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      Biden Campaign to Send Top Allies to Iowa to Spread Democrats’ Message

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      Iowa is dominated by Republicans right now. The events by presidential candidates are for Republicans, the voters who come to see them are Republicans and the main event, Monday’s caucuses, will feature Republicans.But Democrats will try to get in on the action on Monday, when President Biden’s campaign is expected to dispatch some of its biggest surrogates to Iowa to make the party’s case in the hours before Republicans gather to vote.These allies include Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and a co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign; Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who is a member of the campaign’s national advisory board; and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota. They are planning to appear at a news conference in downtown Des Moines on Monday afternoon shortly before the caucuses begin, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s scheduling.Mr. Katzenberg is a longtime Democratic megadonor who has taken on his largest political role to date with the Biden campaign, serving as a conduit to big donors while assuming a role of publicly calming worries about Mr. Biden’s fund-raising, staffing and political vulnerabilities.Mr. Pritzker, America’s wealthiest elected official, is organizing this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Ms. Smith, who represents a neighboring state, is in her first full term as senator.“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans’ all-out assault on democracy and Americans’ personal freedoms will be front and center as Iowans begin to caucus Monday,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “The Biden campaign will be on the ground, talking directly to voters and reminding everyone that President Biden is fighting to ensure MAGA Republicans’ extreme, out-of-touch agenda continues to lose at the ballot box.” More

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      A Convicted Criminal as the Nominee? Trump’s Rivals Avoid Even Raising It

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      The former president’s legal jeopardy offers an obvious line of attack for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, but fearing voter blowback, that cudgel remains largely unused.It is an obvious line of attack that has been creeping into the arsenal of rivals trying to stop former President Donald J. Trump ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday — if nominated to be the Republican Party’s White House standard-bearer, the former president could very well be a convicted criminal by Election Day.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida inched toward that cudgel at a debate on Wednesday night, warning that a “stacked left-wing D.C. jury” is likely to sit in judgment of Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and asking, “What are the odds that he’s going to get through that?”Then, he added, “what are we going to do as Republicans in terms of who we nominate for president? If Trump is the nominee, it’s going to be about Jan. 6, legal issues, criminal trials.”Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has been far more reluctant to broach his legal troubles, speaking almost daily of Mr. Trump as an agent of “chaos” and “disarray” without explicitly mentioning the 91 felony counts looming against him.But perhaps taking their cues from voters leery of attacks on the former president, Mr. Trump’s closest rivals continue to avoid one ominous word: conviction.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, left, and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina have continued to avoid using one word: conviction.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesFor the Republican Party, the reality of Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy is inescapable, and was underscored on Tuesday when he left the Iowa campaign trail to attend courthouse arguments on whether he can claim absolute legal immunity for any actions taken as president. Regardless of how voters feel about his indictments for subverting the 2020 election, mishandling highly classified documents and falsifying business records to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign, one of those cases could go to trial before the election.And a conviction by a jury of his peers after a widely publicized trial could land differently than the indictments themselves, which were dismissed by Mr. Trump and most of his rivals as political efforts by Democrats to interfere with the presidential election.“I actually still believe they will have a trial, and he will be convicted of at least one felony count,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and federal prosecutor still pursuing his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. “That puts the Republican Party in jeopardy: a flawed nominee, a historical precedent of a nominee convicted of a felony, and then a loss” in the general election.That might sound like a potent argument for Mr. Trump’s more prominent foes, but many Republican voters don’t want to hear it. On Tuesday morning, at an Irish pub in Waukee, Iowa, Nick and Kadee Miller of Adel, Iowa, were awaiting Ms. Haley when both expressed doubts about the charges facing Mr. Trump. They supported the decisions of Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis to steer clear.“I really do believe if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all,” said Ms. Miller, a 49-year-old political independent who remains undecided about her choice of candidates.Voters waited for Ms. Haley to speak at Mikey’s Irish Pub in Waukee, Iowa, on Thursday. Polling shows that a growing number of Mr. Trump’s supporters would not want him to be the Republican nominee if he were convicted of a crime.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesSteph Herold, a 62-year-old retiree from West Des Moines, said such negativity spent on Mr. Trump would waste Ms. Haley’s time.“What I love about Nikki is she speaks in facts and truth,” she said. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, “we all reverted back to the middle school playground, beating people up and being bullies. We don’t need more of that.”Bruce Norquist, a 60-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Urbandale, Iowa, was certain a conviction would only bolster Mr. Trump’s support, as the indictments did last year.But that is not what polling shows. Nearly a quarter of Mr. Trump’s own supporters told New York Times/Siena College pollsters in December that he should not be the Republican Party’s nominee if he is found guilty of a crime. Some 20 percent of those who identified themselves as Trump supporters said he should go to prison if convicted of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, and 23 percent of his supporters said in December that they believed he had committed “serious federal crimes,” up from 11 percent in July.“When you put it that way, a convicted felon, no, I don’t want to vote for a convicted felon,” Ms. Miller said, breaking with her husband, who said he would “absolutely” vote for a convicted Mr. Trump “if he could beat Biden.”On Wednesday, at a snow-covered vineyard in Indianola, Iowa, Laura Leszczynski, a 57-year-old security and information technology business owner from St. Mary’s, Iowa, was awaiting the entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Still undecided, she conceded she was not well-versed in the cases arrayed against Mr. Trump, but she was not willing to dismiss them.“It just seems like there’s a lot there,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer. I haven’t studied up, but I am worried.”Still, it is perhaps no coincidence that the two Republican candidates who were most ready to raise the prospect of conviction — Mr. Hutchinson and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — were seeing single digits or worse in national polling of Republican primary voters before Mr. Christie dropped out of the race on Wednesday.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey suspended his candidacy for president during an event in Windham, N.H., on Thursday.Sophie Park for The New York TimesIn his farewell speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Christie returned to the moment in the August Republican primary debate when almost all the candidates on the stage raised their hand when asked if they would vote for Mr. Trump even if he were a convicted criminal.“I want you to imagine for a second if Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Washington were frankly sitting here tonight,” he said. “Do you think they could imagine that the country they risked their lives to create would actually be having a conversation about whether a convicted criminal should be president of the United States?”Yet that conversation continues.In an interview on Friday with The Des Moines Register and NBC News, Ms. Haley danced around the prospects of a conviction for nearly three minutes: “He’s innocent until he’s proven guilty,” she said. “He’ll have to figure that out. I don’t have to deal with those court cases.”Mr. DeSantis has been nudging toward acknowledging the danger. In an interview last month with the conservative radio personality Hugh Hewitt, he blamed Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy on liberals out to get him: “I think it’s very difficult for a Republican, much less Donald Trump, to get a fair shake in front of a D.C. jury,” he said.But as he has made his case against Mr. Trump more aggressively ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Mr. DeSantis has adjusted that argument.“We’re taking a huge risk by empowering a jury of, probably an all-Democrat jury in the nation’s capital, the most Democrat area in the country, to pass a judgment,” he said in the NBC News interview, “because obviously if they rule against him, if they have a verdict against him, that’s going to hurt us in the election.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Nikki Haley emerges from TV debate as Trump’s nearest rival as Iowa vote looms

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      The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley emerged from the last televised debate before the Iowa caucuses clearly Donald Trump’s strongest challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, boosted by the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate to register significantly with voters.Voting begins in Iowa on Monday, before New Hampshire stages its primary a week on Tuesday. Haley has closed on Trump in New Hampshire and has hopes of seizing second place in Iowa at the expense of the rightwing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.Nonetheless, the Trump camp remains bullish as the Iowa vote looms after having maintained hefty leads in the polls for months. On Wednesday night, one senior aide said the campaign “couldn’t have scripted any better ourselves” events in the Des Moines debate, delighting in the spectacle of the former US president’s rivals slogging it out on the CNN stage while Trump – who continues to refuse to debate – took an easy ride at a Fox News town hall.“If you watched any part of the ‘JV’ debate this evening, you see two campaigns that are beating the living hell out of each other,” Chris LaCivita told reporters after Haley fiercely debated DeSantis, while Trump performed on his own elsewhere.“Then you have a Donald Trump commercial that shows up and he’s talking about Joe Biden … we couldn’t have scripted any better ourselves.”“JV” stands for “junior varsity” – a designation for college athletes below first-team standard. At Drake University, Haley said, “I wish Donald Trump was up on this stage” but spent most of her evening fighting DeSantis, regardless of Trump’s whopping Iowa lead.Fox gave Trump an easy ride. On a network which has paid $787.5m to settle one lawsuit arising from his stolen election lie and faces other such threats, the subject never came up. Nor did Trump’s legal problems arising from that lie, including 17 criminal charges regarding election subversion. Nor were Trump’s other 74 criminal charges, for retention of classified information and hush-money payments, high on Fox’s agenda.Tim Miller, a Republican operative turned anti-Trump activist and writer for the Bulwark, a conservative Never-Trump website, delivered a withering assessment of the Fox News town hall.Describing “one big primetime infomercial for the frontrunner”, Miller described Trump’s hosts, the “‘straight news’ reporters Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum”, sitting “beside the disgraced former president listening to his Catskills stand-up bit and giggling like a couple of undergrads after a 5mg weed gummy”.Trump did not avoid every pitfall. Seeking to thread a particularly tricky needle, he questioned the harshness of abortion bans supported by Haley and DeSantis. But he also crowed that “for 54 years, [conservatives] were trying to get Roe v Wade terminated, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it”.The remark drew applause from the Fox audience but delight from Democrats, given how the supreme court’s removal of the federal right to abortion last year (actually 49 years after Roe, the ruling which guaranteed the right) and other attacks on healthcare rights have fueled Democratic wins at the polls. Up and down the ballot, abortion is set to be a key election issue this year.Tommy Vietor, a former staffer to Barack Obama, posted Trump’s remark to social media and said: “Biden campaign is going to feature this in about a billion dollars’ worth of ads.”DeSantis, meanwhile, has spent hundreds of millions on his campaign but is widely seen to be in deep trouble, needing a strong second in Iowa to avoid having to drop out. He also stood to lose more than Haley from Christie’s decision earlier on Wednesday to bring an end to his own campaign.The former New Jersey governor was the only candidate to run on an explicitly anti-Trump platform, regardless of Trump’s hold on Republican voters.Ending his campaign in New Hampshire, the libertarian-minded state on which he pinned his hopes, Christie said: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that [Trump] is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.”Haley and DeSantis have begun to attack Trump as caucus day looms but not in strong terms and while still reserving their harshest fire for each other. Christie also had harsh if unscripted words for both his rivals, in comments apparently picked up by accident on a hot mic before his speech was streamed.“She’s gonna get smoked and you and I both know it,” Christie said, presumably referring to Haley. “She’s not up to this.”He also said: “DeSantis called me, petrified that I would –” before the audio cut out.The remarks, which CNN confirmed were directed at Wayne MacDonald, Christie’s New Hampshire campaign chair, pointed to harsh political realities.Haley is clear in second in New Hampshire and has been reducing Trump’s lead. Most polling indicates Christie supporters will now turn her way. But Haley remains well behind Trump, particularly in her own state, South Carolina, which will be third to vote. Campaign wisdom says candidates who cannot win their home state cannot hope to win over their whole party.DeSantis is well behind Trump in Florida and everywhere else. He would certainly have reason to be “petrified” that Christie’s withdrawal will ensure Haley becomes the only competitor to Trump with any notion of viability at all.The DeSantis and Haley campaigns did not immediately comment. More

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      Will You Vote for Trump Again?

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      Jesse Gutierres believes only one Republican candidate will restore confidence in the economy.Kelly Nieuwenhuis wants to move beyond the chaos.Shannon Demastus wants a president she can be proud of.Will You Vote for Trump Again?It’s the question weighing on Republicans across the country. But Iowans get to decide first. We listened as they grappled with their choices.Jan. 11, 2024There is no way around it: The Iowa caucuses on Monday, the kickoff of the 2024 presidential election, are not really about competing visions for the future of the Republican Party. They are not a battle between dueling ideologies or policy priorities or America’s role in the world.They revolve around one man, the gravitational center of Republican politics for nearly a decade: the former — and perhaps future — President Donald J. Trump.Republicans are in the throes of deciding whether they want Mr. Trump to continue his total dominance over their party. Do they want four more years of his brand of personality-driven, divisive and combative politics? Do they see him as a victim, or as a demagogue? Are they willing to risk nominating a candidate facing 91 charges and who could be a felon come Election Day?Polling shows Republicans are preparing to take the leap; Mr. Trump appears to likely win in Iowa. But the numbers don’t capture the ambivalence and anxiety weighing on many as they grapple with their decisions.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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      Caucus de Iowa: esto es lo que puede esperarse la noche del lunes

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      Quien se impone en las primarias republicanas de Iowa no siempre gana la nominación presidencial del partido. Los candidatos intentarán derrotar a sus oponentes y superar las expectativas.Pareciera haber pocas dudas sobre quién probablemente ganará el caucus presidencial republicano en Iowa el lunes.Pero en Iowa, lo inesperado puede ser lo esperado y una victoria no siempre es una victoria. El resultado podría moldear el futuro del Partido Republicano en un momento de transición, así como el futuro de los caucus de Iowa después de una década difícil. Podría ayudar a determinar si Nikki Haley, quien fungió como embajadora de Estados Unidos, representa un obstáculo serio para el regreso de Donald Trump al poder o si Ron DeSantis, el gobernador de Florida, se verá obligado a abandonar la contienda.A continuación, una guía de algunos resultados posibles y lo que significan para los contendientes:Una victoria de TrumpTodas las suposiciones que anticipan una gran noche para Trump significan que el mayor contrincante que el expresidente tendría que vencer podrían ser las expectativas y no sus dos principales rivales en las boletas, Haley y DeSantis. Trump y su campaña han puesto el listón muy alto. Trump se ha postulado como si fuera el presidente en funciones, sin siquiera debatir con sus oponentes. Sus asesores dicen que creen que puede establecer un récord para una contienda abierta si termina al menos 12 puntos por delante de su rival más cercano.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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      Haley and DeSantis Summon the Right Fury for the Wrong Target

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      I wish Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis had shown a quarter as much contempt for Donald Trump as they did for each other.Oh, they faulted Trump for not appearing onstage in Des Moines on Wednesday for the final Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses. He arrogantly skipped it, just as he’d arrogantly skipped all the others.When pressed, Haley and DeSantis made clearer than they did in the past that he indeed put himself before the Constitution when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was no beautiful display of patriotism. It was a shameful act of disorder.And they had scattered other criticisms of the former president. DeSantis listed many of the promises that Trump didn’t keep. Haley blamed Trump for the depth and breadth of the divisions in America and for creating a degree of chaos that forbids meaningful progress.But those complaints all but receded behind their furious, puerile and relentless attacks on each other. And that made neither political nor moral sense.Haley and DeSantis are the only candidates other than Trump who qualified for the debate. They are the only candidates with any chance of beating him in the Republican primaries and getting the party’s presidential nomination. But that chance is meager, the clock is ticking, and Trump, to go by polls, has held on firmly to his enormous lead. They need to take him down.And for all their considerable flaws, all their embarrassing flubs and all their elaborate fudging of their records, both Haley and DeSantis have infinitely less to account and apologize for than Trump does. He’s the necessary target of their wrath, the rightful recipient of their disdain, an urgent threat to American democracy. But you wouldn’t have known that from the small fraction of their attention that he received, an inadequate measure that distills the Republican Party’s disgrace. It won’t own or slay the monster it created. It’s just too damned terrified.Instead, Haley and DeSantis engaged in a rubber-glue back-and-forth about who was the bigger liar. I can recap almost the entire debate in just a few lines of loosely (but not all that loosely!) paraphrased dialogue.Haley: Stop lying about me!DeSantis: No, you stop lying about me!Haley: You’re the liar!DeSantis: I know you are, but what am I?Haley: You’re so desperate. You’re just so desperate.Haley actually said those last two sentences. And they were strangely refreshing inasmuch as they weren’t one of her endlessly repeated instructions to go to the website desantislies.com. She mentioned that site seemingly every 30 seconds, regardless of what question the debate’s moderators had put to her. She was like a broken GPS system. No matter where you asked her to take you, she directed you to the same old place.DeSantis wasn’t any more high-minded. He banged on and on about what a sellout Haley was, about how she was constantly caving to big business or “the woke mob” or the Chinese. He was especially and inexplicably fond of a line that he used in various ways at various times — that she embodied the “pale pastels” of “warmed-over corporatism.” Was he upset that her corporatism wasn’t freshly sautéed? Was he claiming a sartorial edge and asserting some parable in the contrast between his red tie and her muted pink dress? Color me unimpressed.Except for when DeSantis, whose scripted lines were mostly clichés, delivered one of anomalous cleverness. Referring to Haley’s recent string of highly publicized gaffes, he said, “She’s got this problem with ballistic podiatry — shooting herself in the foot.”Funny as that was, it was even sadder because it was an example of how and where these two candidates lavished their energy: not on sounding the alarm about Trump that needs sounding (and re-sounding), not on holding themselves up as inspiring alternatives to him but on cutting each other down. That was clearly what they’d practiced most. Scorn was their comfort zone.So when they were asked, in the final minutes, to name something about the other that they admired, they lapsed into babble and incoherence.After a few compulsory words about Haley’s service as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, DeSantis said: “I also appreciate the state of South Carolina. My wife is a College of Charleston graduate.” So Haley is admirable because she’s proximal to Casey DeSantis’s alma mater?Haley’s answer — “I think he’s been a good governor” — made even less sense, because she had just spent the better part of two hours talking about all the ways in which he’d been a terrible leader for Florida and how awful it would be if he molded America in his state’s image.They did indeed engage in specifics like that, providing details about their own and each other’s records, establishing an important divergence in their views on aid to Ukraine, forecasting the future of Social Security and promising to fortify the country’s southwestern border. From time to time, the two of them engaged in something not all that dissimilar from a constructive old-fashioned debate.But that was the exception to the rule and to the rancor, and what stood out more than any policy discussion was a depressing paradox: Both of them said that America needed to turn the page, but both modeled the negativity, mockery and spite of the country’s current chapter.“How did you blow through $150 million in your campaign, and you were down in the polls?” Haley asked DeSantis. She visibly relished her dig. Where was that ridicule for Trump?Chris Christie, we miss you! Hours before the debate, which Christie hadn’t qualified for, he dropped out of the race, and he was caught in a hot mic moment, apparently dismissing Haley as “not up to this” and saying that DeSantis was “petrified” about the trajectory of the race. Their performances on Wednesday night bore Christie out. Send him to Delphi and put him in a cave. He’s an oracle.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Facebook, Threads and X (@FrankBruni).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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      Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis to face off in Iowa Republican debate

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      Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis will face off one-on-one in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday night in their fifth and most high-stakes attempt to take support away from Donald Trump before Monday’s Iowa caucus, the country’s first state primary election.The former president has repeatedly declined to debate his party’s opponents, and will again forgo this debate, instead participating in a town hall hosted by Fox News, also in Iowa.Unlike the prior debates, this one was not coordinated by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which decided in December to stop hosting GOP debates for the rest of the primary season.The RNC debates narrowed the field of Republican contenders to five, and CNN’s debate requirement that candidates poll at 10% in at least three national or Iowa-based surveys has left only Haley, DeSantis and Trump qualifying. Chris Christie, Trump’s most vociferous critic among the Republican contenders, did not make the cut, but will likely qualify in New Hampshire.Vivek Ramaswamy, the rightwing tech entrepreneur who has billed himself as a youthful Maga answer to Trump and has peddled in conspiracy theories, including claiming the January 6 Capitol riot was an “inside job”, did not qualify. Ramaswamy, who has spent the most time in Iowa out of all the candidates, has said he will instead participate in a Des Moines taping of a podcast with the rightwing commentator Tim Pool.Florida governor DeSantis has thrown his campaign resources into Iowa before the caucuses, including visiting each of the state’s 99 counties.“I’d be a better president as a result of going through this,” DeSantis said wearily during an Iowa press conference.Meanwhile, Haley, who garnered the endorsement of the heavy-hitting, Koch-backed conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, could see a boost in Iowa as well. (The organization has promised to knock on doors for the former US ambassador to the UN every day ahead of the 15 January caucuses.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf DeSantis and Haley are fighting neck and neck, it is likely for second place. Polls show Trump holding an increasingly commanding lead in Iowa in the weeks before the caucuses – despite putting fewer campaign resources into the early primary than his opponents.If DeSantis fails to eat into Trump’s share of Iowa voters, his campaign – which has faltered repeatedly among gaffes and staffing shakeups – could shutter before he sees another primary. More