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      G.O.P. Debate Takeaways, and a Tech Start-Up Collapse

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      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 five minutes.In the fourth Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, the narrow policy differences among the candidates were overshadowed by feisty personal clashes and insults.Bob Miller for The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:Insults Fly and Candidates Clash With Time Running Out Before Iowa, by Jonathan WeismanMcCarthy Says He Will Leave Congress at the End of the Year, by Annie KarniFrom Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money, by Erin GriffithHot Glazed Doughnuts on the Menu, and Parisians Can’t Get Enough, by Liz AldermanJessica Metzger and More

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      Your Iowa Caucus Questions, Answered

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      The state with the first balloting for 2024 is overflowing with candidates and reporters ahead of the Republican caucuses on Jan. 15. Here’s what to know.It’s the December before a presidential election, which means that Iowa is overflowing with candidates and reporters for its quadrennial caucuses.This year looks different, though — because Democrats have moved their first votes to other states, and because a single candidate so dominates the Republican field.Here’s what to know.What are the Iowa caucuses and how do they work?Though “primaries and caucuses” are often lumped together, they are not the same. Primaries operate the way most elections do: Voters cast ballots privately through early-voting or mail-in options, or at a polling site on Election Day. Caucuses, by contrast, require voters to attend at a specific hour and discuss their preferences publicly.At each local caucus in Iowa — in school gymnasiums, community centers and even churches — Republicans will make speeches in favor of their preferred candidates. Then caucusgoers will take a vote, and candidates’ delegates to the county convention will be nominated based on that vote. No remote participation, such as by mail or phone, will be allowed.You may have heard terms like “viability” and “realignment” in relation to the Iowa caucuses. Those refer to the Democrats’ traditional process, in which caucusgoers sorted themselves physically according to which candidate they supported. Candidates whose support was below a viability threshold were eliminated, and their supporters were able to realign with a viable candidate. Republicans do not have those procedures, and Democrats have dropped them.Caucuses have many critics because they are less accessible than primaries. There is no flexibility — people have to arrive on time and stay until the end — which means those who have to work or are otherwise unavailable at that hour are out of luck. People with disabilities often struggle to participate. So do people who feel unsafe, or simply uncomfortable, disclosing their political preferences.Most states that once held caucuses have switched to primaries, but Iowa is an exception.When are the caucuses?The Republican caucuses will be held on Jan. 15 at 7 p.m. local time.The Democratic caucuses will be held by mail. The first ballots — technically “preference cards” — will be mailed out on Jan. 12, and voters can request one until Feb. 19. Though Iowa Democrats can attend in-person gatherings on Jan. 15 to conduct other party business, they will not choose a presidential candidate then.Why are the Republican and Democratic caucuses different?The Iowa Republican Party and the Iowa Democratic Party control their own caucus procedures, and they have long chosen different ones. But the procedures are especially different this cycle because the Democratic National Committee changed its primary calendar at President Biden’s urging, while the Republican National Committee stuck to its old one.The Democrats’ rationale was to prioritize states more racially diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, which are overwhelmingly white. Their first two states are now South Carolina, on Feb. 3, and Nevada, on Feb. 6, and Iowa is out of the early lineup. (By the D.N.C.’s schedule, New Hampshire would have voted on the same day as Nevada. But it refused to cede its first-in-the-nation primary status, which is enshrined in state law, and scheduled an unsanctioned primary for Jan. 23.)Why does Iowa go first (for Republicans)?Today, the answer is, “Because it always has.” A common argument is that, since Iowans have spent decades shouldering the responsibility of being first, they are uniquely well informed and engaged. They know how much power they hold to winnow presidential fields, this argument goes, and they take that responsibility more seriously than voters elsewhere would.Initially, though, Iowa got its spot by historical accident.After the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, Democrats changed their nominating process to give voters more say than party insiders. Until 1968, the party held popular votes in just a handful of states, while the rest chose a candidate at conventions; after 1968, the balance shifted strongly to popular votes in the form of primaries or caucuses.Iowa Democrats happened to schedule the earliest vote in 1972. Iowa Republicans, realizing the timing could work to the state’s benefit, followed suit in 1976 — and, on the Democratic side, Jimmy Carter took advantage of the Iowa caucuses that year to propel himself from relative obscurity to the front of the presidential pack.The power of going first thus clearly demonstrated, the Iowa Legislature passed a law requiring the state to continue scheduling its caucuses before any others.Jimmy Carter campaigning in Des Moines in 1976, the year Iowa catapulted his candidacy.Associated PressHow do the delegates work?Each precinct will be assigned a number of delegates to elect to a county convention based on the results of the caucus vote in that precinct.Over the ensuing months, the county and state conventions will confirm Iowa’s 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention, where the party’s presidential nominee will be officially chosen based on who wins a majority of the more than 2,000 delegates available nationwide.When do we typically have results?The leaders of each local Republican caucus will report results to the state party, which will tabulate and release the statewide results. This usually happens pretty quickly, within a few hours.Since Democrats are voting by mail this year, and Iowa is no longer first for them, their results won’t come until March 5.Why were there so many delays and problems in 2020?The Iowa Democrats’ reporting process collapsed in 2020, preventing them from releasing any significant results on the night of the caucuses and the full results for days.The caucusing itself went fairly smoothly, but a new app through which precincts were supposed to report their results failed and backup phone lines were jammed, so the state party couldn’t obtain the numbers. When the results were finally tabulated, they were full of errors and inconsistencies — products of manual calculations by precinct officials — and the party conducted a partial recanvass followed by a partial recount.A complicating factor was that the Iowa Democratic Party had promised to release multiple sets of results — not only the number of state-convention delegates each candidate had earned, which would determine the caucuses’ winner, but also how many supporters each candidate had in the first and second rounds of voting.That promise stemmed from 2016, when Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in the caucuses by the tiniest of margins, and Mr. Sanders fought for an audit and accused the state party of a lack of transparency because it had not released the first- and second-round totals.Producing multiple tallies provided a more comprehensive picture and allowed for errors to be identified, but it worsened the delays when the systems failed.What is Iowa’s importance to the rest of the race?Iowa is all about momentum — the nebulous idea of who is rising and who is dead in the water, which can affect voters’ choices in other states.In terms of actual numbers, Iowa doesn’t matter much. It accounts for a tiny fraction of the delegates awarded nationwide. But its ability to set perceptions is so strong that candidates often drop out after doing poorly there, unless they have reason to believe they will do significantly better in New Hampshire. More

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      ‘Moderate’ or Roe v Wade killer: can Trump have it both ways on abortion?

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      A few months ago, the former president Donald Trump accused the Republican party of speaking “very inarticulately” on abortion. And yet, for the GOP presidential frontrunner, inarticulateness seems to be a feature, not a bug, of his own approach to abortion.Trump thinks he can run in 2024 as a “moderate” on abortion, Rolling Stone reported this week – even though he’s currently running ads in Iowa, a crucial state in the Republican primary, proclaiming himself “the most pro-life president ever”. It’s a title to which Trump has a legitimate claim: his three nominees to the supreme court not only handed the nation’s highest court a definitive conservative majority, but all three voted to overturn Roe v Wade in summer 2022.That move handed the anti-abortion movement the victory of a lifetime, but Republicans have been paying for it ever since. They underperformed in both the 2022 midterms and the 2023 Virginia state elections, losses that have been widely credited to the party’s inability to figure out a path forward on abortion. Abortion rights advocates, meanwhile, won every abortion-related ballot measure of the last 18 months, even in red states. After Ohio, seemingly a conservative stronghold, voted to enshrine abortion rights in its state constitution earlier this month, abortion rights activists rushed to remind Democrats that “abortion is a winning issue” in 2024.While Republicans have flailed over how to message on an apparently toxic issue, Trump has – in typical Trump fashion – flip-flopped on it with apparent ease. Shortly after the 2022 midterms, Trump blamed “the abortion issue” for Republicans’ poor performance. He has refused to say whether he supports a federal ban and called the decision by Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, to sign a six-week abortion ban a “terrible thing”.But all the while, Trump continues to take credit for overturning Roe.“I was able to kill Roe v Wade,” he bragged on social media in May.Howard Schweber, a professor of American politics and political theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that “Trump has what, in my experience of observing politics, seems like a nearly unique ability to maintain cognitive dissonance in ways that his supporters find untroubling.“His supporters will say, ‘Oh, well, he really means that when he says’ – and then finish that sentence with whichever position they approve of. That’s the gamble that he’s taking,” he said.Trump has not said what, if any, specific abortion policy he would support as president. DeSantis has said that he would support a 15-week national abortion ban, a position championed by the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has said that she would sign an abortion ban as president, but doubts that Republicans could muster the votes in Congress.Iowa has a reputation for conservative evangelicalism, but most Iowans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. By not letting himself get nailed down on a specific abortion policy, Trump might be approaching Iowa as though the presidential primary is already over, said Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa. (Which it very well be: Trump is polling far higher than any of his competitors, who have largely cratered.) In a general election, where voters are more likely to be less dogmatic, it can pay to be vague – particularly on a charged issue like abortion.“Things that you might say a little more forcefully during the nomination process during the primaries, you back off a little bit when it comes time to time for the general election,” Hagle said. “And that’s been a strategy of candidates for decades.”Republicans in Iowa have launched an effort to amend the state constitution and clarify that it does not protect abortion rights. In order for the amendment to show up on the ballot, the Republican-controlled state legislature would have to pass it before handing the measure to voters. That could backfire, increasing turnout among abortion rights supporters who oppose Trump.“But then we’re also talking about turnout in the presidential year, which is high anyway,” Hagle said. “So if you lose turnout in a midterm year, that’s going to make more of a difference than in a presidential year.”Most Americans oppose the overturning of Roe. But that doesn’t mean voters are all that motivated by it: numerous polls since Roe’s overturning have found that Democrats are highly energized by abortion, while Republicans are less so – a reversal of the status quo while Roe was the law of the land.As long as Trump wins the primary, he’s in little danger of losing the conservative evangelicals who oppose abortion rights. While they may want him to be more forceful on the issue, it’s improbable that they would turn to a Democrat in response to Trump’s reticence.“Sometimes the option is to not vote at all, but I can’t imagine that they would want to do that either,” Hagle said. “It does create a little heartburn on the part of the pro-life folks that supported him if all the sudden he’s taking a more moderating position, but he may see that that’s more appropriate given his electoral strategy.”Even people who say that they would like to keep abortion “mostly legal” are not always that invested in doing so. A recent poll from the New York Times – which did not look at Iowa – found that, among voters who want abortion to be “mostly legal”, Biden led by only one point. Those voters are also twice as likely to say they plan to vote based on economic issues, rather than social issues like abortion.Schweber, though, is convinced that there are would-be Trump voters who will defect solely based on their support of abortion.“Women voters – particularly middle-class and upper-class, suburban women voters – do take abortion rights seriously,” he said. In 2016, Schweber said Republican women told him, “It doesn’t matter, they’re never going to overrule Roe.”“That sense of security is obviously gone,” he added. More

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      DeSantis Finishes His Iowa 99, Hoping for a Bump Against Trump

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      The Florida governor said his tour of all the state’s counties was evidence of his commitment to Iowa voters, even as he remained far behind Donald Trump in state polls.Ron DeSantis took the stage in Jasper County in Iowa on Saturday, heralding his appearance as the culmination of his tour of the state’s 99 counties, and hoping to inject enthusiasm into his well-funded but struggling presidential campaign.The Florida governor, who is running well behind the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, said he was fulfilling his campaign’s promise to complete the “Full Grassley” — so named because the state’s long-serving senator, Chuck Grassley, visits every Iowa county each year — and positioned himself as the candidate of humility, willing to travel the state and meet voters, in contrast to Mr. Trump, who has largely eschewed the retail politics of the state. “That should show you that I consider myself a servant, not a ruler,” Mr. DeSantis said, speaking to a crowd of several hundred voters inside the Thunderdome, a spacious restaurant and entertainment venue in Newton, about 30 miles east of Des Moines. “You’re not any better than the people that you are elected by.”The DeSantis campaign, which hung signs around the venue proclaiming a “Full DeSantis,” pointed out that each of the past three Republican winners of a contested Iowa caucus — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor — had also completed the 99-county circuit (though none of them ultimately won the Republican nomination).Iowa voters have more than a month to deliver an upset win to Mr. DeSantis, and many in attendance on Saturday said it mattered to them that he had made the effort.“I think that’s kind of neat, when a candidate is willing to get out of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, the big cities, get out and see people across the state,” said Richard Roorda, 62. “I think that is a big deal.”But the fanfare belied a difficult truth for Mr. DeSantis: Despite checking all the boxes of a successful Iowa campaign, including racking up endorsements from prominent state figures, he still trails Mr. Trump by a significant margin in state polls, and he has even lost ground in recent months to Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina.Mr. DeSantis spoke at small venues throughout the state in an effort to convince Iowans that he was more connected to them than Mr. Trump.Vincent Alban/Reuters“Mechanically, he’s doing it all the way you need to do it,” said Doug Gross, a longtime Republican strategist and former nominee for Iowa governor who has endorsed Ms. Haley. “The trouble is, he’s just not a very good candidate.”Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump held dueling events on Saturday, with Mr. Trump speaking at a rally less than 100 miles away in Cedar Rapids.Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa evangelical leader who endorsed Mr. DeSantis last month, painted a contrast between the Florida governor and Mr. Trump.“We need somebody who fears God, they don’t believe they are God,” Mr. Vander Plaats told the crowd in Newton.The Iowa tour was largely managed by Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, which has faced setbacks in recent weeks, including the departure of both its chairman and its chief executive. But Mr. DeSantis’s Iowa barnstorm has generated sizable crowds in small-town venues. At each stop, he has made a point of telling his audience how many counties he has visited so far.Many Iowans who have shown up for his events have said that they expected presidential candidates to present themselves in person to win their votes — and praised Mr. DeSantis for doing so.On Saturday, he recounted a few of his family’s favorite stops, like playing baseball at the Field of Dreams in Dubuque County, and visiting a statue of Albert, the world’s largest bull, a tourist attraction in Audubon County.But a few of Mr. DeSantis’s Iowa county visits have seemed perfunctory. In August, the governor stopped at a train depot in Manly, in Worth County, where about a dozen people watched as his young children clambered aboard the trains and blared the horn of a truck before the governor, his family and their entourage boarded the bus for their next destination.And past caucus winners like Mr. Santorum and Mr. Huckabee were seen as anti-establishment candidates who mustered support from evangelical communities to upset more mainstream Republicans. Mr. DeSantis has the unenviable task of running against a popular former president who comes across as anything but establishment, yet maintains a strong lead in the state.Voters also said they were encouraged by Mr. DeSantis receiving the endorsement of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who is popular in the state. Ms. Reynolds appeared onstage Saturday, praising Mr. DeSantis for visiting each county.“Iowans want the opportunity to look you in the eye, they want the opportunity to size that candidate up a little bit,” she said.The DeSantis campaign has highlighted his effort to meet with Iowa caucusgoers in a state that values in-person encounters with presidential candidates. Vincent Alban/ReutersMr. DeSantis also made a new commitment during his remarks: He said that, if he were elected president, he would move the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Iowa as part of an effort to decrease the influence of government agencies in Washington. “You guys will have first dibs on the Department of Agriculture,” he said.Mr. DeSantis also tried to convince voters who backed Mr. Trump that he would push for similar policies, but without the drama. One key difference, he told the crowd, was that he could serve for two consecutive terms if elected.“Two terms is critical,” said Tom Turner, 70, adding that he came to the event with some reservations about Mr. DeSantis, but that the governor had allayed them.“I was a little concerned about whether he was personally warm — he is,” Mr. Turner said.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Trump’s Defense to Charge That He’s Anti-Democratic? Accuse Biden of It

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      Indicted over a plot to overturn an election and campaigning on promises to shatter democratic norms in a second term, Donald Trump wants voters to see Joe Biden as the bigger threat.Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been indicted by federal prosecutors for conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with a plot to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly claimed to supporters in Iowa on Saturday that it was President Biden who posed a severe threat to American democracy.While Mr. Trump shattered democratic norms throughout his presidency and has faced voter concerns that he would do so again in a second term, the former president in his speech repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of corrupting politics and waging a repressive “all-out war” on America.”Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy,” he said. “Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”Mr. Trump has made similar attacks on Mr. Biden a staple of his speeches in Iowa and elsewhere. He frequently accuses the president broadly of corruption and of weaponizing the Justice Department to influence the 2024 election.But in his second of two Iowa speeches on Saturday, held at a community college gym in Cedar Rapids, Mr. Trump sharpened that line of attack, suggesting a more concerted effort by his campaign to defend against accusations that Mr. Trump has an anti-democratic bent — by going on offense.Polls have shown that significant percentages of voters in both parties are concerned about threats to democracy. During the midterm elections, candidates who embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him were defeated, even in races in which voters did not rank “democracy” as a top concern.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign has frequently attacked Mr. Trump along those lines. In recent weeks, Biden aides and allies have called attention to news reports about plans being made by Mr. Trump and his allies that would undermine central elements of American democracy, governing and the rule of law.Mr. Trump and his campaign have sought to dismiss such concerns as a concoction to scare voters. But on Saturday, they tried to turn the Biden campaign’s arguments back against the president.At the Cedar Rapids event, aides and volunteers left placards with bold black-and-white lettering reading “Biden attacks democracy” on the seats and bleachers. At the start of Mr. Trump’s speech, that message was broadcast on a screen above the stage.Mr. Trump has a history of accusing his opponents of behavior that he himself is guilty of, the political equivalent of a “No, you are” playground retort. In a 2016 debate, when Hillary Clinton accused Mr. Trump of being a Russian puppet, Mr. Trump fired back with “You’re the puppet,” a comment he never explained.Mr. Trump’s accusations against Mr. Biden, which he referenced repeatedly throughout his speech, veered toward the conspiratorial. He claimed the president and his allies were seeking to control Americans’ speech, their behavior on social media and their purchases of cars and dishwashers.Without evidence, he accused Mr. Biden of being behind a nationwide effort to get Mr. Trump removed from the ballot in several states. And, as he has before, he claimed, again without evidence, that Mr. Biden was the mastermind behind the four criminal cases against him.Here, too, Mr. Trump conjured a nefarious-sounding presidential conspiracy, one with dark ramifications for ordinary Americans, not just for the former president being prosecuted. Mr. Biden and his allies “think they can do whatever they want,” Mr. Trump said — “break any law, tell any lie, ruin any life, trash any norm, and get away with anything they want. Anything they want.”Democrats suggested that the former president was projecting again.“Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one where the government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies,” Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement. “You don’t have to take our word for it — Trump has admitted it himself.”Even as he was insisting that Mr. Biden threatens democracy, Mr. Trump underscored his most antidemocratic campaign themes.Having said that he would use the Justice Department to “go after” the Biden family, on Saturday, he swore that he would “investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”Mr. Trump has frequently decried the cases brought him against by Black prosecutors in New York and Atlanta as racist. (He does not apply that charge to the white special counsel in his two federal criminal cases, who he instead calls “deranged.”)Yet Mr. Trump himself has a history of racist statements.At an earlier event on Saturday, where he sought to undermine confidence in election integrity well before the 2024 election, he urged supporters in Ankeny, a predominantly white suburb of Des Moines, to take a closer look at election results next year in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, three cities with large Black populations in swing states that he lost in 2020.“You should go into some of these places, and we’ve got to watch those votes when they come in,” Mr. Trump said. “When they’re being, you know, shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor and everyone’s saying, ‘What’s going on?’“We’re like a third-world nation,” he added.Mr. Trump’s speeches on Saturday reflected how sharply he is focused on the general election rather than the Republican primary contest, in which he holds a commanding lead.With just over six weeks until the Iowa caucus, Mr. Trump dismissed his Republican rivals, mocking them for polling well behind him and denouncing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as disloyal for deciding to run against him.He also attacked Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, for endorsing Mr. DeSantis and suggested her popularity had tumbled after she had spurned Mr. Trump.“You know, with your governor we had an issue,” Mr. Trump said, prompting a chorus of boos.Ann Hinga Klein More

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      Nikki Haley’s First TV Ad Calls to Move Beyond ‘the Chaos of the Past’

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      The 30-second spot, part of a $10 million advertising effort in Iowa and New Hampshire, does not mention her front-running rival, Donald Trump, or President Biden.Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign released its first ad of the Republican primary race on Thursday, a spot that calls for “a new generation of conservative leadership” and presents her as a steady hand in the face of domestic and international threats.The ad, titled “Moral Clarity,” comes as Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, aims to build on her momentum in the polls ahead of the first nominating contests in January. Former President Donald J. Trump, however, maintains a wide lead in surveys.The 30-second ad, part of a $10 million purchase in Iowa and New Hampshire, will air on broadcast and cable TV starting Friday. A super PAC backing Ms. Haley, SFA Fund Inc., has spent more than $20 million on television advertising time, including reserved spots well into January.Ms. Haley narrates the ad, and she does not mention Mr. Trump or President Biden. She twice refers to “chaos” — “chaos on our streets and college campuses,” and a need to leave behind “the chaos of the past,” reflecting concerns about Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump that have animated centrist Republicans.To drive home the point, the ad shows security-camera footage of hooded figures shooting guns on a street as well as images of pro-Palestinian protests and American flags being burned.Buoyed by strong debate performances, Ms. Haley has emerged in recent weeks as a challenger to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for the No. 2 spot in the primary field as both seek to dislodge Mr. Trump. She has largely sought to stake out nuanced positions on domestic issues like abortion (which she does not mention in the ad), while taking a hard-line stance on foreign policy, particularly China, Russia and Iran (which she does mention).Mr. Trump’s campaign has told supporters it expects to air its first broadcast TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire starting on Friday. He has previously focused on national ads attacking Mr. Biden. More

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      In Countdown to Iowa, Trump Is Coasting, as DeSantis and Haley Clash

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      The former president’s chief rivals are running low on time to make a statement in Iowa’s caucuses, which could determine whether the Republicans’ nominating contest is seriously contested at all.Negative mailers are overstuffing Iowa mailboxes. Attack ads are cluttering the airwaves. And door knockers are fanning out from Des Moines to Dubuque and everywhere in between.The Iowa caucuses, the first contest in the Republican nominating calendar, are poised to play an especially consequential role in 2024. But with only 49 days to go, Donald J. Trump’s top rivals are running out of time to catch him as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley thrash each other in the final sprint to the starting line.Far ahead in national polls, Mr. Trump is aiming for an emphatic victory on Jan. 15 in Iowa that could serve as an early knockout punch. He leads in public surveys in the state by a margin twice as large as the most competitive contest in the last 50 years.Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, is betting on Iowa to pierce Mr. Trump’s growing aura of inevitability — and to reassert himself as the main rival to short-circuit Mr. Trump’s third run for president. Mr. DeSantis, who won the backing of the state’s popular Republican governor, has been barnstorming across all of Iowa’s 99 counties, bolstered by an army of door knockers paid for by his related super PAC.On Saturday, Mr. DeSantis will visit his final county with an event in Newton held at the Thunderdome, a venue whose name appropriately captures the increasing acrimony and intensity of the race in the state. Mr. Trump will be in Cedar Rapids that same day.For much of the year, the DeSantis team had insisted the 2024 primary was a two-man race. But Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has ridden the momentum of her debate performances to transform it into a two-man-plus-one-woman contest.“The more people see of Nikki Haley the more they like her,” said Betsy Ankney, Ms. Haley’s campaign manager. “The more they see Ron DeSantis, the less they like him.”Now Ms. Haley, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Underestimate me — that’ll be fun” to the Iowa State Fair, is seeking to snuff out Mr. DeSantis at the very start. If she can best Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, his strongest early state, her team believes Ms. Haley would be positioned to emerge as the singular Trump alternative when the calendar turns to two friendlier terrains — New Hampshire, where she has polled in second place, and her home state, South Carolina, where she served as governor.Revealingly, Ms. Haley’s allied super PAC has spent $3.5 million on ads and other expenditures attacking Mr. DeSantis in the last two months in Iowa and New Hampshire, according to federal records, but not a dollar explicitly opposing Mr. Trump despite his dominant overall lead.“Nikki Haley and her donors are greedily wasting millions of dollars targeting Ron DeSantis in Iowa,” said David Polyansky, deputy campaign manager for Mr. DeSantis, who called that spending a political gift to Mr. Trump because the likeliest second choice of DeSantis supporters is not Ms. Haley but the former president.Nikki Haley has ridden the momentum of her debate performances to transform the primary contest.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s team has gleefully greeted the battling. James Blair, national field director for Mr. Trump, said Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis were “trying to bludgeon themselves for the title of first loser.”“The biggest win in Iowa ever is 12 points so anything above that is setting a record,” Mr. Blair added, arguing that even an upset in Iowa would only prove a blip given the former president’s superior organization across the rest of the states on the calendar.Iowa always plays a critical role in narrowing a presidential primary field but this year it could determine whether there is much of a contest at all. The Trump campaign has told supporters that it has booked its first significant television ads to begin in Iowa on Dec. 1, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur, has pledged to also spend millions in the final weeks even as his standing has slid since the summer.“Almost everybody is pushing the chips into the middle of the table in Iowa,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist with years of experience in the state. Only Chris Christie is bypassing Iowa, hoping a muddled result could allow him to break through in New Hampshire.As the candidates vie for votes, their strategists and spinmeisters are seeking any possible advantage in the unseen but critical contest of expectations-setting. Those who surprise or surpass where they are expected to finish typically emerge with the most momentum — and money.“If he doesn’t win Iowa, Ron DeSantis has no rationale to move on,” said Ms. Ankney, Ms. Haley’s campaign manager.Mr. DeSantis’s support has mostly collapsed in New Hampshire, where one recent poll showed him in fifth place. The state’s voters are typically more moderate than Iowa’s and the lack of a serious Democratic primary means independents could flood the contest, which could help Ms. Haley or Mr. Christie.The Haley campaign has announced plans to spend $10 million on television, radio and digital ads in Iowa and New Hampshire (about $4.25 million has actually been reserved on television so far). The DeSantis campaign has announced plans to spend $2 million on Iowa television ads.On the trail, Mr. DeSantis has been saying in increasingly blunt terms that Mr. Trump would lose a rematch against President Biden. But the energy behind that argument has diminished both because Mr. Biden has slipped in the polls and because Ms. Haley has tended to fare even better than either Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis in such a hypothetical matchup. In some cases, Mr. DeSantis has fared worse than Mr. Trump, too.The DeSantis super PAC has spent 10 times more money criticizing Ms. Haley in ads and other expenditures than against Mr. Trump, records show. But in private, Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, have expressed disapproval of those ads, according to two people familiar with their remarks. Several DeSantis allies recently created a new entity to explore fresh avenues of attack on Ms. Haley but the decision has caused more turmoil on the team, with the chief executive abruptly resigning last week.In Iowa and beyond, Mr. Trump’s team has almost exclusively focused on Mr. DeSantis, whom Mr. Trump has treated as his only serious challenger throughout 2023. Mr. Blair said it was notable how much the DeSantis operation was spending attacking Ms. Haley rather than “trying to grow Ron’s image or hurt the president — because they’ve given up on those things.”“They’re just trying to stop Nikki Haley from coming in second,” Mr. Blair added.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is betting on Iowa to pierce Mr. Trump’s growing aura of inevitability.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThere are two debates planned before the Iowa caucuses that could still jostle the dynamics. Only the first, on Dec. 6 in Alabama, has been announced; the second is planned for January in Iowa. Mr. Trump has said he won’t participate in any debates and his team has tried to pressure the Republican National Committee to cancel the rest.The other wild card is the much-discussed door-knocking operation of Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC that said it had 26 paid political staff members in the state and thousands of volunteers. The group says it has knocked on almost 677,000 doors to date — including three times on every targeted home.Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for Never Back Down, has told people that he believes the group’s door-knocking push could be worth as much as 10 percentage points on caucus day, according to a person who has heard the pitch.Caucuses, which occur at 7 p.m. on a typically frigid Monday evening, are far more involved than regular elections and tend to benefit the most organized candidates. But some are skeptical that organizing could give such a large lift.“DeSantis seems to have the best groundwork going out here but it’s nothing compared to what people in the past have had,” said Andy Cable, a longtime Republican activist in Hardin County, which is north of Des Moines. “Trump doesn’t need the groundwork. His people will just show up. Nikki has come on late but I’m not sure she has the actual organization on the ground to actually do it.”Trump campaign officials say their operation has already amassed 50,000 signed cards committing to caucus for him, and 1,800 “caucus captains” for the more than 1,600 precincts. The DeSantis campaign said it had more than 30,000 people who had committed to caucus for him. The Haley campaign declined to provide any such data points.For Mr. DeSantis, the endorsement of Kim Reynolds, the state’s Republican governor, has given him a jolt of energy and she plans to campaign heavily for him through the caucuses, including next Saturday in Newton, Iowa.A television ad featuring Ms. Reynolds is already running. “He gets things done,” she says in the spot.Mr. DeSantis has also won the backing of Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in the state who has endorsed the last three Iowa caucus winners in contested races — Ted Cruz in 2016, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008, all of whom lost the eventual nomination.White evangelical voters are seen as crucial to any potential DeSantis breakthrough, and the Trump campaign has sought to organize support among church leaders, announcing that their total faith leader endorsements topped 150 on the same afternoon that Mr. Vander Plaats made his announcement.Judging from campaign stops, Mr. DeSantis’s 99-county tour does appear to have created some momentum in Iowa. He regularly draws crowds of 50 to 100 people to small-town events at pizza shops, coffee houses and family farms, taking questions and posing for photos.“I’ve been a Trump man all along, but I liked what DeSantis had to say,” said Ev Cherrington, 86, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak at a barbecue restaurant in Ames, Iowa, this month and said he was now considering backing him, largely because of the laundry list of policy ideas that Mr. DeSantis had recited.But outside of the bubble of Mr. DeSantis’s bus tour, a different reality sets in. As Mr. DeSantis visited his 98th Iowa county a week ago after holding around 10 small public events over three days, Mr. Trump appeared at a rally in a high school gym in Fort Dodge, Iowa. He drew roughly 2,000 people, according to The Associated Press — more than all of Mr. DeSantis’s events combined.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      in Elections

      Beside Ramaswamy, a Doctor Who Listens More and Debates Less

      by

      Apoorva Ramaswamy, a surgeon and cancer researcher, has balanced weekdays in hospitals with weekends on the trail, with their young sons in tow.Vivek Ramaswamy was holding court before a crowd at a New Hampshire fair, the second of five stops on a typically busy day of barnstorming, when he did something rare: He yielded the spotlight.A nurse had asked Mr. Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur-turned-author-turned-presidential candidate, about nurse staffing shortages at hospitals. But before addressing the question himself, he turned to the doctor nodding emphatically at his side — his wife, Apoorva Tewari Ramaswamy — and handed her the microphone.“Trust me, I’ve been in his ear. He’s heard that from me, too,” Dr. Ramaswamy said reassuringly, both to the nurse and to hundreds of others listening. “We need so many people who are actually interacting with other humans and seeing what is going on.”New to the public eye, Dr. Ramaswamy, 34, holds many titles: Yale-educated surgeon, cancer researcher and professor, mother of two.Yet since her husband, 38, transitioned from making frequent appearances on Fox News to stumping in early primary states, Dr. Ramaswamy has balanced weekdays making hospital rounds with weekends on the trail, adapting to an everywhere-all-the-time campaign that puts their family — including their sons Karthik, 3, and Arjun, 1 — front and center. (One of her husband’s “commandments” reads: “The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.”)Dr. Ramaswamy on the campaign bus with her family between stops in New Hampshire in September.Sophie Park for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More