Democratic Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      As Inquiries Compound, So Does the ‘Trump Tax’

      by

      For all their complexity, the Trump-related prosecutions have not significantly constrained the ability of prosecutors to carry out their regular duties, officials have said.Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing criminal investigations into former President Donald J. Trump, employs 40 to 60 career prosecutors, paralegals and support staff, augmented by a rotating cast of F.B.I. agents and technical specialists, according to people familiar with the situation.In his first four months on the job, starting in November, Mr. Smith’s investigation incurred expenses of $9.2 million. That included $1.9 million to pay the U.S. Marshals Service to protect Mr. Smith, his family and other investigators who have faced threats after the former president and his allies singled them out on social media.At this rate, the special counsel is on track to spend about $25 million a year.The main driver of all these efforts and their concurrent expenses is Mr. Trump’s own behavior — his unwillingness to accept the results of an election as every one of his predecessors has done, his refusal to heed his own lawyers’ advice and a grand jury’s order to return government documents and his lashing out at prosecutors in personal terms.Even the $25 million figure only begins to capture the full scale of the resources dedicated by federal, state and local officials to address Mr. Trump’s behavior before, during and after his presidency. While no comprehensive statistics are available, Justice Department officials have long said that the effort alone to prosecute the members of the pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is the largest investigation in its history. That line of inquiry is only one of many criminal and civil efforts being brought to hold Mr. Trump and his allies to account.At the peak of the Justice Department’s efforts to hunt down and charge the Jan. 6 rioters, many U.S. attorney’s offices and all 56 F.B.I. field offices had officials pursuing leads. Jason Andrew for The New York TimesAs the department and prosecutors in New York and Georgia move forward, the scope of their work, in terms of quantifiable costs, is gradually becoming clear.These efforts, taken as a whole, do not appear to be siphoning resources that would otherwise be used to combat crime or undertake other investigations. But the agencies are paying what one official called a “Trump tax” — forcing leaders to expend disproportionate time and energy on the former president, and defending themselves against his unfounded claims that they are persecuting him at the expense of public safety.In a political environment growing more polarized as the 2024 presidential race takes shape, Republicans have made the scale of the federal investigation of Mr. Trump and his associates an issue in itself. Earlier this month, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee grilled the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, on the scale of the investigations, and suggested they might block the reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program used to investigate several people suspected of involvement in the Jan. 6 breach or oppose funding for the bureau’s new headquarters.“What Jack Smith is doing is actually pretty cheap considering the momentous nature of the charges,” said Timothy J. Heaphy, former U.S. attorney who served as lead investigator for the House committee that investigated the Capitol assault.The “greater cost” is likely to be the damage inflicted by relentless attacks on the department, which could be “incalculable,” he added.At the peak of the Justice Department’s efforts to hunt down and charge the Jan. 6 rioters, many U.S. attorney’s offices and all 56 F.B.I. field offices had officials pursuing leads. At one point, more than 600 agents and support personnel from the bureau were assigned to the riot cases, officials said.In Fulton County, Ga., the district attorney, Fani T. Willis, a Democrat, has spent about two years conducting a wide-ranging investigation into election interference. The office has assigned about 10 of its 370 employees to the elections case, including prosecutors, investigators and legal assistants, according to officials.The authorities in Michigan and Arizona are scrutinizing Republicans who sought to pass themselves off as Electoral College electors in states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.For all their complexity and historical importance, the Trump-related prosecutions have not significantly constrained the ability of prosecutors to carry out their regular duties or forced them to abandon other types of cases, officials in all of those jurisdictions have repeatedly said.A vast majority of Mr. Smith’s staff members were already assigned to Trump cases before Mr. Smith was appointed.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesIn Manhattan, where Mr. Trump is facing 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with his alleged attempts to suppress reports of an affair with a pornographic actress, the number of assistant district attorneys assigned to the case is in the single digits, according to officials.That has not stopped Mr. Trump from accusing the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, of diverting resources that might have gone to fight street crime. In fact, the division responsible for bringing the case was the financial crimes unit, and the office has about 500 other prosecutors who have no part in the investigation.“Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on,” Mr. Trump wrote on the day in March that he was indicted. “This is how Bragg spends his time!”Mr. Trump pursued a similar line of attack against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who sued the former president and his family business and accused them of fraud. (Local prosecutors, not the state, are responsible for bringing charges against most violent criminals.)The Justice Department, which includes the F.B.I. and the U.S. Marshals, is a sprawling organization with an annual budget of around $40 billion, and it has more than enough staff to absorb the diversion of key prosecutors, including the chief of its counterintelligence division, Jay Bratt, to the special counsel’s investigations, officials said.A vast majority of Mr. Smith’s staff members were already assigned to those cases before he was appointed, simply moving their offices across town to work under him. Department officials have emphasized that about half of the special counsel’s expenses would have been paid out, in the form of staff salaries, had the department never investigated Mr. Trump.That is not to say the department has not been under enormous pressure in the aftermath of the 2020 election and attack on the Capitol.Justice Department officials have long said that just the effort to prosecute the members of the pro-Trump mob that assaulted the Capitol, is the largest investigation in its history.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThe U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which has brought more than 1,000 cases against Jan. 6 rioters, initially struggled to manage the mountain of evidence, including thousands of hours of video, tens of thousands of tips from private citizens and hundreds of thousands of pages of investigative documents. But the office created an internal information management system, at a cost of millions of dollars, to organize one of the largest collections of discovery evidence ever gathered by federal investigators.Prosecutors from U.S. attorney’s offices across the country have been called in to assist their colleagues in Washington. Federal defenders’ offices in other cities have also pitched in, helping the overwhelmed Washington office to represent defendants charged in connection with Jan. 6.“If you combine the Trump investigation with the Jan. 6 prosecutions, you can say it really has had an impact on the internal machinations of the department,” said Anthony D. Coley, who served as the chief spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland until earlier this year. “It didn’t impede the department’s capacity to conduct its business, but you definitely had a situation where prosecutors were rushed in from around the country to help out.”While the Washington field office of the F.B.I. is in charge of the investigation of the Capitol attack, defendants have been arrested in all 50 states. Putting together those cases and taking suspects into custody has required the help of countless agents in field offices across the country.The bureau has not publicly disclosed the number of agents specifically assigned to the investigations into Mr. Trump, but people familiar with the situation have said the number is substantial but comparatively much smaller. They include agents who oversaw the search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate and worked on various aspects of the Jan. 6 case; and bureau lawyers who often play a critical, under-the-radar role in investigations.A substantial percentage of those working on both cases are F.B.I. agents. In a letter to House Republicans in June, Carlos Uriarte, the department’s legislative affairs director, disclosed that Mr. Smith employed around 26 special agents, with additional agents being brought on from “time to time” for specific tasks related to the investigations.In terms of expense, Mr. Smith’s work greatly exceeds that of the other special counsel appointed by Mr. Garland, Robert K. Hur, who is investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency. Mr. Hur has spent about $1.2 million from his appointment in January through March, on pace for $5.6 million in annual expenditures.An analysis of salary data in the report suggests Mr. Hur is operating with a considerably smaller staff than Mr. Smith, perhaps 10 to 20 people, some newly hired, others transferred from the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, which initiated the investigation.For now, the two cases do not appear to be comparable in scope or seriousness. Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden returned all the government documents in his possession shortly after finding them, and Mr. Hur’s staff is not tasked with any other lines of inquiry.A more apt comparison is to the nearly two-year investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, which resulted in a decision not to indict Mr. Trump.The semiannual reports filed by Mr. Mueller’s office are roughly in line, if somewhat less, than Mr. Smith’s first report, tallying about $8.5 million in expenses.Jonah E. Bromwich More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Should No Labels Run a Presidential Candidate?

      by

      More from our inbox:Oppenheimer’s Lessons on Politics and ScienceDisease Outbreaks in Animal IndustriesCans on the Newlyweds’ Car Jacquelyn Martin/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “With Centrist Platform, No Labels Pushes Cause and Latent Third-Party Bid” (news article, July 16):Although I would love to see our two-party system evolve and I think less acrimony is essential to moving forward, I have two basic problems with the No Labels party idea.First, the U.S. system simply doesn’t support the creation of viable alternate parties. Until the barriers in place are removed, all third parties can do is play spoiler.Second, I firmly believe that our first priority should be defending our democratic foundation. For the first time in U.S. history, we have one party actively and unashamedly undermining the rule of law and democracy itself. We need to defend and shore up our democracy first. Then it will be a great time to change the rules so we don’t have this seemingly black or white constraint for our choice of candidate.Since Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire who gives generous gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas, is a contributor to No Labels, I am suspicious of the rest of the donors whom we don’t know about.I see this movement as a political effort designed to prey on the public’s good faith, good intentions and frustration with the chaos caused by anti-democracy forces in the U.S.The way forward is to stick together for democracy — not splinter.Deb GarriesCalgary, AlbertaThe writer is an American citizen.To the Editor:The article mentions the possibility of the No Labels movement in the U.S. seeking to be listed on state ballots as a political party. This is no easy job. Of the two largest American minor political parties, Libertarians and Greens, only the Libertarians have been getting their candidates on the ballot in all 50 states.Each state has its own often complex rules and requirements to be listed on its ballots. Any group such as No Labels could also face legal challenges by one or both of the major parties. Such an effort to gain ballot access for a new party typically requires years of work and much money.No Labels could cause problems in battleground states for President Biden’s re-election bid, but No Labels’ major battle would be just trying to get on state ballots.Dan DonovanBrooklynTo the Editor:The third-party scam must have the Trump wing of the G.O.P. chuckling with glee. Currently, only a Republican or Democrat can win the presidency, and that’s not going to change in a year and a half. Donald Trump’s followers will not be moved by persuasion or facts, so he will be a nominee.This week you reported on Mr. Trump’s intent to concentrate power in the executive branch, weakening the courts and Congress. He plans the end of the republic as we know it. Yet his followers will vote for him.The Republicans’ path to power is a continual drumbeat of “President Biden’s too old, we need fresh blood,” etc., shifting attention away from Mr. Biden’s effectiveness. The strategy: Persuade Democratic voters that they are too “sophisticated” (No Labels) to accept the binary choice, and should go for a Manchin, a Kennedy.In 2000, Ralph Nader voters helped elect George W. Bush, who attacked Iraq and ballooned the national debt. Many “Bernie Bros” in 2016 refused to vote for Hillary Clinton, helping clear the way for Mr. Trump.Thanks for nothing.This search for political purity, or just novelty, could ironically result in the beginning of American dictatorship next year. It is unrealistic to think that third-party votes will lead anywhere else.Howard SchmittGreen Tree, Pa.To the Editor:I’d like to propose an alternative way to refer to No Labels. It should be called what it is: Republicans Only Not in Name (RONIN). Not only is that resonant with the term RINO (Republicans in Name Only), which is used by many Republicans to refer to other Republicans they disapprove of. It’s also consistent with the Japanese term “ronin,” a kind of loose cannon in the feudal social structure.Ron GroveFlagstaff, Ariz.Oppenheimer’s Lessons on Politics and ScienceJ. Robert Oppenheimer in an undated photo.Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “‘Oppenheimer’ Shows the Danger of Politicizing Science,” by Kai Bird (Opinion guest essay, July 18):Mr. Bird’s excellent essay about J. Robert Oppenheimer illustrates all too well the dangers to our democracy in allowing political rhetoric and policies to alter scientific facts and theories.Such lessons do not belong only to the McCarthy era. The politicization of the Covid vaccine and the far right’s attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci are recent history. And indeed, as we speak, Republican strategists are planning increased executive and presidential political control over scientific and other now independent agencies.Let’s not let the lessons of Oppenheimer be lost. They are as relevant now as they were in the McCarthy era.Ken GoldmanBeverly Hills, Calif.To the Editor:Whether it’s harsh truths about atomic power or the merits of vaccines against Covid-19, influenza and childhood illnesses, it’s science — regularly, honestly and clearly explained — that is sanity’s ultimate home-field advantage.Peter J. PittsNew YorkThe writer, a former F.D.A. associate commissioner, is president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a visiting professor at the University of Paris School of Medicine.Disease Outbreaks in Animal IndustriesThe United States produces 10 billion animals for food every year, including more pigs and poultry, which can harbor and transmit influenza, than nearly any other country.Gerry Broome/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Risk Seen in U.S. Animal Industries” (Science Times, July 11), about the risk of infectious disease outbreaks:This article is illuminating, but one element of the crisis is missing: the degree to which animals suffer in these appalling situations.Consider the complete lack of hygiene to which animals confined in farming operations and live animal markets are subjected without relief until they die, either at the hands of slaughterers or from chronic stress and disease.I doubt that much will be done to control the animal industries identified in the article until more people speak out against what these animals are forced to endure.The cruelty and contamination are linked. We might stretch our imaginations to make this connection and act on it.Karen DavisMachipongo, Va.The writer is the president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit that promotes the respectful treatment of domesticated birds.Cans on the Newlyweds’ CarTo the Editor:Re “Where Those Cans Behind the Car Came From” (Traditions, Sunday Styles, July 16):When my wife, Laurie, and I were married, my brothers affixed a “Just Married” sign and a bouquet of cans to the bumper of my Jeep Cherokee.On our way to the airport that evening, we were pulled over by the Suffield, Conn., police. We weren’t speeding, and there was no one else on the road. Perhaps the officer wanted to congratulate the newlyweds?No; apparently a can had come loose from the vehicle. We were issued a warning — and informed that a ticket would have cost us $82 (more than $200 today) — for “operating with an unsecure load.”Despite that inauspicious start, my wife and I will celebrate our 34th anniversary in November.David CecchiAgawam, Mass. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Attacks Trump and MAGA but Avoids Indictment Talk

      by

      The president has taken swipes at Republicans, including a video playfully featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene as a narrator, but he and his allies are avoiding one target: his predecessor’s legal woes.For months, President Biden has appeared to delight in needling Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, trying at every turn to make MAGA and ultra-MAGA a shorthand for the entire party.This week, Mr. Biden cheekily highlighted a video in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia derisively ticks through his first-term accomplishments and likens him — not positively — to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I approve this message,” the president commented on the video, which was viewed more than 43 million times in 24 hours.Mr. Biden recently did a victory lap when Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama promoted local spending in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Mr. Tuberville had voted against.And his campaign took a shot at Mr. Trump for not visiting Wisconsin during his current presidential bid, accusing him of a “failure to deliver on his promised American manufacturing boom.”But when it comes to the topic dominating the presidential race this week, Mr. Biden and his top allies are treating Mr. Trump’s legal troubles like Voldemort — avoiding, at all costs, any mention of the indictments that must not be named.This moment comes after weeks of polling, both public and private, that suggests Mr. Trump, who is comfortably the front-runner in the Republican primary race, would be a weaker general-election opponent next year than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida or other G.O.P. candidates.The White House and the Biden campaign have not sent explicit instructions to surrogates and supporters telling them to steer clear of Mr. Trump’s legal issues, but plenty of those on Team Biden have gotten the message loud and clear: Don’t talk about the Trump indictments.“The American people want the judicial process to play out without interference from politicians,” said Representative Ro Khanna of California, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “President Biden has his pulse on the sentiments of the American public by talking about what matters to them.”Mr. Biden has said he won’t comment on investigations into and charges against Mr. Trump — a reflection of his clear desire not to be seen as intruding on Justice Department independence, as well as the political imperative of deflecting Republicans’ relentless, evidence-free accusations that he is the hidden hand behind the prosecutions.The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee have repeatedly declined to comment or answer questions about Mr. Trump’s indictments. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has dodged numerous questions about Mr. Trump’s legal travails in recent weeks.“I’m just not going to respond to any hypotheticals that’s currently, you know, out there in the world,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said Tuesday after Mr. Trump revealed he had received a so-called target letter from federal investigators, a sign that he could soon be indicted in the investigation into the events that culminated in the Capitol riot. “Just not going to comment from here.”The Biden world’s approach to Mr. Trump’s indictments echoes how Democrats handled Mr. Trump, then the president, during the 2018 midterm elections.Scores of resistance-fueled Democrats ran for and won House seats by focusing on health care policy without placing Mr. Trump at the center of their campaigns. They didn’t have to talk Trump then, the thinking went, because voters had already made up their minds about him.“He is omnipresent and the voters who are motivated to vote against him and his party already know what they need to know,” said Meredith Kelly, a strategist who worked for the House Democrats’ campaign arm in 2018. “This allowed congressional candidates to talk about real kitchen-table issues impacting families and continues to be the case this cycle as he looms large over the battlefield in 2024.”There’s also little question that polling shows Mr. Biden is stronger against Mr. Trump than Mr. DeSantis or others, giving the president little incentive to do anything to hurt Mr. Trump’s standing among Republican primary voters.A Michigan poll conducted last week by a Republican-leaning polling firm found Mr. Biden up by a percentage point against Mr. Trump but down by two to Mr. DeSantis. The same firm’s poll of Nevada showed Mr. Biden up by four against Mr. Trump and trailing Mr. DeSantis by two. And in Wisconsin, a poll last month from Marquette University Law School found Mr. Biden with a nine-point lead over Mr. Trump but a two-point lead over Mr. DeSantis.According to the Marquette pollster, Charles Franklin, both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis hold support from hard-core Republicans in a matchup against Mr. Biden, but among Republican-leaning independents, Mr. Trump’s support drops while Mr. DeSantis’s does not.The public polling aligns with the White House’s own polling of battleground states.One person who is more than happy to amplify discussions about the investigations and indictments is Mr. Trump himself. It was the former president, of course, who revealed that he had received the target letter.“Crooked Joe Biden has weaponized the Justice Department to go after his top political opponent, President Trump, who is the overwhelming front-runner to take back the White House,” said Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman. “Biden wants to meddle in the election because he knows he stands no chance against President Trump.”Mr. Biden’s campaign on Wednesday referred to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as an “unintentional campaign” spokeswoman.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe Biden campaign’s video of Ms. Greene served to tweak and elevate one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest far-right supporters and promote Mr. Biden’s own record without getting into the legal cases against Mr. Trump. Polling conducted for the White House last year found that Ms. Greene was known and disliked by a large portion of voters and that independent voters associated her with Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.Mr. Biden’s campaign referred to her on Wednesday as an “unintentional campaign” spokeswoman.“Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what F.D.R. started, that L.B.J. expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete,” Ms. Greene said at the Turning Point Action conference over the weekend, in the video clipped by the Biden campaign.The result is a crisp 35-second video, distributed on Mr. Biden’s Twitter feed with the introduction, “I approve this message.”The clip was similar to the moment last month when Mr. Biden highlighted unusual and unexpected support from another Trump-centric Republican, Senator Tuberville, who praised spending in Alabama from the infrastructure law, which Mr. Biden signed and the senator had voted against.In that instance, Mr. Biden played up Mr. Tuberville’s support during a Chicago speech, theatrically drawing the sign of the cross on his chest as if the senator had undergone a political conversion.The president has previously sought to draw attention to Ms. Greene, who is already a leading social media and fund-raising star in the Republican Party. During a speech this month in South Carolina, he said that he would soon make a visit to her northwest Georgia district to celebrate the beginning of construction of a solar power manufacturing plant there.The crowd laughed. Mr. Biden has not yet scheduled a trip to the groundbreaking. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Are We Doomed to Witness the Trump-Biden Rematch Nobody Wants?

      by

      Have you met anyone truly excited about Joe Biden running for re-election? And by that, I mean downright Obama-circa-2008 energized — brimming with enthusiasm about what four more years of Biden would bring to our body politic, our economy, our national mood, our culture?Let’s be more realistic. Is there a single one among us who can muster even a quiet “Yay!”? And no, we’re not counting the guy who sounds like he’s performing elaborate mental dance moves to persuade himself nor anyone who is paid to say so. According to a recent report in The Times, Biden’s fund-raising thus far doesn’t exactly reveal a groundswell of grass roots excitement.Instead, most Democrats seem to view what looks like an inexorable rematch between Biden and Donald Trump with a sense of impending doom. My personal metaphor comes from Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia,” in which a rogue planet makes its way through space toward an inevitable collision with Earth. In that film, the looming disaster symbolized the all-encompassing nature of depression; here, the feel is more dispiritedness and terror, as if we’re barreling toward either certain catastrophe or possibly-not-a-catastrophe. Or it’s barreling toward us.A Biden-Trump rematch would mean a choice between two candidates who, for very different reasons, don’t seem 100 percent there or necessarily likely to be there — physically, mentally and/or not in prison — for the duration of another four-year term.To take, momentarily, a slightly more optimistic view, here is the best case for Biden: His presidency has thus far meant a re-establishment of norms, a return to government function and the restoration of long-held international alliances. He has presided over a slow-churning economy that has turned roughly in his favor. He’s been decent.But really, wasn’t the bar for all these things set abysmally low during the Trump administration (if we can even use that word given its relentless mismanagement)? We continue to have a deeply divided Congress and electorate, a good chunk of which is still maniacally in Trump’s corner. American faith in institutions continues to erode, not helped by Biden’s mutter about the Supreme Court’s most recent term, “This is not a normal court.” The 2020 protests led to few meaningfully changed policies favoring the poor or disempowered.A Biden-Trump rematch feels like a concession, as if we couldn’t do any better or have given up trying. It wasn’t as though there was huge passion for Biden the first time around. The 2020 election should have been much more of a blowout victory for Democrats. Yet compared with his election in 2016, Trump in 2020 made inroads with nearly every major demographic group, including Blacks, Latinos and women, except for white men. The sentiment most Democrats seemed to muster in Biden’s favor while he was running was that he was inoffensive. The animating sentiment once he scraped by into office was relief.This time, we don’t even have the luxury of relief. In the two other branches of government, Democrats have been shown the perils of holding people in positions of power for too long — Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the judiciary and Dianne Feinstein in the legislature. Democrats and the media seem to have become more vocal in pointing out the hazards of Biden’s advancing age. In an April poll, of the 70 percent of Americans who said Biden shouldn’t run again, 69 percent said it’s because of his old age.That old age is showing. Never an incantatory speaker or a sparkling wit, Biden seems to have altogether thrown in the oratorical towel. Several weeks ago, he appeared to actually wander off a set on MSNBC after figuratively wandering through 20 minutes of the host Nicolle Wallace’s gentle questions. In another recent interview, with Fareed Zakaria, when asked specific questions about U.S.-China policy, Biden waded into a muddle of vague bromides and personal anecdotes about his travels as vice president with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. When asked point blank whether it’s time for him to step aside, Biden said, almost tangentially, “I just want to finish the job.”But what if he can’t? Kamala Harris, briefly a promising figure during the previous primary season, has proved lackluster at best in office. Like Biden, she seems at perpetual war with words, grasping to articulate whatever loose thought might be struggling to get out. The thought of her in the Oval Office is far from encouraging.One clear sign of America’s deepening hopelessness is the weird welcoming of loony-tune candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr., who has polled as high as a disturbing 20 percent among Democratic voters. Among never-Trumpian Republicans, there is an unseemly enthusiasm for bridge troll Chris Christie, despite his early capitulation to Trump, for the sole reason that among Republican primary candidates, he’s the one who most vociferously denounces his former leader. And a Washington nonprofit, No Labels, is gearing up for a third-party run with a platform that threatens to leach support from a Democratic candidate who is saddled with a favorable rating of a limp 41 percent.Trump, of course, remains the formidable threat underlying our malaise. Though he blundered into office in 2016 without a whit of past experience or the faintest clue about the future, this time he and his team of madmen are far better equipped to inflict their agenda. As a recent editorial in The Economist put it, “a professional corps of America First populists are dedicating themselves to ensuring that Trump Two will be disciplined and focused on getting things done.” The idea that Trump — and worse, a competent Trump — might win a second term makes our passive embrace of Biden even more nerve-racking. Will we look back and have only ourselves to blame?It is hard to imagine Democrats, or most Americans, eager to relive any aspect of the annus horribilis that was 2020. Yet it’s as if we’re collectively paralyzed, less complacent than utterly bewildered, waiting for “something” to happen — say, a health crisis or an arrest or a supernatural event — before 2024. While we wait, we lurch ever closer to something of a historical re-enactment, our actual history hanging perilously in the balance.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

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Gut-level Hatred’ Is Consuming Our Political Life

      by

      Divisions between Democrats and Republicans have expanded far beyond the traditional fault lines based on race, education, gender, the urban-rural divide and economic ideology.Polarization now encompasses sharp disagreements over the significance of patriotism and nationalism as well as a fundamental split between those seeking to restore perceived past glories and those who embrace the future.Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, described the situation this way in an email to me:Because political beliefs now reflect deeply held worldviews about how the world ought to be — challenging traditional ways of doing things on the one hand and putting a brake on that change on the other — partisans look across the aisle at each other and absolutely do not understand how their opponents can possibly understand the world as they do.The reason we have the levels of polarization we have today, Hetherington continued,is because of the gains non-dominant groups have made over the last 60 years. The Democrats no longer apologize for challenging traditional hierarchies and established pathways. They revel in it. Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality, or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it. It’s just something we are going to have to live with until a new set of issues rises to replace this set.Democrats are determined not only to block any drive to restore the America of 1963 — one year before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — but also to press the liberal agenda forward.Toward the end of the 20th century, Republicans moved rightward at a faster pace than Democrats moved leftward. In recent decades, however, Democrats have accelerated their shift toward more liberal positions while Republican movement to the right has slowed, in part because the party had reached the outer boundaries of conservatism.Bill McInturff, a founding partner of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, released a study in June, “Polarization and a Deep Dive on Issues by Party,” that documents the shifting views of Democratic and Republican voters.Among the findings based on the firm’s polling for NBC News:From 2012 to 2022, the percentage of Democrats who describe themselves as “very liberal” grew to 29 percent from 19.In 2013, when asked their religion, 10 percent of Democrats said “none”; in 2023, it was 38 percent. The percentage of Republicans giving this answer was 7 percent in 2012 and 12 in 2023.The percentage of Democrats who agreed that “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people” grew from 45 percent in 1995 to 67 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in 2021, a 37-point gain. Over the same period, Republican agreement rose from 17 to 23 percent, a six-point increase.“The most stable finding over a decade,” McInturff reports, is that “Republicans barely budge on a host of issues while Democrats’ positions on abortion, climate change, immigration, and affirmative action have fundamentally shifted.”The Democrats’ move to the left provoked an intensely hostile reaction from the right, as you may have noticed.I asked Arlie Hochschild — a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “Strangers in Their Own Land” who has been working on a new book about Eastern Kentucky — about the threatening policies conservatives believe liberals are imposing on them.She wrote back: “Regarding ‘threats felt by the right’ I’d say, all of them — especially ‘trans’ issues — evoke a sense that ‘this is the last straw.’” In their minds, “the left is now unhinged, talking to itself in front of us, while trying to put us under its cultural rule.”For example, Hochschild continued:When I asked a Pikeville, Ky., businessman why he thought the Democratic Party had become “unhinged,” Henry, as I’ll call him here, studied his cellphone, then held it for me to see a video of two transgender activists standing on the White House lawn in Pride week. One was laughingly shaking her naked prosthetic breasts, the other bare-chested, showing scars where breasts had been cut away. The clip then moved to President Biden saying, “these are the bravest people I know.”The sense of loss is acute among many Republican voters. Geoffrey Layman, a political scientist at Notre Dame, emailed me to say:They see the face of America changing, with white people set to become a minority of Americans in the not-too-distant future. They see church membership declining and some churches closing. They see interracial and same-sex couples in TV commercials. They support Trump because they think he is the last, best hope for bringing back the America they knew and loved.Republican aversion to the contemporary Democratic agenda has intensified, according to two sociologists, Rachel Wetts of Brown and Robb Willer of Stanford.In the abstract of their 2022 paper, “Antiracism and Its Discontents: The Prevalence and Political Influence of Opposition to Antiracism Among White Americans,” Wetts and Willer write:From calls to ban critical race theory to concerns about “woke culture,” American conservatives have mobilized in opposition to antiracist claims and movements. Here, we propose that this opposition has crystallized into a distinct racial ideology among white Americans, profoundly shaping contemporary racial politics.Wetts and Willer call this ideology “anti-antiracism” and argue that it “is prevalent among white Americans, particularly Republicans, is a powerful predictor of several policy positions, and is strongly associated with — though conceptually distinct from — various measures of anti-Black prejudice.”Sympathy versus opposition to antiracism, they continue, “may have cohered into a distinct axis of ideological disagreement which uniquely shapes contemporary racial views that divide partisan groups.”They propose a three-part definition of anti-antiracism:Opposition to antiracism involves (1) rejecting factual claims about the prevalence and severity of anti-Black racism, discrimination and racial inequality; (2) disagreeing with normative beliefs that racism, discrimination and racial inequality are important moral concerns that society and/or government should address; and (3) displaying affective reactions of frustration, anger and fatigue with these factual and normative claims as well as the activists and movements who make them.The degree to which the partisan divide has become still more deeply ingrained was captured by three political scientists, John Sides of Vanderbilt and Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck, both of U.C.L.A., in their 2022 book, “The Bitter End.”Vavreck wrote by email that she and her co-authors describedthe state of American politics as “calcified.” Calcification sounds like polarization but it is more like “polarization-plus.” Calcification derives from an increased homogeneity within parties, an increased heterogeneity between the parties (on average, the parties are getting farther apart on policy ideas), the rise in importance of issues based on identity (like immigration, abortion, or transgender policies) instead of, for example, economic issues (like tax rates and trade), and finally, the near balance in the electorate between Democrats and Republicans. The last item makes every election a high-stakes election — since the other side wants to build a world that is quite different from the one your side wants to build.The Sides-Tausanovitch-Vavreck argument receives support in a new paper by the psychologists Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle of the University of Limerick in Ireland. The authors demonstrate not only how ingrained polarization has become, but also how attuned voters have become to signals of partisanship and how adept they now are at using cues to determine whether a stranger is a Democrat or Republican.“Learning a single attitude (e.g., one’s standpoint toward abortion rights),” they write, “allows people to estimate an interlocutor’s partisan identity with striking accuracy. Additionally, we show that people not only use attitudes to categorize others as in-group and out-group members, but also to evaluate a person more or less favorably.”The three conducted survey experiments testing whether Americans could determine the partisanship of people who agreed or disagreed with any one of the following eight statements:1) Abortion should be illegal.2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal.3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country.4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased.5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry.6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment.7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun.8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.The results?“Participants were able to categorize a person as Democrat or Republican based on a single attitude with remarkable accuracy (reflected by a correlation index of r = .90).”While partisan differences over racial issues have a long history, contemporary polarization has politicized virtually everything within its reach.Take patriotism.A March Wall Street Journal/NORC poll at the University of Chicago found that over the 25-year period since 1998, the percentage of adults who said patriotism was “very important” to them fell to 38 percent from 70.Much of the decline was driven by Democrats and independents, among whom 23 and 29 percent said patriotism was very important, less than half of the 59 percent of Republicans.A similar pattern emerged regarding the decline in the percentage of adults who said religion was very important to them, which fell to 39 percent from 62 percent in 1998. Democrats fell to 27 percent, independents to 38 percent and Republicans to 53 percent.Or take the question of nationalism.In their 2021 paper, “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’: How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein and Sean Bock, sociologists at N.Y.U., the University of Haifa and Harvard, argue that the United States has become increasingly divided by disagreement over conceptions of nationalism.“Nationalist beliefs shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” they write. “The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties.”In addition, Bonikowski, Feinstein and Bock argue, “over the past 20 years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have come to define America in more exclusionary and critical terms, and Democrats have increasingly endorsed inclusive and positive conceptions of nationhood.” These trends “suggest a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce partisan divisions.”Bonikowski and his co-authors contend that there are four distinct types of American nationalism.The first, creedal nationalism, is the only version supported by voters who tend to back Democratic candidates:Creedal nationalists favor elective criteria of national belonging, rating subjective identification with the nation and respect for American laws and institutions as very important; they are more equivocal than others about the importance of lifelong residence and language skills and view birth in the country, having American ancestry, and being Christian as not very important.The other three types of nationalism trend right, according to Bonikowski and his colleagues.Disengaged nationalists, “characterized by an arm’s-length relationship to the nation, which for some may verge on dissatisfaction with and perhaps even animus toward it,” are drawn to “Trump’s darkly dystopian depiction of America.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists both apply “elective and ascriptive criteria of national belonging,” including the “importance of Christian faith.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists differ, according to the authors, “in their degree of attachment to the nation, pride in America’s accomplishments, and evaluation of the country’s relative standing in the world.” For example, 11 percent of restrictive nationalists voice strong “pride in the way the country’s democracy works” compared with 70 percent of ardent nationalists.These and other divisions provide William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings who studies how well governments work, the grounds from which to paint a bleak picture of American politics.“Issues of individual and group identity — especially along the dimensions of race and gender — have moved to the center of our politics at every level of the federal system,” Galston wrote by email. “The economic axis that defined our politics from the beginning of New Deal liberalism to the end of Reagan conservatism has been displaced.”How does that affect governing?When the core political issues are matters of right and wrong rather than more and less, compromise becomes much more difficult, and disagreement becomes more intense. If I think we should spend X on farm programs and you think it should be 2X, neither of us thinks the other is immoral or evil. But if you think I’m murdering babies and I think you’re oppressing women, it’s hard for each of us not to characterize the other in morally negative terms.Despite — or perhaps because of — the changing character of politics described by Galston, interest in the outcome of elections has surged.Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, cited trends in polling data on voter interest in elections in an email:In 2000, only 45 percent of Americans said that it really matters who wins that year’s presidential election. Since then, increasing shares of Americans say that who wins presidential elections has important consequences for addressing the major issues of the day: about 63 percent of registered voters provided this response in each of the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections, which then increased to 74 percent in 2016 and 83 percent in 2020.Why?As the parties have become increasingly differentiated over the last several decades, and as presidential candidates have offered increasingly distinct political visions, it is no surprise that greater shares of Americans perceive greater stakes in which party wins the presidential election.Where does all this leave us going into the 2024 election?Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, provided the following answer by email: “When partisan conflict is no longer primarily about policies, or even values, but more about people’s basic worldviews, the stakes do feel higher to partisans.”Weiler cited poll data showing:In 2016, 35 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral than Democrats and 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral. In 2022, those numbers had jumped dramatically — 63 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral, and 72 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral.In this context, Weiler continued:It’s not that the specific issues are unimportant. Our daily political debates still revolve around them, whether D.E.I., abortion, etc. But they become secondary, in a sense, to the gut-level hatred and mistrust that now defines our politics, so that almost whatever issue one party puts in front of its voters will rouse the strongest passions. What matters now isn’t the specific objects of scorn but the intensity with which partisans are likely to feel that those targets threaten them existentially.Perhaps Bill Galston’s assessment was not bleak enough.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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Today’s Top News: Biden Invites Netanyahu to the U.S., and More

      by

      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.President Biden’s invitation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, right, came as a surprise to many.Abir Sultan/EPA, via ShutterstockOn Today’s Episode:Biden Invites Netanyahu to U.S., Easing Tensions, with Patrick KingsleyWith a Centrist Manifesto, No Labels Pushes Its Presidential Bid Forward, with Jonathan WeismanRussia Pulls Out of the Black Sea Grain Deal, with Farnaz FassihiEli Cohen More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Biden’s Campaign Fund-Raising Filing Shows Sluggish Small Donations

      by

      Wealthy Democrats have thrown their money behind the president’s re-election bid, but for many reasons, the party’s small donors have yet to step up their contributions.When President Biden traveled to San Francisco last month, he raised more than $10 million in 36 hours from wealthy Democrats. Trips to Chicago and New York netted millions more, as did fund-raising events around Washington, proving that the party’s big-donor class is fully committed to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.But the small-dollar online money spigot that helped Mr. Biden smash fund-raising records during his 2020 presidential campaign has not yet turned on, and there are ample signs that it may be months before it does.The Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, its joint fund-raising vehicle, collected $10.2 million from small donors — defined as those who gave $200 or less — during the three-month fund-raising period that ended June 30, according to a Federal Election Commission report filed Saturday. That figure is about half of the $21 million President Barack Obama’s campaign raised during the same period of his 2012 re-election effort.Democrats involved with Mr. Biden’s campaign and the world of online fund-raising detailed a host of reasons for Mr. Biden’s relatively low small-dollar haul.Google and Apple have made it harder for email senders to see data about who has opened solicitations. Inflation slowed political donations across the board. Donors are exhausted by the unending flow of emails asking for money, and recipients are responding to far fewer of them.At the moment, Democrats aren’t quite as fired up as they were in 2018 and 2020, when Donald J. Trump’s presidency opened floodgates of liberal money, or ahead of the 2022 midterms, when the Capitol riot, the rise of the election-denial movement and the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade all motivated donors.And Mr. Biden is not an insurgent candidate who is motivating students to put up posters of him on dorm-room walls, as Mr. Obama or Senator Bernie Sanders did in their campaigns. His low-key White House and bare-bones campaign haven’t yet motivated supporters to rage-donate to his campaign.“Right now there’s there is no day-to-day competition combat going on,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul, whom Mr. Biden named a co-chairman of his campaign. “So these are the most loyal, most dedicated believers and supporters. It’ll build over time.”Mr. Biden’s campaign highlighted an array of statistics to promote its grass-roots donor operation. Nearly a third of its 394,000 donors did not contribute to Mr. Biden in 2020, the campaign said.Yet the president’s finance reports show that he is far more dependent on the wealthiest donors than Mr. Trump was in his re-election bid or Mr. Biden’s opponents were in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary contest.Ten donors, including Mr. Katzenberg, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the Maryland hotel magnate, gave $500,000 or more to the Biden Victory Fund. Another 82 donors contributed $100,000 or more.Four years ago, 35 percent of the money raised by Mr. Trump and the two joint committees his campaign formed with the national committee — Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again Committee — came from donors who gave $200 or less. For Mr. Biden, 21 percent of funds to his campaign and the joint finance committee came from small donors.Small-dollar contributions are down across the political spectrum. An analysis conducted by Middle Seat, a digital fund-raising firm with an array of Democratic clients, found that small donors had given less money during the first fund-raising period of 2023 than they had in nearly four years — since early 2019.“If I were on the Biden team right now, I’d be really happy with the numbers,” said Kenneth Pennington, a partner at Middle Seat. “It’s a terrible fund-raising environment, and he’s not launching a new campaign.”While Mr. Biden’s total fund-raising was roughly on par with the Republican candidates, he outpaced them with small donors. Combined, the G.O.P. candidates raised $7.5 million from small donors to his $10.2 million.The percentage of contributions of less than $200 is typically at its high point at the beginning of a campaign and drops as campaigns proceed, because when the amount an individual donor has given exceeds $200, it triggers a federal disclosure requirement.When Mr. Biden began his 2020 campaign for president, 38 percent of the money his campaign raised during the comparable reporting period came from small donors. Democratic online fund-raising experts said they expected the pace of online giving to the Biden campaign to pick up early next year, once voters begin to pay more attention to the Republican primary race and the nominee to oppose Mr. Biden emerges.“Once Democratic donors become focused on the Republican primary and what’s at stake in the 2024 election, the Biden campaign will have no problem raising record amounts of money online,” said Lauren Miller, who served as digital director to Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaigns.Mr. Trump’s small-dollar percentage cannot be discerned until his joint fund-raising committees, into which most of his online solicitations direct money, report finances. They are not required to do so until July 31.Finance reports for the other Republican candidates reveal a party that, even more than Mr. Biden, is heavily reliant on large donors.Among the other Republican candidates, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida reported $2.9 million from small donors, but that figure accounts for a mere 14 percent of what his campaign raised. The small-dollar percentages among other candidates ranged from 34 percent for former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to 2 percent for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who is largely self-financing his campaign.Unlike the Obama and Trump campaigns, the Biden campaign didn’t begin with a digital fund-raising team in place. Instead, it has relied on the Democratic National Committee for its online solicitations. The campaign advertised last week that it was seeking a “director of email and SMS” to lead a division that typically would have more than a dozen people. The campaign recently hired a grass-roots fund-raising director, an official said Saturday.Mr. Biden’s campaign has plowed at least $3.3 million into advertising on Facebook and Google, according to data compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a marketing and communications agency. That figure is far more than any Republican candidate has spent on the platforms and suggests that the campaign is investing in its search for small donors.Two of Mr. Biden’s top advisers, Anita Dunn and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who are overseeing his re-election campaign from the White House, this week formally blessed a super PAC, Future Forward, as the chief outlet for large sums of cash from supportive billionaires and multimillionaires. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Fundraising Deadline for 2024 Presidential Campaigns Arrives: What to Watch

      by

      Which presidential and Senate candidates are swimming in cash? Which ones are growing desperate? That and more will become clearer on Saturday, when campaigns must file their latest federal reports.The financial landscape of the 2024 presidential race — the contest’s haves and have-nots, their momentum and desperation — will come into sharper focus on Saturday, the deadline for campaigns to file their latest reports to the Federal Election Commission.The filings, which detail fund-raising and spending from April 1 through June, will show which campaigns brought in the most hard dollars, or money raised under federal limits that is used to pay for staff, travel, events and advertising. Senate campaigns must also file by the end of Saturday, which means an early glimpse at incumbents’ fund-raising in potentially vulnerable seats.Crucially, the records will reveal which candidates are struggling to draw donor interest. For example, former Vice President Mike Pence raised just $1.2 million, two aides said on Friday, a strikingly low figure that could signal a difficult road ahead.The reports will also give a sense of small-dollar support, and which donors are maxing out their contributions to which candidates. And they will show how campaigns are spending their money, which ones have plenty of cash on hand and which ones are in danger of running dry.“The F.E.C. reports are the M.R.I. scan of a campaign,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist. “It’s the next-best thing to breaking into the headquarters and checking the files.”But the picture will not be complete. For one thing, super PACs, which can raise unlimited money and play an outsize role in supporting presidential candidates, do not have to file reports on their fund-raising and spending until the end of the month.The total number of donors to each campaign will not be provided in the filings, either. That figure is a vital measure for Republicans, because the party is requiring presidential candidates to have at least 40,000 unique donors to take part in the first primary debate on Aug. 23.Saturday will also be the first detailed look at President Biden’s war chest as he slowly ramps up his re-election campaign. His campaign said on Friday that along with the Democratic National Committee and a joint fund-raising committee, it had raised more than $72 million combined for the second quarter.In the same period in 2019, former President Donald J. Trump and his allies raised a total of $105 million — $54 million for Mr. Trump and his committees, and $51 million for the Republican National Committee. In 2011, former President Barack Obama raised $47 million for his campaign and $38 million for the Democratic National Committee.Saturday will also show the money taken in by candidates in competitive Senate races in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana, Nevada and Ohio, among other places.The filings for presidential candidates are pored over by competitors, who want to “get a sense of how they are applying their resources, which will give them a clue to strategies,” Mr. Murphy said. Candidates might look at how much their rivals are spending on ads and polling, for example.“The most important number is cash on hand, minus debt,” Mr. Murphy said. “You see how much financial firepower they actually have.”Several Republican presidential campaigns have previewed their fund-raising ahead of the release. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raised $20 million in the second quarter, his campaign said this month. But the filing on Saturday will show what percentage of that amount came from contributions below $200, which is instructive to assessing the strength of his grass-roots support.Mr. Trump raised more than $35 million in the second quarter, his campaign said. That number, however, is hard to compare with Mr. DeSantis’s because Mr. Trump has raised money through a joint fund-raising committee, which allows him to solicit contributions above the $3,300 individual limit and then transfer funds to his campaign and to his leadership political action committee.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raised $20 million in the second quarter, his campaign said this month. His filing on Saturday will show what share came from contributions below $200, a sign of grass-roots support.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesNikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, is raising money into a joint fund-raising committee, which transfers funds to her campaign and to a leadership PAC.Ms. Haley’s three committees together took in $7.3 million in contributions in the second quarter, according to filings shared with The New York Times, of which the campaign itself accounted for $4.3 million.Mr. Murphy singled out Ms. Haley as a candidate whose total earnings appeared modest, but whose cash on hand had increased from the first quarter of the year — to $9.3 million from $7.9 million across the three committees. “It shows a heartbeat,” he said. Her filings also suggest that her campaign is running a lean operation, with minimal staff, economical travel and no television ads.The Republican National Committee’s donor threshold for the first debate has shifted the calculus of many campaigns and PACs, which must focus not only on raising money but also on attracting a sufficient number of individual donors. So far, the candidates who say they have met that threshold are Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.Nikki Haley’s three committees together took in $7.3 million in contributions in the second quarter, according to filings shared with The New York Times. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Mr. Scott’s campaign said he had raised $6.1 million in the second quarter. Mr. Scott entered the race in May with a head start: He had $22 million in hard dollars in his Senate campaign. His presidential campaign said it had $21 million remaining at the end of the quarter.Another Republican candidate, the wealthy entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has not released a preview of his fund-raising numbers, but he has said he will spend $100 million of his own money on his bid. Mr. Christie, similarly, has not released his numbers.On Friday, the campaign of Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, a wealthy former software engineer, filed its quarterly report, showing that he had raised $1.5 million in contributions and that he had lent $10 million to his campaign. He had $3.6 million in cash on hand at the end of the month.The campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental lawyer who is challenging Mr. Biden for the Democratic nomination, also filed its report Friday, showing more than $6.3 million in contributions and $4.5 million in cash on hand at the end of June.Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist who ran Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said it would be telling which candidates broadcast their total donor numbers.Another thing to watch is the “burn rate” of each campaign, Mr. Sullivan said — what candidates are spending as a share of what they have taken in, and how much they have left in the bank.Campaign accounts are vital to candidates because, unlike PACs, the funds are controlled by the campaign. Also unlike PACs, campaigns are protected by federal law that guarantees political candidates the lowest possible rate for broadcast advertising.Mr. Sullivan said that television advertising was no longer as important as so-called earned media exposure, through events, viral moments and debates. But those often cost money, too: Even on a tight budget, candidates can easily spend a quarter-million dollars a day holding events on the trail, he said.“Nobody stops running for president because they think their ideas are no longer good enough, or they’re not qualified,” Mr. Sullivan said. “People stop running for president for one reason, and one reason only: It’s because they run out of money.”Reid J. Epstein More