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    How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

    Yes, there’s reason for skepticism, but also reason for concern for Democrats, particularly over turnout.Is President Biden really struggling as badly among nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — as the polls say?I’ve seen plenty of skepticism. Among nonwhite voters, a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t fared as badly as those polls suggest in a presidential election result since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In the case of Black voters, the disparity between the usual support for Democrats — around 90 percent or more — and the recent polling showing it in the 70s or even the 60s just seems too much to accept. Some skeptics believe they’ve seen results like this before, only for Republican strength to vanish on Election Day.But if we compare the polls with those from previous election cycles, Mr. Biden’s early weakness looks serious. His support among Black, Hispanic and other nonwhite voters is well beneath previous lows for Democrats in pre-election polls over the last several decades — including the polls from the last presidential election. Yet at the same time, his weakness is put in better perspective when judged against prior polls, rather than the final election results.Here’s how you should interpret what the polling really means for Mr. Biden’s eventual support among nonwhite and especially Black voters.Election results are the wrong benchmarkA major source of skepticism of Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters is the sheer magnitude of the drop-off, based on the difference between the early poll results among registered voters and the estimated final results in post-election studies, like the exit polls.It’s an understandable comparison, but it’s a bad one. Millions of people are undecided in polling today, while all voters have made up their minds in these post-election studies. The registered voter polling also includes millions of people who won’t ultimately vote; the post-election studies typically include only actual voters.These two factors — undecided voters and low-turnout voters — help explain many seemingly weird differences between pre-election polls and the post-election studies.For illustration, consider the following from our New York Times/Siena College polling:Mr. Biden leads, 72 percent to 11 percent, among Black registered voters over the last year.Mr. Biden’s lead among Black voters jumps to 79-11 if undecided voters are assigned based on how they say they voted in 2020.He leads by 76-10 among Black voters with a record of participating in the 2020 general election.His lead among 2020 voters jumps to 84-10 if we allocate undecided voters based on their self-reported 2020 vote preference.For comparison, this same group of Black voters who turned out in 2020 reported backing Mr. Biden over Donald J. Trump, 89-7, in the last election.The upshot: The gap between post-election studies and registered voter polls narrows considerably after accounting for the inherent differences between the two measures — undecided voters and turnout.This lesson isn’t limited to Black voters. To take a different example, Mr. Biden leads by just 46-34 among young registered voters in our polling over the last year, but he leads by 57-35 among young validated 2020 voters if we assign undecided voters based on their 2020 vote preference. His lead among Hispanic voters grows from 47-35 to 56-36 with the same approach. Among Asian American, Native American, multiracial and other nonwhite voters who aren’t Black and Hispanic, it goes up to 50-39, from 40-39.Of course, we can’t assume that Black, Hispanic, young or any voters will turn out as they did in 2020. We can’t assume that undecided voters will return to their 2020 preferences, either. The point is that the differences between pre-election registered voter polls and the final post-election studies explain many of the differences between survey results by subgroup and your expectations. If you must compare the crosstabs from registered voter polls with the final election studies, here’s a tip: Focus on major party vote share. In the case of Black voters, Mr. Biden has a 71-12 lead, so that means he has 86 percent of the major party vote in our Times/Siena polling, 71/(71+12) = 86. That roughly five- or six-point shift in major party vote share is a lot likelier to reflect reality than comparing his 59-point margin among decided voters (71-12 = 59) with his 80-point margin from 2020.Why major party vote share? The logic is simple. Imagine that today 17 percent of eventual Biden voters are undecided and 17 percent of eventual Trump voters are undecided. What would that mean for a poll of voters who will eventually vote 86 to 14? They would be 71 to 12 in the polls today.Mr. Biden’s polling weakness is unusualThere’s another aspect of the skeptics case that I’m less sympathetic toward: the idea that we always see this kind of weakness among nonwhite voters, and it just never materializes.If you look back at polling from prior cycles, it becomes clear that Mr. Biden today really is quite a bit weaker than previous Democrats in registered voter polling from prior cycles. More

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    Wisconsin Elections Official Targeted in Partisan Clash Over Voting

    Meagan Wolfe, the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator since 2018, has been demonized by former President Donald J. Trump’s allies in the battleground state.Republicans in Wisconsin pushing to oust the state’s nonpartisan head of elections clashed on Tuesday with voting rights advocates and some local clerks during a rancorous public hearing in Madison, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.With their new supermajority in the State Senate, Republicans fought over the reappointment of Meagan Wolfe as the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator.The agency’s head since 2018, Ms. Wolfe has become a steady target of right-wing attacks, fueled by former President Donald J. Trump’s grievances about his defeat in the battleground state in 2020. Many of them hinge on his falsehoods about election fraud and the use of electronic voting machines and ballot drop boxes.Ms. Wolfe did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be ousted. Among them was Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice whom Republicans tasked with leading a 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results in the state. The review, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million, found no evidence of significant fraud.“A majority of people in Wisconsin have doubts about the honesty of elections in this state,” he said at the hearing. “That’s disgraceful.”On Tuesday, Ms. Wolfe declined to comment through a spokesman for the elections commission, who shared a copy of a letter that she sent to legislators in June that had sought to dispel election misinformation.“I believe it is fair to say that no election in Wisconsin history has been as scrutinized, reviewed, investigated and reinvestigated as much as the November 2020 general election,” her letter said. “The outcome of all those 2020 probes produced essentially the same results: the identification of a relatively small number of suggestions for procedural improvements, with no findings of wrongdoing or significant fraud.”Meagan Wolfe, the administrator, did not attend the hearing, where a stream of critics told a Senate election oversight committee that she should be removed.Ruthie Hauge/Wisconsin State Journal, via Associated PressAt the hearing, Ms. Wolfe’s supporters described her as a model of competency who guided a network of state, county and local election officials through the pandemic and has done so in an impartial manner. They warned that her removal would result in chaos.“Considering what happened after the 2020 elections and since, we are in a world of crazy for next year,” said Lisa Tollefson, the clerk of Rock County, in the southern part of the state. “With the actions and accusations that have been made toward election officials, we are certainly seeing the highest turnover in county clerks and municipal clerks in our history.”Dan Knodl, a Republican who is the chairman of the Senate committee, challenged her “world of crazy” remark.“Are you predicting something, or you have information that something is on the horizon?” he said.Ms. Tollefson answered that the political climate was only likely to intensify in Wisconsin and pointed to the hard-fought election in April that flipped Wisconsin’s Supreme Court from conservative to liberal.Several times during Tuesday’s hearing, Democrats argued that the Legislature did not have the authority to vote on Ms. Wolfe’s reappointment, noting that state law requires her renomination to come from the commission.A June vote by the commission on whether to appoint her to another four-year term ended in an impasse, with three Democrats abstaining over concerns that Republicans would use their supermajority in the Senate to remove her. By doing nothing — declining to renominate or take any other action — the commission can effectively keep Ms. Wolfe in her current role under state law.Republicans have challenged the statute, and the issue is expected to end up being decided by the courts.Ann S. Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner, referred to the move by G.O.P. lawmakers to oust Ms. Wolfe as a “circus.”Mr. Knodl bristled at her language and said he was not about to abdicate oversight.“Whether it’s circuslike or not, that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Thank you for attending the circus.”Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, a government watchdog group, said Ms. Wolfe’s removal would be a major blow to the state, which is likely to once again be a crucial battleground for the presidential race.“The vast majority of Wisconsin’s voters and citizens can and will lose confidence and trust in our elections,” he said. More

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    How Trump’s Election Lies Left the Michigan G.O.P. Broken and Battered

    Infighting between Trump acolytes and traditionalists has driven away donors and voters. Can the Michigan Republican Party rebuild in time for the presidential election?The Michigan Republican Party is starving for cash. A group of prominent activists — including a former statewide candidate — was hit this month with felony charges connected to a bizarre plot to hijack election machines. And in the face of these troubles, suspicion and infighting have been running high. A recent state committee meeting led to a fistfight, a spinal injury and a pair of shattered dentures.This turmoil is one measure of the way Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have rippled through his party. While Mr. Trump has just begun to wrestle with the consequences of his fictions — including two indictments related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 results — the vast machine of activists, donors and volunteers that power his party has been reckoning with the fallout for years.As the party looks toward the presidential election next year, the strains are glaring.Mr. Trump’s election lies spread like wildfire in Michigan, breaking the state party into ardent believers and pragmatists wanting to move on. Bitter disputes, power struggles and contentious primaries followed, leaving the Michigan Republican Party a husk of itself.The battleground has steadily grown safer for Democrats. No Republican has won a statewide election there since Mr. Trump won the state in 2016. (Republicans have won nonpartisan seats on the State Supreme Court.) G.O.P. officials in the state are growing concerned that they do not have a top-tier candidate to run for the open Senate seat.“It’s not going real well, and all you have to do is look at the facts,” said Representative Lisa McClain, a Republican from Eastern Michigan. “The ability to raise money, we’ve got a lot of donors sitting on the sideline. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. It’s just a plain fact. We have to fix that.”She added: “Everyone is in the blame game. We’ve got to stop.”Representative Lisa McClain at a Trump rally in Michigan in 2022. Ms. McClain says the “everyone is in the blame game” as the Michigan G.O.P. struggles with infighting and sluggish fund-raising. Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesMichigan Republicans were long a force in national politics. The state was home to Gerald Ford and George Romney and to many of the “Reagan Democrats” who helped transform the party four decades ago. Ronna McDaniel, the current chair of the Republican National Committee, was the chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party until 2017. Betsy DeVos, the former secretary of education under Mr. Trump who resigned after Jan. 6, is a power broker in the state, managing vast wealth and a political network with influence far beyond state lines.The slow unraveling of the state party began well before the 2020 election. Throughout the Obama administration, the right wing of the party grew more vocal and active. After Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, many party posts that were once controlled largely by megadonor families and the Republican establishment began to be filled by Trump acolytes.By 2021, the new activists wanted to support only candidates who believed the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump lost in Michigan by more than 154,000 votes, was fraudulent and were committed to trying to do something about it.Those leaders soon emerged. Matthew DePerno, a lawyer who advanced false election theories, became a folk hero in the state and ran for attorney general. Kristina Karamo, a poll worker who signed an affidavit claiming she had witnessed vote stealing, became a conservative media star and ran for secretary of state. And Meshawn Maddock, the leader of Women for Trump who organized buses to Washington on Jan. 6, became co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party.As co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, Meshawn Maddock blamed big donors for not supporting their candidates and maintained falsehoods about the 2020 election.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesMr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo did not respond to requests for comment. The Michigan Republican Party did not respond to requests for comment. In a video released on Monday night, Ms. Karamo defended her actions as party chair and lashed out at more moderate Republicans she claimed were part of a “uniparty.”Their nominations exposed a rift within the party, with more moderate, traditional Republicans like the DeVos family swearing off both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo and withholding funds from most of the state party. Other donors similarly expressed their frustration. County nominating conventions devolved into open conflict.“Meshawn was never connected to the donor base, and so having her as the vice chair for a lot of us was a showstopper,” said Dave Trott, a former Republican congressman from Michigan who retired in 2018 and is also a former donor to the state party. “Because we just knew she would never be someone that would be rational in her approach to state party politics.”Ms. Maddock, who is no longer involved in the party, responded to Mr. Trott, saying she was “not surprised at all that he takes no responsibility for disappointing Michigan voters or anyone.” “The state party needs the wealthy RINOs who often fund it to come to terms with what the actual voters on the right want,” Ms. Maddock said. “Instead of constantly gaslighting the Republican base, the wealthy donors need to treat them with an ounce of respect for once.”As standard-bearers for the state party during the 2022 midterm cycle, Mr. DePerno, Ms. Karamo and Ms. Maddock all maintained the falsehoods about the 2020 election. In their campaigns, Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo placed extra emphasis on the 2020 election, often at the expense of other issues more central to voters.They were resoundingly defeated. Republicans also lost control of both chambers of the State Legislature. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic incumbent, sailed to a landslide victory.Republicans across the state were left pointing fingers. The state party blamed Tudor Dixon, the candidate for governor, for an unpopular abortion stance and anemic fund-raising. Ms. Dixon blamed state party leadership. Ms. Maddock blamed big donors for not supporting their candidates. Ms. Karamo refused to concede.A state party autopsy days after the election, made public by Ms. Dixon, acknowledged that “we found ourselves consistently navigating the power struggle between Trump and anti-Trump factions of the party” and that Mr. Trump “provided challenges on a statewide ballot.”Ms. Karamo, who succeeded Ms. Maddock at the helm, pledged to bring in a new donor class. But those donors never materialized. The party has lost money since Ms. Karamo took over, with under $150,000 in the bank as of June 30, according to federal campaign finance records. At the same time four years ago, the party had roughly three times as much cash on hand.Ms. Karamo and Matthew DePerno are prominent election deniers who stepped into the vacuum of leadership at the state party.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesShe has drawn condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats for her social media posts tying gun reforms to the Holocaust and has faced attempts to limit her power.The party has been plagued by infighting. In April, two county leaders were involved in an altercation, with one filing a police report claiming assault, according to video obtained by Bridge Michigan. In July, a brief brawl broke out during a state party gathering. The chairman of the Clare County Republican Party told police he had stress fractures in his spine, bruised ribs and broken dentures as a result of the fight.A memo circulated this month from the executive director and general counsel of the state party, obtained by The Times, warned of a rogue meeting being advertised under the banner of the state party that was “in no manner properly connected to or arising from the true and real Michigan Republican Party.”The issues facing the party extend beyond infighting and fund-raising; this month, Mr. DePerno, as well as a former Republican state representative and a lawyer, were charged with felonies related to a plan to illegally obtain voting machines. They have pleaded not guilty.“Tell me how that helps. Tell me how that helps get the swing voter,” said Ms. McClain. “Voters don’t care about the infighting. The swing voter wants to know, how are your policies going to help me have a better life for my family?”Prominent Michigan Republicans appear content to let the state party wither. Former Gov. Rick Snyder, among the last Republicans elected statewide in Michigan, has begun a fund-raising campaign directing money away from the state party and directly into the House Republican caucus in a desperate attempt to win back at least one chamber of the State Legislature.(The effort bears some similarities to one Gov. Brian Kemp undertook in Georgia, another state where division over Mr. Trump’s election claims hobbled the state party.)Mr. Snyder’s fund-raising, as well as some activity from the DeVos family network, have filled the coffers of the Republican House caucus, led by Matt Hall, the minority leader in the State Legislature whom many party elites are looking to as the de facto leader. The House Republican Caucus, despite being in the minority, is outpacing the House Democratic Caucus in fund-raising this year, with $2.3 million to the Democrats’ $1.7 million.Mr. Hall also has helped fuel 2020 election doubts. (He once was the chairman of a committee hearing featuring the Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani spreading lies about the election.) But he is far more likely to attack Democrats on spending or “pork” projects.Separate from Mr. Hall’s efforts, the DeVos family and other influential donors have begun raising money for congressional and state legislative races only, forgoing any presidential or Senate races, according to Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the state party.But the problems looming ahead of next year’s election are not just about money.“What can’t be replicated is the manpower infrastructure,” said Mr. Timmer, who now advises the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “You can’t just go out and buy the passion and zealousness of people who will go out knock on doors and put up signs and do all those things that require human labor in a campaign.”Prominent Republicans point to the coming Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference as a sign of how far the state party has fallen. It was once a marquee stop for presidential hopefuls looking to make an impression on the critical swing state, and not a single Republican candidate for president in 2024 is scheduled to make an appearance.Instead, the featured speaker at the September conference will be Kari Lake, who lost her race for governor in Arizona and has since claimed her loss was marred by fraud. More

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    G.O.P. Chair Says Candidates Must Talk About Abortion to Win in 2024

    Republican rivals spent more time talking about abortion than any other single issue during the first debate, exposing divisions around a federal ban.Even as Republicans’ efforts to restrict abortion rights appear to have hurt candidates in key races over the last year, the party’s chairwoman said on Thursday morning that she welcomed the protracted — and at times, contentious — discussion of the topic in the first Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night.“I was very pleased to see them talk about abortion,” Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, said on “Fox & Friends.”According to an analysis by The New York Times, abortion was the most-discussed topic among the eight candidates, outlasting discussion of former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, by more than a minute.Ms. McDaniel noted that Democrats had successfully campaigned on the issue of abortion rights in last year’s midterm elections and were likely to do so again in 2024. Democrats have sought to harness a backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. The issue appears to have helped motivate voter turnout for Democrats and has become politically risky for Republicans. Many have sought to play down the subject.“If our candidates aren’t able to find a response and put out a response, we’re not going to win,” Ms. McDaniel said.But if Ms. McDaniel welcomed the discussion Wednesday night, so, too, did some Democrats and abortion rights activists, who were eager to remind voters that most Republicans — including those on the debate stage — are far to the right of public opinion.“Someone tell her they’re also not going to win if they do talk about abortion,” a leading abortion rights group, Naral Pro-Choice America, responded on X, formerly known as Twitter.This month, Ohio voters rebuffed a Republican-backed ballot measure that would have made it more difficult to amend the state’s constitution, an effort by Republicans to make it harder for voters to preserve abortion rights through an amendment. Though abortion was not technically on the ballot, discussion of the issue dominated the conversation.While a 2024 candidate’s fierce opposition to abortion may help draw voters in a Republican primary, that stance could hurt them with moderate or independent voters in a general election.A New York Times/Siena College poll from July found significant opposition to abortion among likely Republican voters, with 56 percent saying abortion should be mostly or always illegal, and 58 percent saying they backed a 15-week federal abortion ban.But the federal ban had significantly less support among a broader pool of voters, with 53 percent saying they would oppose it, and 61 percent saying abortion should be mostly or always legal.The exchange at Wednesday night’s debate laid bare this tension, exposing divisions within the Republican Party and those seeking to be its standard-bearer. While all eight candidates have voiced support for the Supreme Court’s decision, they disagree on whether to enact a federal abortion ban or leave those measures to the states.Former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina both backed a 15-week national ban, a policy that Mr. Pence has challenged everyone in the field to embrace. Mr. Pence sparred over the issue with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, who argued that a federal abortion ban was politically impractical and urged Republicans “to stop demonizing this issue.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who signed a six-week abortion ban into law in his state — hedged, saying he would support “the side of life” while also acknowledging that “Wisconsin is going to do it different than Texas.”But in her appearance on Fox News, Ms. McDaniel sought to highlight the party’s unity, saying that all eight candidates had successfully painted their political opponents as extreme on the issue. Mr. Scott, for example, claimed falsely that New York, California and Illinois allowed abortions without limits up until birth.Mr. Trump, who opted to skip the debate, has been less clear about his views on an abortion ban. His appointments to the Supreme Court cleared the way for its decision on abortion. But Mr. Trump has not yet backed a federal ban, and his campaign has suggested that he wants to leave abortion policy up to individual states. During his presidency, he at one point supported a ban after 20 weeks’ gestation. More

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    How Are Iowa Democrats? ‘I Can’t Even Describe to You How Bad It Is.’

    Not long ago, Iowa was the center of the Democratic political universe.In 2019, two dozen presidential candidates roamed the Iowa State Fair to grill pork chops and admire the famed butter cow as they vied for the state’s caucusgoers. Some Democrats still saw the state’s rightward jolt in 2016 as temporary, believing that their flipping of two congressional seats in 2018 had reaffirmed Iowa’s purple status. Days before the 2020 general election, Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned in Des Moines.Now, as Republican presidential candidates flock to the fair, Iowa Democrats are at their lowest point in decades.“It is so bad,” said Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines. “I can’t even describe to you how bad it is.”Ms. Celsi and others described themselves as exhausted by repeated defeats at the ballot box, an inability to slow Republicans at the State Capitol and the loss to South Carolina of the first-in-the-nation status in Democratic presidential contests. Deep in the minority, Democrats in the State Legislature have squabbled among themselves, ousting their party’s State Senate leader in June after a dispute over personnel.In interviews this week, Iowa Democrats said the state now stood as a warning sign for what happens when their party falls out of touch with voters who once made up key parts of its electoral coalition.“There’s no question that Democrats are at a low point in Iowa,” said former Representative Dave Loebsack, whose eastern Iowa seat, which he had held for 14 years, flipped to a Republican when he chose not to seek re-election in 2020. “It’s difficult even to recruit people to run when we’re so far down.”Iowa’s transition to a deep-red state has taken place with remarkable speed. Democrats controlled the State Senate as recently as 2016. In 2018, Democrats won three of the state’s four congressional seats and three of the six statewide offices. But after the party’s bungling of its 2020 presidential caucuses, President Donald J. Trump cruised to victory in Iowa that November.Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines, said simply of the situation for Iowa Democrats, “It is so bad.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe midterm elections last year were a Democratic blood bath in Iowa, even though the party had over-performed in much of the rest of the country.The underfunded, little-known Democratic nominee for governor lost by 19 percentage points to Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and carried only four of the state’s 99 counties. Republicans took all four congressional seats for the first time in 50 years, enacted a gun rights amendment in the State Constitution, ousted two of the three Democrats in statewide office and took supermajority control of both chambers of the Legislature.The three congressional seats Democrats held as recently as 2020 are still winnable, Democrats say, but the party doesn’t have 2024 candidates for any of them so far.“We should have candidates out there thinking, ‘If I get a few breaks, I can win,’” said Pete D’Alessandro, a senior aide to Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in Iowa. “That we don’t is a direct reflection of having an incompetent party for the last couple of years.”Democrats, including Mr. D’Alessandro, express optimism about the party’s new chairwoman, Rita Hart, who has sought to empower county-level leaders. Ms. Hart, who in 2020 lost the congressional race for Mr. Loebsack’s seat by six votes, said Iowa Democrats would have to fight for a focus on local issues.Ms. Hart took over the party in January, after a period in which Iowa Democrats had four leaders in less than two years. She has sought to instill some continuity while reorienting the party’s priorities away from the presidential cycle and toward local needs.“The way the media has changed, the way people have gotten their information, we have not shifted to understanding that we’ve got to talk to our fellow Iowans,” she said. “I’m very convinced that we’ve got to empower our county parties to do just that.”The struggles of Iowa Democrats reflect the broader migration of white, rural voters to Republicans, a long-term trend that has accelerated during Mr. Trump’s political career. Iowa has just two big cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and two college towns that state Democrats can still count on winning.Interviews with two dozen Democrats in the state suggest that the party has suffered from a confluence of problems, including diminished campaigning during the coronavirus pandemic; Mr. Trump’s appeal to the white, rural voters who dominate state politics; and weak messaging in the 2022 elections.Democrats have faced numerous setbacks this year, including Republicans’ passage of a six-week abortion ban — which has been temporarily halted by a court order — and a new program that allocates state money toward private school vouchers.“It’s just been so exhausting and frustrating to continue to take losses,” said Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democratic state senator who was the party’s rare bright spot last year when she flipped a suburban Des Moines district to beat the Republican president of the chamber.She added, “If I had known everything that I was getting into, I don’t think I would have run in the first place, because it’s just been really hard, but I see so much opportunity in Iowa.”Losing the first presidential contest after the state party had suffered international ridicule for the 2020 caucuses fiasco forced what several Democrats described as a long-overdue reckoning. No longer can the party rely on a periodic influx of fund-raising and attention. Internal discussions now center on how to act more like successful red-state Democrats elsewhere, nominating moderate candidates who can attract independent voters who have been tilting more conservative with each election.“I’m hopeful that now our attention is on getting people elected and getting Democrats to turn out the vote rather than a national entity that overtakes everything,” said J.D. Scholten, a state representative from Sioux City who in 2018 nearly defeated Representative Steve King, a hard-right Republican with a history of racist remarks.Mr. Scholten, who spent years playing professional baseball in several countries, will not attend the State Fair because he’s pitching for a team in the Netherlands this summer. Ms. Celsi said she wouldn’t go because it is “Kim Reynolds’s show.” And Mr. Loebsack said he was staying home because the country music acts at the fair’s amphitheater did not appeal to him and his wife.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, a Republican, holding an interview at the State Fair. She easily won re-election last year.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIt’s clear that Iowa Democrats have a long way to go.Republicans, with a hammerlock on the state’s politics, dominate fund-raising and media attention — and that was before the G.O.P. presidential candidates made themselves regulars at local fund-raisers and other political events.That has left Democrats doing a lot of finger-pointing and soul-searching about what has gone wrong, whether they have hit rock bottom yet and how to maneuver their way back to political relevance.“The Iowa Democratic Party didn’t prepare for the transition to understanding and using social media,” said Jack Hatch, a longtime state legislator who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014. “Some individual campaigns understood, but not the party. As a result, we had one message for all campaigns, which weakened all our campaigns. One message doesn’t work in Iowa.” More

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    The Normal Paths to Beating Trump Are Closing

    In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.But it’s true that Biden did a fair bit of abnormalizing in his campaign rhetoric, and you could argue that the establishment panic was successful at keeping Trump’s support confined to a version of his 2016 coalition, closing off avenues to expand his popular appeal.Whatever your narrative, the events of Jan. 6 understandably gave abnormalizers the upper hand, while inflation and other issues took the wind out of the more normal style of Democratic politics — leading to a 2022 midterm campaign in which Biden and the Democrats leaned more heavily on democracy-in-peril arguments than policy.But when this abnormalizing effort was successful (certainly more successful than I expected), it seemed to open an opportunity for normalizers within the Republican Party, letting a figure like Ron DeSantis attack Trump on pragmatic grounds, as a proven vote loser whose populist mission could be better fulfilled by someone else.Now, though, that potential dynamic seems to be evaporating, unraveled by the interaction between the multiplying indictments of Trump and DeSantis’s weak performance so far on the national stage. One way or another, 2024 increasingly looks like a full-abnormalization campaign.Post-indictments, for DeSantis or some other Republican to rally past Trump, an important faction of G.O.P. voters would have to grow fatigued with Trump the public enemy and outlaw politician — effectively conceding to the American establishment’s this-is-not-normal crusade.In the more likely event of a Biden-Trump rematch, the remarkable possibility of a campaign run from prison will dominate everything. The normal side of things won’t cease to matter, the condition of the economy will still play its crucial role, but the sense of abnormality will warp every aspect of normal partisan debate.Despite all my doubts about the abnormalization strategy, despite Trump’s decent poll numbers against Biden at the moment, my guess is that this will work out for the Democrats. The Stormy Daniels indictment still feels like a partisan put-up job. But in the classified documents case, Trump’s guilt seems clear-cut. And while the Jan. 6 indictment seems more legally uncertain, it will focus constant national attention on the same gross abuses of office that cost Trumpist Republicans so dearly in 2022.The fact that the indictments are making it tougher to unseat Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is just tough luck for anti-Trump conservatives. Trump asked for this, his supporters are choosing this, and his Democratic opponents may get both the moral satisfaction of a conviction and the political benefits of beating a convict-candidate at the polls.But my guesses about Trump’s political prospects have certainly been wrong before. And there is precedent for an abnormalization strategy going all the way to prosecution without actually pushing the demagogue offstage. A precedent like Berlusconi, in fact, who faced 35 separate criminal court cases after he entered politics, received just one clear conviction — and was finally removed from politics only by the most normal of all endings: his old age and death.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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    Matt DePerno, Trump Meddler in Michigan, Is Charged in Election Breach

    A key figure in a multistate effort to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. DePerno lost his race for Michigan attorney general in 2022. He later finished second to lead the state’s Republican Party.Matthew DePerno, a key orchestrator of efforts to help former President Donald J. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan and an unsuccessful candidate for state attorney general last year, was arraigned on four felony charges on Tuesday, according to documents released by D.J. Hilson, the special prosecutor handling the investigation.The charges against Mr. DePerno, which include undue possession of a voting machine and a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer or computer system, come after a nearly yearlong investigation in one of the battleground states that cemented the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Former State Representative Daire Rendon was also charged with two crimes, including a conspiracy to illegally obtain a voting machine and false pretenses.Both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Rendon were arraigned remotely on Tuesday before Chief Judge Jeffery Matis, according to Richard Lynch, the court administrator for Oakland County’s Sixth Circuit, and remained free on bond.The charges were first reported by The Detroit News.Mr. DePerno denied any wrongdoing and said that his efforts “uncovered significant security flaws” in a statement from his lawyer, Paul Stablein.“He maintains his innocence and firmly believes that these charges are not based upon any actual truth and are motivated primarily by politics rather than evidence,” Mr. Stablein said.The criminal inquiry in Michigan has largely been overshadowed by developments in Georgia, where a grand jury is weighing charges against Mr. Trump for trying to subvert the election, but both are part of the ongoing reckoning over the conspiracy theories about election machines promoted by Mr. Trump and his allies.The efforts to legitimize the falsehoods and conspiracy theories promoted widely by Mr. Trump and his allies continued long after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and after Mr. Biden took office. In Arizona, such efforts included the discredited election audit of Maricopa County led by Republicans in the state legislature.In a statement, Mr. Hilson said, “Although our office made no recommendations to the grand jury as to whether an indictment should be issued or not, we support the grand jury’s decision and we will prosecute each of the cases as they have directed in the sole interests of justice.”Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general and a Democrat who went on to defeat Mr. DePerno in the November election, has not been involved in the investigation since the appointment of a special prosecutor in August last year. In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Nessel said that the allegations “caused undeniable harm to our democracy” and issued a warning for the future.“The 2024 presidential election will soon be upon us. The lies espoused by attorneys involved in this matter, and those who worked in concert with them across the nation, wreaked havoc and sowed distrust within our democratic institutions and processes,” Ms. Nessel said. “We hope for swift justice in the courts.”The charges stemmed from a bizarre plot hatched by a group of conservative activists in early 2021 to pick apart voting machines in at least three Michigan counties, in some cases taking them to hotels and Airbnb rentals as they hunted for evidence of election fraud.In the weeks after the 2020 election, he drew widespread attention and the admiration of Mr. Trump when he filed a lawsuit challenging the vote tallies in Antrim County, a rural area in Northern Michigan where a minor clerical error fueled conspiracy theories.He falsely claimed that voting machines there had been rigged, a premise that was rejected as “idiotic” by William P. Barr, an attorney general under Mr. Trump, and “demonstrably false” by Republicans in the Michigan Senate.Mr. Hilson, the prosecutor in Muskegon County appointed as special prosecutor, had initially delayed bringing charges, asking a state judge to determine whether it was against state law to take possession of a voting machine without the secretary of state’s permission or a court order. A judge determined last month that doing so was against the law, clearing the way for charges.Democrats swept the governor’s race and other statewide contests last fall, in addition to flipping the full Legislature for the first time in decades. Mr. DePerno, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, lost the attorney general’s race by eight percentage points.This year, Mr. DePerno had been a front-runner to lead the Michigan Republican Party after its disappointing showing in last year’s midterm election, but he finished second to another election-denier: Kristina Karamo.In his campaign to lead the G.O.P. in Michigan, Mr. DePerno had vowed to pack the party’s leadership ranks with Trump loyalists, close primaries to just Republicans and ratchet up the distribution of absentee ballot applications to party members — despite what he said was lingering opposition to voting by mail within the party’s ranks.His candidacy was supported by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has spread conspiracy theories about election fraud and appeared at a fund-raising reception for Mr. DePerno in Lansing on the night before the chairmanship vote.Mr. DePerno lost to Ms. Karamo after three rounds of balloting at the state party convention, a process that was slowed for several hours by the use of paper ballots and hand counting.Danny Hakim More