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      DeSantis and Haley Will Appear in Dueling Town Halls Tonight

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      It’s another busy day on the presidential campaign trail in Iowa.Eleven days out from the caucuses, two of Donald J. Trump’s rivals, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will participate Thursday night in back-to-back town halls to be broadcast live on CNN.For Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, who have been battling for second place, the town halls will provide prime-time opportunities for them to win over Iowans ahead of the Jan. 15 caucuses. Mr. DeSantis will go first at 9 p.m. Eastern time, followed by Ms. Haley an hour later.Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur, is keeping up his fevered sprint across Iowa, aiming to beat the odds on Caucus Day despite his fourth-place position in state polls.The man they are all trying to take down, Mr. Trump, won’t start appearing at Iowa events until Friday, but his surrogates are stumping on his behalf. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right firebrand from Georgia, and Eric Trump, a son of the former president, will hold simultaneous campaign events in different parts of Iowa Thursday night.Mr. Trump, the overwhelming favorite of Republicans in Iowa, is regularly shown in state polls to be around or slightly below 50 percent support, with Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley polling below 20 percent in a virtual tie.But Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis have so far spent far more money attacking each other than they have Mr. Trump, and they have both been very cautious whenever they do venture toward criticizing the former president.Ms. Haley has focused on policy differences between her and Mr. Trump, on attack ads Mr. Trump has put out against her, and on the “chaos” that she says has followed him throughout the years. Although Mr. DeSantis has gone after Mr. Trump for making campaign promises in 2016 that he failed to keep while in office, Mr. DeSantis so far appears more comfortable attacking Ms. Haley. He has called her a liberal, a flip-flopper and the favored candidate of Wall Street, while Ms. Haley has mostly ignored him when speaking on the campaign trail.Mr. DeSantis’s refusal to more directly criticize Mr. Trump is a version of a problem every other candidate in the race faces: Seemingly every approach to talking about Mr. Trump, whether it’s aggressively attacking him or coming to his defense, has failed to draw away significant support.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is not campaigning in Iowa and is instead staking his candidacy on the later New Hampshire primary, has most aggressively gone after Mr. Trump throughout the race. However, Republicans have so far had little appetite for that message.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      It’s 2024, and the Candidates Are Campaigning at a Furious Pace

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      Twelve days. Not that we’re counting.That’s how much time remains until Caucus Day in Iowa, where the first voting will usher in the 2024 presidential race when Republicans gather on Jan. 15 in school gyms, community centers and churches across the state.The Republican hopefuls seeking to topple former President Donald J. Trump for the party’s nomination have already spent tens of millions of dollars and months campaigning across Iowa. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has at least four events planned on Wednesday, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur running for office, is keeping up a breakneck pace while his poll numbers barely budge. Mr. Trump, with polling leads that seem insurmountable, has faced considerably less pressure to crisscross the state. But even Mr. Trump is headed to Iowa for campaign events this week.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, has barnstormed Iowa and is battling Mr. DeSantis for second place. But she’ll be campaigning on Wednesday in New Hampshire, the next state to vote in the G.O.P. nominating contest and one where she is pinning her hopes.But they are all staring straight up at Mr. Trump, who has maintained daunting double-digit leads in polls in Iowa, despite the 91 felony charges against him and after two states have barred him from their primary ballots after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.His campaign is seeking an overwhelming victory in Iowa to shut out his rivals before most Republicans get a chance to vote in the primaries. Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis, who remain far behind Mr. Trump in Iowa polls, look to be fiercely battling for second place.Mr. Ramaswamy, who has brashly promised a surprise showing in the caucuses, is polling a distant fourth in Iowa, with less than 10 percent support. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the race’s staunchest Trump critic, has not campaigned in Iowa, and is polling in fifth place behind Mr. Ramaswamy, the race’s foremost Trump proponent. Mr. Christie has instead staked his candidacy on the New Hampshire primary.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at the Iowa State Fair last year, when he was viewed as the clear No. 2 to Donald J. Trump.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesIowa is not a particularly valuable state to win in the presidential nomination process. The state awards very few delegates, and the victor there is not assured the party’s nomination. The last non-incumbent Republican presidential nominee to win the Iowa caucuses was George W. Bush in 2000.Still, the state holds symbolic importance as the first votes cast in the nation. The results can point to signs of momentum, of which candidates are rising or falling as the contest moves to larger states.But despite months of intense campaigning and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, the race in Iowa has changed little from the summer, when the hopefuls were roaming the Iowa State Fair: Mr. Trump is still far and away the favorite.One exception has been the rise of Ms. Haley, and the decline of Mr. DeSantis. (On Thursday, they will participate in dueling CNN town halls.) While Mr. DeSantis had been widely viewed as the clear No. 2 when he entered the race, Ms. Haley has caught up to him in the jockeying for second place.That position is still far behind Mr. Trump, but observers are watching closely: A strong performance from either candidate could put pressure on the other to drop out and allow a stronger anti-Trump coalition to emerge. More

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      Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis Battle for Iowa

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      Patrick Healy: Katherine, the Iowa caucuses are 12 days away — the first chance some Americans will have to vote again for Donald Trump or decide if they want to go in a different direction. Trump has a lead of roughly 30 percentage points in several Iowa polls over Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. What do you see driving the race in Iowa right now? Can anything stop Trump?Katherine Miller: This is the part of an election cycle where the stakes and ideas really get tangled up with who voters think has the best shot of winning, polls, money and so forth. If a candidate runs out of money, for instance, it’s hard to campaign for president. If you zoom out and look at polling and the apparatus of support surrounding Donald Trump, it’s really much more likely than not he will be the Republican nominee. He’s polling extremely strongly nationally, but also in Iowa, where his campaign has built what looks like a real operation to make sure he wins.Patrick: He looks like an incumbent president running for re-election, driving the conversation in the party about immigration, security, Biden’s flaws — and treating rivals like protest candidates he wouldn’t deign to debate.Katherine: A lot of Republican voters also just support Trump and what he’s promised: The Des Moines Register published polling before Christmas showing that, on the subject of his grim commentary about immigration or when he compares people to “vermin,” many likely caucusgoers either said that those remarks made them more likely to vote for Trump or that they did not matter.Patrick: A lot of Republicans really like Trump as he is — they already know he will do and say Trumpy things and don’t punish him for it.Katherine: Still: There really is still time for another candidate to seriously challenge Trump. It’s not inevitable. In January of presidential election years, each week starts to feel a lot longer and the result of each caucus or primary can really shape the ones that follow. If you look at national polling, he’s dominating the Republican field. But if you look at New Hampshire’s polling, it’s a much tighter race, and if an “inevitable” front-runner loses one of the first two contests, that can change how voters elsewhere view a race and the choices in front of them.Patrick: It definitely did for Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Howard Dean in 2004.Katherine: There are some people who feel Haley and DeSantis can lose Iowa and the Jan. 23 New Hampshire primary and still win the nomination — I am not one of them. The argument I’ve heard around this relates to the possibility that Trump will be convicted in the federal Jan. 6 trial, or that those trials would depress enthusiasm for him as the trials went on. I am a little skeptical that the party would actually switch gears over the summer even if both those things happened. What happened in 2020 with Joe Biden, where he lost the first two contests, was pretty unusual. Nikki Haley, for instance, really needs to prove quickly this is real and she can actually beat Trump.Patrick: The political question I heard most over the holidays was, “can she do it?” — can Haley beat expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire and have a shot to beat Trump for the G.O.P. nomination? But then came her answer about the cause of the Civil War, where she didn’t mention slavery. You’ve been watching her — before we discuss the Civil War, I’m curious how you see Haley’s chances?Katherine: I’ve been wildly wrong before, but I do think Haley needs to win New Hampshire and then somehow hang on in South Carolina. If both of those things happened, that’s a very different race.Patrick: That reminds me of John Kerry in 2004. The Massachusetts senator needed a big combo victory too — more than just winning the next-door New Hampshire primary. Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire, and it gave him momentum he needed to triumph over Dean.Katherine: Right. So with this in mind, I think Haley needs to come in second in Iowa, presumably behind Trump, and she would need that second-place result to be “better than expected.” What does “better than expected” mean? That’s kind of nebulous. She can’t just narrowly beat Ron DeSantis by a point or something, though; she’d want something where she’d be able to get on TV that night and frame the New Hampshire primary to voters and the media as a “Trump vs. Haley” one-on-one race, with an actual choice in vision and approach that she’s offering.Haley has tried to imply contrasts — that she is more temperate, that she is more “electable” against Biden — and some of it is about policy. Her viewpoint involves a much more expansive American foreign policy than Trump wants, and a return to the fiscal austerity of the 2010s, in addition to a more kitchen-table approach. That austerity ended up being pretty unpopular during the 2012 election, and populism on the right and a return to more assertive liberalism about the value of government has really changed that conversation — but perhaps inflation has changed how voters view fiscal matters. She has not been especially critical of Trump beyond a generational or electability critique, versus, for instance, his trying to overturn the 2020 election. How do you see the expectations for her in Iowa?Patrick: I’m a little torn, and this is why: Second place for Haley in Iowa would give her momentum and knock against the image that she has only narrow appeal with moderates and independents. But if DeSantis comes in a humiliating third place in Iowa, I could see him dropping out a day or two later — and a lot of his support in New Hampshire could move to Trump, who is already ahead in the New Hampshire polls. In the final analysis, though, a second-place surprise upset is better for Haley. Can she pull that off, though?Katherine: Her campaign and the affiliated groups have spent a lot of money the last few weeks on TV ads in Iowa and in New Hampshire, and are reserving more; she’s also campaigning a lot.Patrick: Iowa is famous for late surges — Kerry 2004, Obama ’08 and Mike Huckabee ’08, Rick Santorum ’12, Cruz ’16.Katherine: Only two of those people won the nomination, though. But go on…Patrick: True. And right now, the odds are long that Haley will win the nomination. I am curious to see if Republican voters will be affected by Haley’s comments about the Civil War. I doubt that any large numbers of voters will move away from her simply because she didn’t say right away that the cause of the war was slavery — most Republicans aren’t making up their minds on Haley based on one gaffe in an otherwise pretty gaffe-free campaign. Her answer did remind me of the university presidents who couldn’t say that genocide against Jews was bad, unacceptable, wouldn’t be tolerated. What I do know is she has disrupted a good moment for herself with a bad moment. You?Katherine: I don’t know, it was just a depressing, bad answer. The cleanup also had some confusing parts about freedom in it, as well; she should have just stopped at, “By the grace of God, we did the right thing and slavery is no more.” Maybe it’s partly a reflexive impulse from the days when she was running for governor and people believed she had to say she wouldn’t take the Confederate flag down at the state capitol in order to win, but that’s also depressing in and of itself.Patrick: Then there’s Ron DeSantis, who has really thrown himself into Iowa, visiting all 99 counties. Last spring, he started off in the Iowa polling at around 28 percent, according to the Real Clear Polling average; today, he’s around 19 percent. He seems like the example of, “The more you get to know him, the less you like him.” You’ve been on the trail with him a few times this year — why didn’t he catch fire? Why didn’t he “wear well” with more voters, as they say?Katherine: I think it’s still a little unclear what exactly the problem is. On a pure affect level, he’s definitely intense in person, he speaks at a pretty relentless pace, and he’s not a politician with a natural affinity for mixing it up with voters.Our colleagues in the newsroom mentioned in a story last month how, in Iowa over the summer, he interrupted a 15-year-old who was asking about mental health and the military by making a joke about her age. I was actually there for that exchange. The voter had self-deprecatingly mentioned that maybe her question didn’t matter because she was too young to vote, then he cut in to make a joke that this didn’t stop the Democrats from trying to let her vote, just as she was saying she has depression and anxiety, and started asking a thoughtful question about mental health and military recruitment. Mental health for young people and military recruitment are huge problems! But he started talking about how the military has requirements for a reason, before finally saying that in his experience people were still able to serve well and he’d take a look at the issue. In my notes, I just wrote “BAD ANSWER.”Patrick: All caps. I know you — you’ve seen a lot over the years — that’s bad.Katherine: So I think the persona is probably part of it. But I also really wonder about the policy platform itself. The idea is supposed to be “getting all the meat off the bone,” as DeSantis puts it, and turning all the stuff Trump talks about into a reality. I think there’s a theory of the case that people just don’t like the idea of stuff being banned by the government, whether that’s about abortion or books or choices for their kids — even if a voter, for instance, might disapprove of abortion as a practice. If DeSantis were in this chat, I’m sure he’d dispute the idea that there’s book banning in Florida, but that’s its own kind of issue in campaigns — if you’re explaining and defending in lawyerly ways, that’s not always what a voter wants to hear.Or maybe it’s that people who love Trump love Trump and don’t need an alternative. What do you think?Patrick: DeSantis has a high opinion of himself and started off the race amid great expectations for his candidacy, and I think he’s sort of the classic candidate who doesn’t live up to the billing. He won a big re-election victory in 2022 against a very weak Democratic opponent, and looked like a guy who relished picking fights and winning ruthlessly (Disney, educators, pro-choice people, gay and trans kids). Then he got in the race and quickly showed himself to be stiff and awkward and, perhaps worst of all for his brand, a wimp in the face of Trump’s attacks. He got trolled by that plane at the Iowa State Fair; he would say benign things about Trump while Trump would basically label him as a pedophile in high heels. He kept up that weird grin and little feints as Trump executed brass-knuckles, full-Jeb takedowns.In our most recent Times Opinion focus group, two voters said they were interested in DeSantis early on but found him too conservative and too stilted in the end. Now maybe Iowa Republican caucusgoers will surprise us, but DeSantis came in wanting to beat Trump and now is trying to hang on against Haley.Katherine: With DeSantis, the perception that he’s too conservative, when in many ways he’s promising almost exactly what Trump promises is this weird feature of politics right now — there’s very little daylight between them, for instance, in their actual approaches on foreign policy, or the idea of an administrative/deep state, or immigration, or trans rights. Abortion policy is an exception, and that can’t be discounted as a perception of “conservatism,” but in a lot of ways, DeSantis is offering similar policy to Trump. Maybe it’s purely about those voters just liking Trump.The thing is, there clearly was some space for a challenger to make a run at Trump. Who knows: Maybe we’re about to witness a stunning last-minute surge by DeSantis. The hard part was and is, candidates needed to be critical of Trump in a way that meant something to voters, that also created a choice for them vs. Trump, and for that criticism of Trump to not become their entire political identity. DeSantis clearly wanted to evade Trump’s attacks, but that didn’t really work, and his main criticism of Trump is that he did not live up to his word as president. It’s just not clear that people really feel that Trump didn’t live up to his word, or that if they do think that, they really care.Patrick: See you next week in Iowa, Katherine!Patrick Healy is the deputy Opinion editor. Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.Source photograph by Anna Moneymaker, via Getty Images.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Haley’s Civil War Gaffe Complicates Her New Hampshire Push

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      Her failure to mention slavery in response to a question about the causes of the Civil War has given Chris Christie fresh ammunition as they compete for the anti-Trump vote.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor seeking the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, appears to have weathered a holiday-season gaffe on the causes of the Civil War, but the controversy over her answer, which neglected to mention slavery, was a gift to a rival, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And that fresh ammunition may be the most lasting fallout for her effort to catch former President Donald J. Trump in the nation’s first Republican primary in New Hampshire on Jan. 23.With less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley is expected back in southern New Hampshire on Tuesday for a two-day campaign swing, working to maintain the momentum that has lifted her to second place in the state. But the final week of 2023 was a particularly rocky one. She flubbed the name of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ star basketball player Caitlin Clark, stirred anger and frustration among the independent and moderate factions of her base over her Civil War answer at a Berlin, N.H., town hall meeting, then potentially provoked the anti-Trump faction again when she said she would pardon Mr. Trump should he be convicted.Mr. Christie, who will be in the state on Thursday and Friday, has seized on Ms. Haley’s gaffe, and both of their campaigns are at a pivotal moment. They have long been on a collision course in New Hampshire, which Mr. Christie has made his do-or-die state and where Ms. Haley has been climbing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Trump to Skip CNN Debate in Iowa to Attend Fox News Town Hall

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      Donald J. Trump is expected to participate in a Fox News town hall on the same day, the network announced Tuesday.A Republican presidential primary debate that CNN plans to host in Des Moines next week will be a one-on-one showdown between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who are fighting to emerge from the state’s caucuses as the definitive alternative to former President Donald J. Trump.Both Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, are long shots to win the caucuses, given that they are trailing Mr. Trump in polls of Iowans by more than 30 points on average. But if either one is to have even a small chance of claiming the nomination, that person needs to drive the other out of the race, which they could do — or at least take a first step toward doing — by beating them for second place in Iowa.Mr. Trump did not participate in the official debates sponsored by the Republican National Committee last year, and he will not participate in the CNN debate in Iowa either. (The Iowa event will be followed by a similar one in New Hampshire.) And no other candidate qualified by the deadline on Tuesday.Participants needed at least 10 percent support in three national or Iowa polls that met CNN’s criteria, including at least one poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers. The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has largely ignored Iowa in favor of campaigning in New Hampshire; and former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas did not meet that mark.In a post on X saying he wouldn’t participate even if he qualified, Mr. Ramaswamy expressed anger at CNN over the network’s fact-checking of the conspiracy theories he advanced during a town-hall event last month and about CNN anchors’ and commentators’ criticism of him. He also faulted the network for rejecting some polls that the Republican National Committee accepted to qualify candidates for its debates.He said he would instead do a live show with the right-wing commentator Tim Pool on Jan. 10, the night of the debate. Mr. Trump is scheduled to participate in his own counterprogramming: a town-hall event that Fox News announced on Tuesday.Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley both criticized Mr. Trump’s refusal to participate.“With only three candidates qualifying, it’s time for Donald Trump to show up,” Ms. Haley said in a statement. “As the debate stage continues to shrink, it’s getting harder for Donald Trump to hide.”A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, Andrew Romeo, said Mr. Trump was “scared” to defend his record and said mockingly, “If it would make the debate more inviting, we would gladly agree to make it a seated format where the former president would be more comfortable.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      The big themes in 2024: elections, antitrust and shadow banking.

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      From elections and A.I. to antitrust and shadow banking, here are the big themes that could define the worlds of business and policy.What we’re watching in 2024 Andrew here. As we look ahead to the new year, the DealBook team has identified about a dozen themes that are likely to become running narratives that could define the business and policy ecosystem for the next 12 months.Of course, the presidential election, perhaps one of the most polarizing in history, is going to infect every part of the business world. Watch out for which C.E.O.s and other financiers back candidates — and, importantly, which ones go silent — and how companies deal with outspoken employees. Also: Look for some wealthy executives to avoid giving directly to candidates but instead donate to PACs as a shield, of sorts, from public scrutiny.Another story line that will probably remain part of the water cooler — er, Slack and X — conversation in business is the backlash against environmental, social and corporate governance principles, or E.S.G. This fight has manifested itself into a political battle and increasingly found its way in the past year into a debate about free speech on campuses (another theme that isn’t going away).Here’s a bit more detail on what we’re looking out for this year.The U.S. presidential election. The race seems set to come down to a rerun of 2020, with Donald Trump leading opinion polls to be the Republican candidate despite his mounting legal battles. The big question is how business leaders will respond. Will they coalesce around (and direct their money to) an anyone-but-Trump candidate? Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, is leading that race, but she has a long way to go to catch up to Trump. President Biden, who has made a series of consequential decisions on the economy, hopes voters will start to feel an economic upswing to reverse his sagging poll ratings.Private credit could be hit by a wave of defaults. Just as 1980s-style leveraged buyouts have been rechristened “private equity,” so too has “shadow banking” been rebranded as “private credit” and “direct lending” in time for the business to reach its highest levels yet. Direct lending by investment firms and hedge funds has become a $1.5 trillion titan, with scores of companies turning to the likes of Apollo and Ares for loans instead of, say, JPMorgan Chase.But the industry may face a test in 2024: Indebted borrowers, facing looming debt maturities and high interest rates, already are turning to private credit for yet more loans, raising concerns that lenders could face a wave of defaulting clients. A string of failures could hit these lenders hard, skeptics fear — leaving pension funds, insurers and other backers of private credit funds holding the bag.Paramount Pictures may be sold, a move that could be the start of a year of media deal-making.Hunter Kerhart for The New York TimesMedia deal mania? Reports that David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery, held talks last month about a potential merger with Paramount set off a wave of speculation that 2024 would be a year of media consolidation. The industry has been transformed in recent years by the growth of streaming, changes in the way people consume media and big tech’s encroachment into sectors typically dominated by old-school media companies. Now, the industry is on the cusp of the next major shift with the rise of artificial intelligence.One date to put in your diary: April 8, 2024, the two-year anniversary of the merger of Warner Media and Discovery to create Warner Bros. Discovery — and the first day that the new company can be sold without risking a big tax bill.Will unions maintain their momentum? Organized labor had a banner year in 2023, with big wins in fights with Hollywood studios and the auto industry. Whether that signals a permanent turnaround for the labor movement is up for debate. But the election most likely will be a key factor. Both Biden and Trump tried to woo striking autoworkers this year, so expect more efforts to win over blue-collar voters.Middle East money will keep flowing. Tensions with China and economic sanctions have made it increasingly difficult for companies to raise money from a place that used to be top of the list. Middle Eastern investors have picked up the slack. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and others are spending money as they look to diversify their fossil fuel-dependent economies. The sectors are wide-ranging, including sports, tech companies, luxury, retail and media. Critics say the petrostates with dubious human rights records are trying to launder their reputations, but that hasn’t stopped Western business from seeking their lucre.One trend to watch: the growing ties between China and Middle Eastern money. Beijing is trying to deepen links with countries outside of Washington’s orbit or, at least, with those willing to play both sides.Lina Khan, the chair of the F.T.C., will keep challenging big deals despite losing some legal fights in 2023.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMore antitrust fights. A tough year for regulators — like Lina Khan at the F.T.C. and Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department — ended with two wins after both Illumina and Adobe called off multibillion-dollar takeovers in the face of government pressure. Enforcers could already claim some success by forcing deal makers to weigh whether a big deal is worth pursuing, given the potential risk that they might have to spend months in court defending it. Don’t expect Khan to ease the pressure; do expect more antitrust fights.New climate disclosure rules. Public companies have been bracing for years for new climate-related disclosure rules from the S.E.C. In 2021, the agency signaled that climate change would be one of its priorities. About a year later, Gary Gensler, the S.E.C. chair, proposed new rules. The most contentious aspect of the draft regulations was a requirement that large companies disclose greenhouse gasses emitted along their value chain. The new rules are set to be finalized in the spring. But the probable lawsuits could go all the way to the Supreme Court.Another election to watch: India’s. The world’s biggest democracy and a rising superpower, India will go to the polls in April and May. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is benefiting from the West’s search for a regional bulwark to counter China. Business is looking at opportunities in India, as companies work to diversify their supply chains and tap into a fast-growing economy. The election will also be a crucial early test of how A.I. can factor into the spread of (mis)information during an election.Workplace shake-up. In late 2022, the release of ChatGPT propelled A.I. into the public consciousness. In 2023, companies experimented with new ways to build the technology into their operations, but few had yet to overhaul their procedures to cope with it. It’s still not clear exactly what A.I. will mean for jobs, but in 2024 we may see more companies making decisions about its use in ways that will have consequences for workers.The other big topic workplaces are grappling with is the response to the war in Gaza. Some companies are already considering changes to their workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and executives face some of the same pressures as university presidents when it comes to how to handle their statements and responses to incidents related to the war. More

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      Sununu Says Christie Should Drop Out Ahead of New Hampshire Primary

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      Mr. Sununu, the state’s governor, expressed concern that Mr. Christie would pull support from his preferred candidate, Nikki Haley.Just weeks before New Hampshire holds its Republican presidential primary, the state’s governor, Chris Sununu, said on Sunday that Chris Christie’s presidential bid was “at an absolute dead end” and suggested that he drop out to pave way for Mr. Sununu’s preferred candidate, Nikki Haley.Mr. Sununu, who this month endorsed Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, told CNN that “the only person that wants Chris Christie to stay in the race is Donald Trump.”He framed the race as a “two-person contest” between Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump, whom she now trails in New Hampshire by an average of 20 percentage points.“There’s no doubt that if Christie stays in the race, the risk is that he takes her margin of the win,” Mr. Sununu said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” In a campaign ad last week, Mr. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, explicitly addressed calls from some in the party for him to drop out to consolidate support around a non-Trump candidate. “Some people say I should drop out of this race,” he said. “Really? I’m the only one saying Donald Trump is a liar.”In response to Mr. Sununu’s remarks, a spokesman for Mr. Christie’s campaign doubled down on that message: “The events of the last few days fully solidifies the point that Christie has been making for six months: that the truth matters, and if you can’t answer the easy questions, you can’t fix the big problems.”Mr. Sununu’s comments were in response to questions from Dana Bash, the CNN anchor, about Ms. Haley’s recent gaffe involving the Civil War, for which she has faced significant criticism from Mr. Christie and others.Mr. Sununu endorsed Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, in December.Sophie Park/Getty ImagesOn Wednesday, when she received a question at a New Hampshire town hall about the cause of the Civil War, Ms. Haley’s answer did not mention slavery. The next day, she walked back her remarks, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.” She suggested that the question came from a “Democrat plant.”Mr. Sununu acknowledged that Ms. Haley had made a mistake in her remarks, but dismissed them as a “nonissue,” saying she had “cleared it right up and everyone’s moving on.”Mr. Christie and Ms. Haley have maintained a complicated relationship throughout the primary cycle. Mr. Christie defended Ms. Haley during the fourth Republican debate after she was attacked by Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur running for office. Yet earlier this month, in the first ad released by his campaign, Mr. Christie blasted Ms. Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for attacking each other more than they do Mr. Trump.Ms. Haley has made headway in New Hampshire in recent weeks, climbing to a solid second place. (Mr. Christie is polling third in the state). But securing the nomination remains a daunting task: She continued to battle Mr. DeSantis for second place in Iowa, and remains behind Mr. Trump, her former boss, in national polls by around 50 points.While Ms. Haley was campaigning in Iowa over the weekend, an attendee at a town hall in Cedar Falls asked her why she was behind in polls in South Carolina, her home state. Ms. Haley said that her support there would grow, should she perform well in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states on the nomination schedule. “South Carolinians are the type that they want to see you earn it,” she explained.Her response did not directly address specifics — that Mr. Trump is immensely popular in the state and has received endorsements from many top officials, including Gov. Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham.On Sunday, Mr. Sununu also told CNN of his disapproval of the Maine secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, removing Mr. Trump from the state’s primary ballot last week. He called the decision “very politically motivated,” saying of Ms. Bellows, “This is a politician who I think has political aspirations down the road and is trying to make a little bit of a name for herself.”Mr. Sununu said that Mr. Trump’s removal would “only boost his opportunity to play that victim card down the road.” More

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      Nikki Haley Erases Civil War History

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      Nikki Haley drew criticism this week for what she didn’t say. As she campaigned in New Hampshire for the Republican presidential nomination, a person asked her to name the cause of the Civil War.Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor, joked it was not an “easy question.” She then mentioned “how government was going to run,” “freedoms,” the need for “capitalism” and individual liberties. When the questioner observed that she hadn’t mentioned slavery, she asked, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”She told a radio interviewer the next morning that “of course” the war was about slavery, that she was not evading the issue but trying to reframe it in modern terms. While we shouldn’t read too much into one video clip, it’s fair to ask: How is the Civil War’s cause not an easy question?The facts of our history are currently contested — especially that history. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has acted to restrict what he sees as woke views of slavery and race in schools. Other Republican-led states have taken similar measures, and Donald Trump has offered his own hazy views of the past. It’s no wonder Ms. Haley spoke cautiously. The history of race has become as fraught a topic on the political right as it has been on the left.All this points to a reality we would do well to confront: Some Americans do not believe slavery was the cause of the Civil War. I encountered some of them while discussing a recent book on Abraham Lincoln.A few days ago, a caller on C-SPAN identified as “William in Lansford, Pa.,” asserted this to me: “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was about the states fighting with one another about money.”It was far from the first time I’ve heard such claims. It’s not hard to see why a candidate might avoid engaging too deeply with voters on this topic.But the rest of us can arm ourselves with a few base-line facts. Far more than most historical events, the Civil War is debated among ordinary people as much as among historians. (Lincoln called it “a people’s war,” and it’s now a people’s history. I recently attended the annual Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg, Pa., where scholars shared the room with hundreds of superfans.) If we are to hold on to our history, we can prepare ourselves to respond calmly and with facts when someone makes a doubtful claim. Evidence shows what the war was about. It also shows why some people think it wasn’t about slavery — and why it matters a century and a half later.The evidence is straightforward. Southern states rejected Lincoln’s 1860 election as a president from the antislavery Republican Party. South Carolina was the first of 11 states that tried to leave the Union, and Confederates fired the first shot of the Civil War there at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.Leaders of the would-be new republic named slavery as their cause. Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in 1861 in which he said “the assumption of the equality of races” was “an error” and “a sandy foundation” for the country he intended to leave.More than 30 years of agitation over slavery preceded the war. Northern antislavery leaders denounced the South’s institution more and more loudly and finally organized through the new Republican Party to gain political power. Southern leaders, who once cast slavery as a tragic inheritance from colonial times, increasingly defended it as moral and good.After the South’s defeat in 1865, these plain facts were obscured. Former Confederates cast their war heroes, like Robert E. Lee, as defenders of their home states rather than champions of slavery.The United Daughters of the Confederacy campaigned for generations to downplay slavery’s role in the war. In a 1924 speech to the group’s annual convention, Hollins N. Randolph asserted that “Southern men” had “fought to the death” for “the liberty of the individual, for the home and for the great principle of local self-government.” Never mind that it was “the liberty of the individual” to own other human beings. The speech advocated raising money for a great Confederate monument that still exists at Stone Mountain, Ga.Beyond the bombast, historians contested many facets of the long road to war. To give just one example from the immense scholarly record: T. Harry Williams, a 20th-century writer, put some blame for the war on Northern capitalists. He said they foresaw “fat rewards” in knocking proslavery aristocrats out of power and reshaping the economy to benefit their own factories and railroads. But really, such arguments amount to different interpretations of how the United States came to fight a war over slavery.Today some people quote Lincoln — accurately — saying his main war aim was preserving the Union, not ending slavery. But these quotes cannot sustain any argument longer than a social media meme. Lincoln also said that slavery was “the cause of the war.” Preserving the Union ultimately required slavery’s destruction.It seems that people question the historical record less because of doubt about the past than because of conflicts in the present. Some conservatives feel that progressives use slavery as a cudgel against their side in modern debates over race and equality.The first Republican president saw slavery neither as a cudgel nor as something that he needed to obscure. In an 1864 letter, he described slavery as a “great wrong” and added that people of the North and South alike shared “complicity in that wrong.”Complicity. Lincoln affirmed his country’s responsibility for failing to live up to its promise of equality. He still believed in the country and its promise.Lincoln never claimed to be morally superior to his countrymen. He focused on an immoral system, which he worked to restrict and then to destroy. The end of slavery is now part of this country’s legacy. It’s also part of the legacy of Lincoln’s party, though Ms. Haley’s example shows it can be hard for Republican candidates to talk about it.Steve Inskeep, a co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “Up First,” is the author of “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More