the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, highlighting the dearth of Black voters in those states as a reason the results should be downplayed.“Tonight, I’ve just heard from the first two states, not all the nation,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “Up till now, we haven’t heard from the most committed constituency in the Democratic Party — the African American community.”He went on to win the South Carolina primary in a landslide. More