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      Latino Republicans Call Debate a Missed Opportunity to Reach Voters

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      Republicans have sought to make inroads with the fast-growing slice of the electorate. But voters saw a swing and a miss on debate night.The Republican Party has been on a quest to make inroads with Hispanic voters, and the second presidential debate was tailored to delivering that message: The setting was California, where Latinos now make up the largest racial or ethnic demographic. The Spanish-language network Univision broadcast the event in Spanish, and Ilia Calderón, the first Afro-Latina to anchor a weekday prime-time newscast on a major network in the United States, was a moderator.But questions directly on Latino and immigrant communities tended to be overtaken by bickering and candidates taking swipes at one another on unrelated subjects. Only three candidates — former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — referred directly to Latinos or Hispanics at all. And only Mr. Pence pitched his economic message specifically toward Hispanic voters.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose state has the third-largest Latino population, appeared to suggest there was no need for specific overtures to Hispanics or independents when he had won by such large margins in his home state, including in Miami-Dade County, a former Democratic stronghold.“I’m the only one up here who’s gotten in the big fights and has delivered big victories for the people of Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”In interviews, Latino voters and strategists called the debate a missed opportunity for Republicans: Few of the candidates spoke directly to or about Latinos or claimed any cultural affiliation or familiarity with them. The Republican field offered little in the way of economic plans to help workers or solutions to improve legal channels to immigration. The candidates doubled down on depictions of the nation’s southern border as chaotic and lawless.Mike Madrid, a longtime Latino Republican consultant in California, said the tough talk could draw in the support of blue-collar Latino Republicans who did not hold a college degree and in recent years have tended to vote more in line with white voters. But the debate was only further evidence that the party had abandoned attempts to broaden its reach beyond Latino Republicans already in its fold. Republicans are “getting more Latino voters not because of their best efforts, but in spite of them,” he said.Latinos are now projected to number about 34.5 million eligible voters, or an estimated 14.3 percent of the American electorate, according to a 2022 analysis by the Pew Research Center.Although Latino voters still overall lean Democratic, former President Donald J. Trump improved his performance with the demographic in 2020 nationwide, and in some areas like South Florida and South Texas even made sizable gains. Debate over what exactly drove his appeal continues.Some post-mortem analyses have found his opposition to city-led Covid pandemic restrictions that shut down workplaces and his administration’s promotion of low Latino unemployment rates and support for Latino businesses helped persuade Latino voters to his side, even when they disagreed with his violent and divisive approach to immigration.Historically, about a third of Latino voters have tended to vote for Republican presidential candidates. But Latino Republicans differ from non-Hispanic Republicans on guns and immigration: Fewer Hispanic Republicans believe protecting the right to own guns is more important than regulating who can own guns, and Hispanic Republicans are less likely to clamor for more border security measures, according to the Pew Research Center.At the debate on Wednesday, Ms. Calderón, who is Colombian and has gained prominence in Latin America for her incisive reporting on race and immigration, and the other moderators often turned to issues central to Latinos in the United States, including income inequality, gun violence and Black and Latino students’ low scores in math and reading.But on the stage, the candidates’ attention quickly turned elsewhere. Mr. DeSantis — the only candidate to provide a Spanish translation of his website — accused Washington of “shutting down the American dream,” an idea popular with Latino workers, but mostly pitched himself as a culture warrior.Ilia Calderón, the first Afro-Latina to anchor a major national news desk in the United States, was a moderator.Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockIn response to a question on whether he would support a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people in the United States, Mr. Christie talked of the need for immigrant workers to fill vacant jobs. But in his central point, he pledged to increase the presence of troops and agents at the border with Mexico, calling for the issue to be treated as “the law enforcement problem it is.”Mr. Pence dodged Ms. Calderón when she pressed him on whether he would work with Congress to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The initiative, which remains in limbo in the courts, is temporarily protecting from deportation roughly 580,000 undocumented immigrants who have been able to show they were brought into the country as children, have no serious criminal history and work or go to school, among other criteria. About 91 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 54 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners favor a law that would provide DACA recipients permanent legal status. Although Mr. Pence described himself as the only candidate onstage who had tackled congressional reform before, he did not directly answer the question on DACA. Mostly, he used his responses to attack Vivek Ramaswamy and Mr. DeSantis before launching into a lengthy accounting of his track record on hard-line Trump policies.“The truth is, we need to fix a broken immigration system, and I will do that as well,” Mr. Pence said. “But first and foremost, a nation without borders is not a nation.”When asked how he would reach out to Latino voters, Mr. Scott highlighted his chief of staff, who he said was the only Hispanic female chief of staff in the Senate and someone he had hired “because she was the best, highest-qualified person we have.” But he, too, quickly turned to attacking his home-state rival, former Gov. Nikki Haley.The exchanges were a marked difference from the 2016 presidential debate when Senator Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, defended speaking Spanish and personalized their experiences with immigration and the Latino community.Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who helped run Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign last election cycle, said they also were different — and less effective — from those of Mr. Trump. Missing were the pledges “to bring jobs back to America, buy American and drain the swamp,” he added, messages that he said tended to resonate with Latinos and Latino men in particular.“Their campaigns have become such grievance politics that there is not a positive message that is radiating from anyone,” Mr. Rocha said. The shift could also hurt Republicans with a Latino community that skews young and tends to be aspirational, he argued.In South Texas, Sergio Sanchez, the former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, said he listened to the debate with dismay. He wanted to hear the candidates talk about pocketbook issues and energy policies. And he wanted them to stay on message and connect the dots for voters on why their economic policies were better than those under the Biden administration. Instead, he said, they spent more time swinging at one another.That was not good for Latinos or anyone else, he said. “They swung and missed,” he added. More

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      In Michigan, Biden and Trump Offer a Preview of 2024

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      The candidates’ dueling styles were on clear display as the two men tried to woo voters affected by the United Automobile Workers strike.It’s going to be a long road to next November. And the first steps started this week.President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump traveled to Michigan, one day after the other, to speak directly to working-class voters in what amounted to a preview of a likely 2024 campaign.Their dueling styles were on clear display as the two men tried to woo voters affected by the United Automobile Workers strike. Mr. Biden has campaigned on a message of bolstering the middle class, protecting democratic norms and countering China. Mr. Trump, a criminal defendant several times over, has focused on vindicating himself, channeling conservative grievances and promoting America-first policies.Their differences are not just ideological and tactical but stylistic. Mr. Trump prefers a boisterous event that lets him take center stage, and Mr. Biden, so far, has opted for small fund-raisers where he can burnish his Scranton Joe persona.Voters have signaled that they would prefer a different set of options in 2024, but for now, the most likely choice is between the current and former president, who have sharply diverging visions for the future of the United States.In a speech on Wednesday, former President Donald J. Trump criticized the Biden administration’s clean-energy agenda.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRaucous rallies, like the one he held on Wednesday, allow Mr. Trump to test his messaging and give him political oxygen to power through the next news cycle. On Wednesday, as seven other Republican presidential candidates gathered in California for a primary debate, Mr. Trump bragged about being ahead of the field — at one point calling his rivals “job candidates” for a second Trump administration — and brought his usual bluster to a crowd of several hundred at a nonunion manufacturing facility.Guests circulated inside the facility, called Drake Enterprises, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Trump’s mug shot and a telling caption: “NEVER SURRENDER.”In an hourlong speech, Mr. Trump castigated the Biden administration’s clean-energy agenda, which includes a push for a transition to electric vehicles that has aggravated union workers who share his populist views on the economy.“A vote for Crooked Joe means the future of the auto industry will be based in China,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, warning that a transition to electric vehicles amounted to a “transition to hell.” He offered tepid support for the striking autoworkers, telling them that electric vehicles would undermine any success with a new contract: “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you get because in two years you’re all going to be out of business.”Mr. Trump repeatedly overinflated the evening’s crowd size, at one point falsely claiming that there were 9,000 people waiting outside the venue. But in Michigan, he did what Mr. Biden has not done yet: He pleaded for endorsements and votes.“Your leadership should endorse me,” Mr. Trump said, “and I will not say a bad thing about them again and they will have done their job.”Mr. Trump spoke to a crowd of several hundred on Wednesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNever a big fan of a rally, Mr. Biden, who has for decades presented himself as a champion of the middle class, has so far limited most of his campaign appearances to fund-raisers or receptions with supporters. At those events, he opts to shake hands in rope lines and share stories of his decades in politics. He also warns his supporters of the grave risk he feels Mr. Trump continues to pose to the country.On Tuesday, before traveling to California for campaign events and a meeting with technology advisers, Mr. Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line, visiting workers outside a General Motors facility in Belleville, Mich. — a sign of how important it was for him to court a powerful political bloc whose ranks are no longer full of reliably Democratic voters.“The middle class built this country,” Mr. Biden told striking workers on Tuesday. “And unions built the middle class. That’s a fact.”President Biden showed support for striking autoworkers by joining their picket line outside a General Motors facility west of Detroit.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesIn his short appearance with workers — Mr. Trump and several of supporters pointed out that the visit was only about 12 minutes — Mr. Biden spoke briefly and turned a bullhorn over to Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president.Unlike Mr. Trump, the president did not take the chance to link his visit to Michigan to securing union backing. When asked if he hoped to receive the support of the U.A.W., which endorsed him in 2020 but has refrained so far out of complaints about his clean-energy agenda, Mr. Biden would only say, “I’m not worried about that.”Before Mr. Trump’s visit on Wednesday, the Biden campaign released an ad targeting the former president’s economic track record, accusing Mr. Trump of passing “tax breaks for his rich friends while automakers shuttered their plants and Michigan lost manufacturing jobs.”Age and energy have become prevailing concerns among voters about Mr. Biden, who spent this week crisscrossing the country. On Thursday, Mr. Biden, who is 80, is scheduled to deliver what is widely seen as a rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s appearance and the Republican primary debate.Mr. Trump, who is 77, relied on a teleprompter on Wednesday evening — as does Mr. Biden when he delivers prepared remarks. He could not resist the occasional aside, including an extended complaint about the paint job on Air Force One — “so inelegant,” said Mr. Trump, who tried to change the exterior of the plane when he was president. When he departed, he took his time navigating a set of stairs that led to the stage.President Biden became the first sitting president to join a picket line on Tuesday.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesIn recent appearances, Mr. Biden has spoken comparatively softly, and has tried to make light of concerns about his age. “I’ve never been more optimistic about our country’s future in the 800 years I’ve served,” he said at a campaign event this month.But at a reception in California on Wednesday, Mr. Biden had sharp words for his predecessor.“We’re running because our most important freedoms — the right to choose, the right to vote, the right to be who you are, to love who you love — has been attacked and shredded,” the president told supporters. “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy because they want to break down institutional structures.” More

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      Shawn Fain, U.A.W. Leader, Says He Won’t Meet Trump in Michigan

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      Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers union, said he was opposed to meeting the former president during his visit to Michigan on Wednesday.The leader of the United Automobile Workers union ruled out meeting former President Donald J. Trump, the 2024 Republican front-runner, when he visits Michigan on Wednesday, casting him as an out-of-touch billionaire who has been hostile toward the industry’s workers, who are currently on strike.When Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, was asked by CNN in an interview on Tuesday whether he would be open to such an audience with Mr. Trump, he said that there was no upside.“I see no point in meeting with him because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” Mr. Fain said. “He serves a billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”His remarks came just hours after President Biden, at the invitation of Mr. Fain, joined a picket line outside a General Motors facility in Belleville, Mich., near Detroit.Mr. Trump’s campaign did not address Mr. Fain’s specific criticism on Wednesday, but contended that rank-and-file unions members did not uniformly share his views.“The reality is that there’s a disconnect between the political leadership of some of the labor unions and the working middle-class employees that they purport to represent,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign. “President Trump will be in Michigan talking with union workers and ensuring American jobs are protected.”Mr. Fain stopped short of endorsing Mr. Biden’s re-election, but he had harsh words for Mr. Trump and his planned speech at a nonunion plant in Macomb County, Mich.“I find a pathetic irony that the former president is going to hold a rally for union members at a nonunion business,” Mr. Fain said.Mr. Fain said that Mr. Trump had blamed U.A.W. members and their contracts for the troubles of automakers during the 2008 recession. As a presidential candidate in 2015, he added, Mr. Trump supported moving jobs in the industry out of the Midwest, with fewer protections for union workers. Mr. Fain also asked why the former president did not show solidarity with General Motors workers in 2019, while Mr. Trump was in office, when they were on strike for 60 days.“I didn’t see him hold a rally,” Mr. Fain said. “I didn’t see him stand up at the picket line, and I sure as hell didn’t hear him comment about it. He was missing in action.” More

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      Trump, Weighing In on Auto Strike, Has a Mixed Legacy on Unions

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      The former president will be making a campaign stop in Michigan on Wednesday amid the United Automobile Workers’ strike. He has both appeased unions and sought to circumvent them.As a businessman, Donald J. Trump at first tried to circumvent labor unions, then spent decades largely appeasing them to avoid costly strikes.During his first presidential campaign, he boiled down labor issues to a grievance about other countries taking advantage of the United States.As president, he made appointments and adopted policies often more antagonistic to organized labor than those of many other Republicans.When Mr. Trump arrives in the Detroit area on Wednesday to interject himself into the United Auto Workers strike, he will bring with him a record of interactions with organized labor that, whether out of pragmatism or opportunism, has few straight lines.What may resonate the loudest with the current and former factory workers whom Mr. Trump hopes to reach is his decades-long history of reducing a host of economic and labor issues to the complaint that America’s leaders have allowed other countries to “rip off” the United States. He used that line of reasoning in announcing the Michigan trip, arguing that “dumb” government programs to promote electric vehicles would push all automobile production to China. “The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.He deployed the same logic in criticizing Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers’ president, though what he thought Mr. Fain should do differently was not clear. “I think he’s not doing a good job in representing his union, because he’s not going to have a union in three years from now,” Mr. Trump said in a recent interview broadcast on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Those jobs are all going to be gone because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China.”In many ways, that argument is a replay of one of the greatest hits from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, when he aligned himself with workers at a Carrier furnace plant in Indianapolis who faced layoffs after the company announced plans to move the operation to Mexico. At rally after rally, he said it would be easy for him to stop such departures, a message that appealed to former factory workers and those who felt at risk. In Detroit, that approach would allow him to strike a note of support to both workers and companies without choosing sides in the most consequential labor dispute in years.Members of the United Auto Workers union at a rally in Detroit last week.Cydni Elledge for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s visit will serve other political purposes as well. He has scheduled a prime-time speech at an auto parts manufacturer as a distraction from the Republican primary debate he chose not to attend, much as his interview with Tucker Carlson was scheduled to be released during the last primary debate. And in the contest to win over blue-collar voters, the appearance pits him directly against President Biden, who on Tuesday took the unusual step of appearing with Mr. Fain and speaking out in support of the union’s contract demands.Mr. Trump’s early interactions with labor unions were based on less complex concerns. As a young real-estate developer in 1980, Mr. Trump hired a nonunion crew of 200 undocumented Polish workers to demolish the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, clearing the way for what would become Trump Tower, his signature building and the first new construction he pursued on his own. The men were paid as little as $4 an hour, less than half the union wage, and worked 12-hour shifts without safety gear. Though he saved money in the short term, the long-term costs were significant. The treatment of those workers led to 15 years of litigation. Mr. Trump paid $1.375 million to settle the case, including a $500,000 payment to a union benefits fund. The terms of the settlement remained sealed until Mr. Trump became president and a judge released them over his objections.For the rest of his building career, Mr. Trump generally hired large construction companies, allowing him to complete major projects with a minimum number of full-time employees. Those companies typically handled the hiring and management of union workers. It was an era when organized crime lorded over many of the building trade unions in New York.“We had very little, if anything, to do with the unions,” said Barbara Res, who oversaw the construction of Trump Tower for Mr. Trump and worked with him for years. “That’s one of the benefits of having a construction manager. They take care of that crap.”When Mr. Trump ran casinos in Atlantic City, the owners negotiated as an association with the local hotel and casino workers union. John R. O’Donnell, who managed the Trump Plaza casino for several years starting in the late 1980s, said Mr. Trump was so terrified by the threat of lost business during a strike that he would mine his fellow association members and their lawyers for details on the owners’ strategy and then surreptitiously pass that information along to local union leaders. He said Mr. Trump’s typical efforts to reduce costs “did not apply when it came to the union,” because he was adamant that a strike “cannot happen.”“He worked against the association to help the unions, to the detriment of the rest of the city,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “He was going to sign a contract regardless.”In New York City, Mr. Trump developed a professional relationship with Peter Ward, the longtime president of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, which had members working in Trump-owned or -operated hotels. In 2011, Mr. Ward led his union to support Mr. Trump’s brief effort to take over operation of the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park, which had been closed by a bankruptcy.“We have a long and good history with him,” Mr. Ward told The New York Post at the time of the Tavern on the Green agreement.During the transition after Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, Mr. Ward was among those on the president-elect’s official schedule for a face-to-face meeting at Trump Tower.Not all employees at Mr. Trump’s hotels and golf courses are unionized. Workers at the hotel that Mr. Trump co-owns in Las Vegas with the casino mogul Phillip Ruffin began a unionization drive in 2014. The owners pushed back against the effort, but ultimately signed a contract with the union the month after the 2016 election. In 2018, workers at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., told a reporter for The New York Times that many employees there were undocumented immigrants; one worker said a manager had directed her to someone to help her obtain fraudulent records.After decades taking a counterintuitive approach to organized labor as a business owner, Mr. Trump made a sharp turn to the right once elected. Two of his choices for top Labor Department posts had been reliable antagonists of organized labor throughout their careers: Andrew Puzder, who as chief executive of a fast-food company repeatedly argued that labor regulations stifled economic growth; and Patrick Pizzella, a conservative lobbyist and government official who had spent years promoting the interests of businesses against those of unions.Mr. Puzder withdrew his nomination because of a lack of congressional support. Mr. Pizzella served as deputy secretary and acting secretary under Mr. Trump. As a lobbyist in the 1990s, he had been hired by the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States where some workers earned less than $1 an hour, to ensure that Congress did not impose federal minimum wage and immigration laws there.As president, Mr. Trump signed executive orders that undid longstanding protections for two million unionized federal workers, including making it easier to fire and discipline government employees. His appointees demoted the senior civil servants who resolved most labor cases. Mr. Trump has said that if re-elected he will fire thousands of federal workers whom he considers part of a “deep state” filled with “villains.”His line of complaint about other countries taking advantage of the United States dates back to his earliest comments on national affairs. In September 1987, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Mr. Trump bought full-page advertisements in three major newspapers, including The Times, arguing that Japan, Saudi Arabia and other countries were “laughing at America’s politicians” because the United States paid their defense costs. “I was tired, and I think a lot of people are tired, of watching other countries ripping off the United States,” he said on CNN that night. “This is a great country. They laugh at us behind our backs. They laugh at us because of our own stupidity, and the leaders.”Nearly 30 years later, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump repeated almost those exact words after a video of Carrier managers announcing layoffs to employees in the Indiana plant gained wide attention. He said such moves would stop under his presidency because he would impose a 35 percent tariff on goods shipped from foreign factories that had replaced plants in the United States. “We’re going to make our products here,” he said. “Companies are taking advantage of us. And countries are abusing us. And the way you stop it is so easy.”The message resonated with voters at his rallies, as well as with Carrier employees. “I loved it,” Jennifer Shanklin-Hawkins, a worker at the company, told The Times. “I was so happy Trump noticed us.”Mr. Trump never instituted the sort of targeted tax threat he said would be so easy. He and Mike Pence, the vice president and former governor of Indiana, did help persuade Carrier to keep about 850 of those 1,400 jobs in Indiana, in exchange for $7 million in incentives from the state. The rest of the workers were laid off, and hundreds more workers at a nearby Carrier factory were also let go. Some said they ended up feeling like props for the Trump campaign.“There was still a layoff,” Ms. Shanklin-Hawkins told a reporter with The Indianapolis Star in 2020. “He lied completely.”Noam Scheiber More

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      What Republicans Say (and Don’t Say) About the Auto Workers’ Strike

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      It has been interesting to watch the response of Republicans to the United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three American car manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler).The most openly anti-worker view comes from Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who condemned the striking workers as insolent and ungrateful in a stunning display of conservative anti-labor sentiment. “I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike,” Scott said at a campaign event in Iowa. “He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me, to the extent that we can use that once again.” Scott also criticized the union’s demands. “The other things that are really important in that deal is that they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.” In America, he continued, “that doesn’t make sense.”Most other Republicans have sidestepped any discussion of the workers themselves in favor of an attack on electric vehicles and the Biden administration’s clean energy policies. “I guarantee you that one of the things that’s driving that strike is that Bidenomics, and their green energy, electric vehicle agenda is good for Beijing and bad for Detroit, and American autoworkers know it,” former Vice President Mike Pence said during a recent interview on CNBC.Donald Trump took a similar swing at the same target. “The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer,” Trump wrote last week. “They will all be built in China and, they are too expensive, don’t go far enough, take too long to charge, and pose various dangers under certain atmospheric conditions. If this happens, the United Auto Workers will be wiped out, along with all other auto workers in the United States. The all Electric Car policy is about as dumb as Open Borders and No Voter I.D. IT IS A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER!”That much was expected. But beyond the presidential contenders, there were also the ostensibly populist Republicans who have placed workers at the center of their case.“Autoworkers deserve a raise — and they deserve to have their jobs protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are destroying the U.S. auto industry and making China rich,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio wrote that he was “rooting for the autoworkers across our country demanding higher wages and an end to political leadership’s green war on their industry.” Likewise, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida pinned the strike on “a radical climate agenda that seeks the end of gas-powered cars even if it means destroying American jobs,” adding: “Instead of supporting either union bosses or C.E.O.s we need to support American workers who want policies that protect their jobs.”You’ll notice that for all the talk about workers, not one of these more populist Republicans has actually said their demands should be met. They haven’t affirmed the right of labor to strike. They haven’t even blamed management for the strike, despite the fact that the U.A.W. is taking aim at rising corporate profits, which it believes could support higher wages, cost-of-living protections and stronger benefits — and the two-tier system that pays new workers less than veteran workers for the same work.And they haven’t voiced support for the largest, most ambitious organizing goal of the U.A.W. — the unionization of new electric vehicle and battery factories, either as part of a new contract or pursued through new organizing. If anything, Republican attacks on electric vehicles work to obscure the nature of the conflict, which is less about a new product category than about the balance of power between labor and management in the American auto industry.As (my former editor and colleague) Harold Meyerson notes in a piece for The American Prospect:The long-term future of the U.A.W. truly hinges on its ability to unionize the Big Three’s non-union competitors and their own non-union E.V. factories springing up in the right-to-work South. As today’s Wall Street Journal points out, the S.E.C. reports that total compensation (wages and benefits) for the median-paid worker at Tesla’s factories is a bare $34,084, while for the median worker at GM, it’s $80,034; at Ford, $74,691; and at Stellantis, $68,683. Total compensation at the Big Three and non-Big Three new E.V. and battery factories, as well as at the non-E.V. foreign-owned auto factories that are spread across the South, also falls well short of the levels that U.A.W. members make at the Big Three.“In short,” he concludes, “the union won’t long be able to realize the kind of gains its members need unless it can level up the standards at Tesla et al., lest it be compelled to face a long-term leveling down to Elon Musk’s idea of what a proper division of revenue should be.”Or as the U.A.W.’s first-ever directly member-elected president, Shawn Fain, wrote last week in a Guardian opinion essay co-authored with Representative Ro Khanna of California:The electric vehicle transition must be as much about workers’ rights as it is about fighting the climate crisis. We will not let the E.V. industry be built on the backs of workers making poverty wages while C.E.O.s line their pockets with government subsidies. There is no good reason E.V. manufacturing can’t be the gateway to the middle class. But the early signs of this industry are worrying. We will not let corporate greed manipulate the transition to a green economy into a roll back of economic justice.The extent to which Republicans are indifferent to these questions of power is key, because it puts the lie to the idea that the party has become pro-worker in any sense other than a few words and the occasional nod to blue-collar cultural identity. Josh Hawley, for example, opposed a 2018 effort to repeal Missouri’s anti-union “right to work” law. Marco Rubio, according to the AFL-CIO’s scorecard of members of Congress, is among the most anti-labor Republicans in the Senate. J.D. Vance railed against “union bosses” in his 2022 campaign, and Donald Trump (along with Mike Pence) ran one of the most anti-union presidential administrations in recent memory.In other words, Republican support for workers remains little more than rhetoric, signifying nothing. They have no apparent problem with management granting workers a modest increase in wages, but remain hostile to workers who seek to organize themselves as a countervailing force to corporate and financial power.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on the basic analytical problem with the constant calls for Joe Biden to step away from the 2024 Democratic nomination.Absent an extraordinary turn of events, Biden will be on the ballot next year. He wants it, much of the institutional Democratic Party wants it, and there’s no appetite among the men and women who might want to be the next Democratic president to try to take it away from him. Democrats are committed to Biden and there’s no other option, for them, but to see that choice to its conclusion.My Friday column, building somewhat on the Tuesday one, was on Donald Trump, abortion and the political burdens of presidential leadership.Trump is no longer the singular figure of 2016. He is enmeshed within the Republican Party. He has real commitments to allies and coalition partners within the conservative movement. He is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party, yes, but he can’t simply jettison the abortion issue, which remains a central concern for much of the Republican base.And in the most recent episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the film “The American President” with Linda Holmes of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour.”Now ReadingSamuel Clowes Huneke on “wokeness” for The Los Angeles Review of Books.Michael Szalay on the politics of prestige television for Public Books.Dinah Birch on anonymous letters for The London Review of Books.Lola Seaton on “political capitalism” for The New Left Review.Amy C. Offner on neoliberalism for Dissent.Photo of the WeekA photo from the archive! This is the Art Deco Model Tobacco building in Richmond, Va., built around 1940. I took this photo in 2018 with a camera I have long since sold. The building itself has been converted into apartments.Now Eating: Greek-Style White BeansThis is a very simple recipe for Greek-style white beans from The Rancho Gordo Vegetarian Kitchen series, Volume 1. The book calls for lima beans, but any large white bean will do. You’ll want to use dried beans. Other than that, however, the recipe is yours to play with. I cook anchovies along with the vegetables and tomatoes for some additional umami, and I tend to let the beans cook in the oven for longer than 30 minutes — I like them a little on the drier side. I also go a little easy on the olive oil.Be sure to garnish with additional feta and a lot of herbs — dill, parsley and mint all work well here. You would also do well to buy, or make, some pita bread to have on the side.Ingredients½ cup olive oil (divided use)1 large carrot, peeled and finely chopped1 celery stalk, finely chopped½ onion, finely chopped2 tablespoons tomato paste½ pound large white beans, cooked and drained1 large, ripe tomato, chopped3 tablespoons minced fresh dillsalt and freshly ground pepperfeta cheeseDirectionsPreheat the oven to 350 degrees.In a large skillet, warm 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat. Add the carrot, celery, and onion; sauté until the vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste.In a large baking dish, combine the sautéed vegetables, beans, tomato and remaining olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and dill. Add feta, if desired.Bake until the beans are soft and creamy, about 30 minutes. More

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      Pro-Choice? Pro-Union? Donald Trump Has a Deal for You.

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      As Ron DeSantis’s challenge to Donald Trump has seemed to wither on the vine, a piece of conventional wisdom has hardened: That DeSantis has been offering Republican voters Trumpism without the drama, but now we know Republicans love the drama, indeed they can’t live without the drama, and mere substance simply leaves them cold.In one sense, that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the way that Trump’s multiplying indictments seemed to solidify his front-runner’s position, the way that he’s sucked up media oxygen and built his primary lead on the basis of what would be, for any normal politician, terrible publicity.But it elides the fact that DeSantis, like many of his rivals in the current battle for second place, hasn’t actually offered voters an equivalent of Trumpism, and certainly not the Trumpism that won the 2016 Republican primary fight and then upset Hillary Clinton.He has offered part of that package, certainly: the promise to wage war on liberalism by all available means, the harsh words for self-appointed experts and elites, the hostility to the establishment press. But he hasn’t really tried to channel another crucial element of Trumpism — the marriage of rhetorical extremism with ideological flexibility, the ability to drop a vicious insult one moment and promise to make a big, beautiful bipartisan deal the next.That was what Trump offered throughout 2016. While his rivals in the primaries impotently accused him of being unconservative, he cheerfully embraced various heterodoxies on health care and trade and taxes, selling himself as an economic moderate with the same gusto that he promised to build the wall and ban Muslim visitors from the United States.These heterodoxies were often more a salesman’s patter than a sincere policy agenda, which helps explain why his presidency was more conventionally conservative than his campaign.But now candidate Trump is back at the salesman’s game. In the last week, the man whose judicial appointees overturned Roe v. Wade and whose administration was reliably hostile to unions has condemned the six-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis, promised to magically bring the country together on abortion and indicated he’s going to counterprogram next week’s Republican presidential debate by showing up on the U.A.W. picket line.You can see these forays as proof that Trump thinks he’s got the nomination in the bag, that the pro-life movement especially has no choice but to support him and that he can start presenting himself as a general-election candidate early.But I suspect it’s a little more complicated than that, and that Trump’s willingness to show ideological flexibility — or, to be a bit harsher, to pander emptily to any audience he faces — has its uses in the primary campaign as well. Because what it showcases, even to primary voters who disagree with him, is an eagerness to win even at the expense of ideological consistency, an eagerness that much of American conservatism lacks.And showcasing electability is arguably even more important for Trump in 2024 than in 2016, because he was at his weakest after the 2022 midterms, which seemed to expose his election fraud obsessions as a political disaster for the G.O.P. So by moving to the center early, while DeSantis and others try to run against him from the right, he’s counteracting that narrative, trying to prove that he’s committed to victory and not just vanity. (And on the evidence of national polls, in which he now does slightly better than DeSantis against Biden, it’s working.)Does Trump actually have a labor-friendly solution to the U.A.W. strike or a coherent pro-worker agenda? The answers are no and not really. But if showing public sympathy for workers and promising a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods are respectively an empty gesture and a dubious gambit, they are still a better political message than, say, what we got from Tim Scott, the candidate of pre-Trump conservatism, who suggested that the U.A.W. workers should be fired the way Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. (This kind of nonsense position, invoking Reagan’s firing of federal employees in the completely different context of a private-sector fight where employers can’t fire strikers, is exactly what the term “zombie Reaganism” was invented to describe.)Likewise, can Trump actually mediate a national compromise on abortion by stiff-arming the pro-life movement? I wouldn’t bet on it; for better or worse, I expect his transactional relationship with anti-abortion organizations to survive in a potential second term.But his sudden pro-choice outreach is a cynical response to a real political problem for Republicans. If you aspire to restrict abortion beyond the reddest states in a politically sustainable way, you need at the very least a rhetorical modulation, a form of outreach to the wavering and conflicted. And better still would be some kind of alternative offer to Americans who are pro-choice but with reservations — with the obvious form being some new suite of family policies, some enhanced support for women who find themselves pregnant and in difficulty.But most Republicans clearly don’t want to make that kind of offer, beyond a few pro forma gestures and very modest state-level initiatives. DeSantis was quick (well, by his standards) to attack Trump for selling out the pro-life cause, and any abortion opponent should want to see Trump punished politically for that attempted sellout. But nothing in the DeSantis response was directed at the outreach problem, the political problem, the general-election problem that Trump in his unprincipled way was clearly trying to address.And so it has been throughout the primary season thus far. Trump makes big bold promises; his rivals check ideological boxes. Trump talks like a general-election candidate; his rivals bid against one another for narrower constituencies. Scott and Nikki Haley rerun the Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio campaigns; DeSantis aims to improve on Ted Cruz’s Iowa-first strategy … but the only candidate really promising the Trumpism of 2016 is, once again, Donald Trump himself.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Asked About Auto Walkout, Tim Scott Praises Reagan’s Firing of Workers

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      Mr. Scott, when asked if he would involve himself in the United Auto Workers dispute as president, took a harsher stance than many other Republican candidates.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina took a harsher stance toward striking autoworkers on Monday than many of his fellow Republican presidential candidates, saying it did not make sense for workers to want higher pay for shorter workweeks and noting approvingly that President Ronald Reagan had fired federal employees for striking.“I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike,” Mr. Scott said at a campaign event in Iowa, in response to a voter who had asked whether he would “insert” himself into the United Auto Workers talks as president. “He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me, to the extent that we can use that once again.”He went on to criticize federal funding for private-sector unions’ pension plans and said with regard to the U.A.W. dispute: “The other things that are really important in that deal is that they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.”In “America, that doesn’t make sense,” he said. “That’s not common sense.”Members of the United Auto Workers union went on a targeted strike on Friday against three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. The workers are seeking raises of up to 40 percent — which would correspond with pay increases for their companies’ executives over the past decade — and four-day workweeks, along with cost-of-living adjustments and a restoration of previously forfeited pensions.Despite Mr. Scott’s approving reference to Reagan, who fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers in 1981, United Auto Workers members are not federal employees and cannot be fired by the president. Federal labor law also protects them from being fired by their employers for striking.Mr. Scott’s campaign emphasized the rest of his answer — his rejection of taxpayer funding for any deal — and said the Reagan portion had referred to federal workers, not the U.A.W. But it declined to respond on the record when asked why he had brought up Reagan’s firing of federal workers if that had no relevance to the U.A.W. dispute.“Senator Scott has repeatedly made clear, both at that event and others, that Joe Biden shouldn’t leave taxpayers on the hook for any labor deal,” a campaign spokesman, Matt Gorman, said.Mr. Scott’s criticism of the workers’ demands set him apart from many other Republican candidates who have commented on the U.A.W. strike, though not all of them have weighed in. While most of the other candidates have been critical of unions in general, with particular vitriol for teachers’ unions, they have generally expressed sympathy with the autoworkers’ economic concerns.Former President Donald J. Trump is actively trying to court the striking workers while denouncing their leaders; he has cast the workers as victims of Biden administration rules intended to ensure that two-thirds of new passenger cars sold in the United States are electric by 2032.Three other candidates, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Vice President Mike Pence and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, have also brought up the push for electric vehicles in offering sympathy, directly or obliquely, for the workers. Mr. Pence has emphasized inflation, too, while denying that the growing gap between workers’ and executives’ salaries is a factor — though the workers themselves have cited it.One exception to the trend was Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who has proudly described herself as a “union buster.” She told Fox News after the U.A.W. strike began that it would increase auto prices and hurt consumers, and that President Biden was to blame because his support had encouraged unions to make unreasonable demands.“When you have ‘the most pro-union president’ and he touts that he is emboldening the unions, this is what you get,” she said. “And I’ll tell you who pays for it is the taxpayers.” More

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      Trump Planning Detroit Visit During Second GOP Debate

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      Looking past the Republican primary, Donald Trump and his campaign are already gearing up for a possible rematch with President Biden.Former President Donald J. Trump is planning to travel to Detroit on the day of the next Republican primary debate, according to two Trump advisers with knowledge of the plans, injecting himself into the labor dispute between striking autoworkers and the nation’s leading auto manufacturers.The trip, which will include a prime-time speech before current and former union members, is the second consecutive primary debate that Mr. Trump is skipping to instead hold his own counterprogramming. He sat for an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that posted online during the first G.O.P. presidential debate in August.The decision to go to Michigan just days after the United Auto Workers went on strike shows the extent to which Mr. Trump wants to be seen as looking past his primary rivals — and the reality that both he and his political apparatus are already focused on the possibility of a rematch with President Biden.So instead of attending the next G.O.P. debate — on Sept. 27 in California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — Mr. Trump intends to speak to over 500 workers, with his campaign planning to fill the room with plumbers, pipe-fitters, electricians, as well as autoworkers, according to one of the Trump advisers familiar with the planning. Mr. Trump has not directly addressed the wage demands of striking workers and has attacked the union leadership, but he has tried to more broadly cast himself on the side of autoworkers.The campaign is also considering the possibility of having Mr. Trump make an appearance at the picket line, although the adviser said such a visit, which could involve difficult logistics given the former president’s security protections, is unlikely.The former president has long prided himself on his appeal to rank-and-file union workers — even as most union leaders have remained hostile to him, and as Mr. Biden has called himself the most pro-union president in history. In the 2016 campaign, an adviser to Mr. Trump, Paul Manafort, sought to establish a back channel with organized labor in Michigan and Wisconsin in the hopes the A.F.L.-C.I.O. would scale back its efforts to help the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. It did not appear to go anywhere, but underscored the areas that Mr. Trump considered vital in the general election.Mr. Trump won Michigan in the 2016 election, one of the states in the so-called blue wall that crumbled for Democrats that year. But Mr. Biden carried Michigan by more than 150,000 votes in 2020, and it is seen as a critical state for Democrats in 2024.The Trump campaign has produced a radio ad that will begin running on Tuesday in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, trying to cast Mr. Trump as aligned with autoworkers. The same Trump adviser said the ad targeted union workers and men, and will air on sports and rock-themed stations.“All they’ve ever wanted is to compete fairly worldwide and get their fair share of the American dream,” the narrator says in the ad. “Donald Trump calls them great Americans and has always had their backs.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized the transition to electric vehicles, and in a post on his social media site Truth Social over the weekend, he called it an “Electric Car SCAM.” The radio ad also uses the Biden administration’s support for the transition to electric vehicles to attack Mr. Biden.The ad does not specifically mention the strike, which began last week against all big three Detroit automakers, and in which the union is seeking a 40 percent wage increase over four years.Ammar Moussa, a press officer for Mr. Biden’s campaign, said in a statement, “Donald Trump is going to Michigan next week to lie to Michigan workers and pretend he didn’t spend his entire failed presidency selling them out at every turn.”Mr. Biden has sided with the striking workers, sending two top aides to Detroit and saying at the White House hours after the strike began that “workers deserve a fair share of the benefits they helped create.”The United Auto Workers pointedly decided not to endorse Mr. Biden this spring ahead of the current labor clash, with the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, expressing concern about the labor elements of the transition to electric vehicles. At the same time, in a memo, Mr. Fain said Mr. Trump would be a “disaster” if he returned to the White House.In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast over the weekend, Mr. Trump was critical of Mr. Fain, saying workers had been “sold down the river by their leadership.”“I don’t know the gentleman, but I know his name very well, and I think he’s not doing a good job in representing his union,” Mr. Trump said. “Because he’s not going to have a union in three years from now. Those jobs are all going to be gone, because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China.”In a statement after The New York Times reported on Mr. Trump’s Detroit plans, Mr. Fain said that “every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”“We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class,” he said. More