Newsom, Gavin

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      Gavin Newsom Promotes Biden and Himself in a Delicate Dance

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      The California governor has made himself the most visible Democrat-in-waiting. Still, he says that it’s time Democrats “buck up” and get behind President Biden.Over the past four months, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, has traveled to six Republican-led states. He has goaded Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican presidential candidate from Florida, to debate on Fox News. He has assembled a small staff of political advisers and created a political action committee to distribute $10 million to Democratic causes and candidates.And this week, he raised $40,000 for a long-shot candidate for the United States Senate in Tennessee, one of the red states he has criticized his own party for neglecting.By all appearances, Mr. Newsom is a man with an eye on the White House, building a national network of supporters and accumulating the kind of good will among donors, party operatives and voters that could prove critical should he decide to move beyond Sacramento. Mr. Newsom said in an interview that he was not running for president, and that the time has come for Democrats to rally around President Biden.“The train has left the station,” Mr. Newsom said. “We’re all in. Stop talking. He’s not going anywhere. It’s time for all of us to get on the train and buck up.”But it may be difficult for Mr. Newsom to quiet speculation about his own future. He has spent months positioning himself as one of his party’s leading voices during a time of deep Democratic worry and lingering unease about the political strengths of Mr. Biden, who is 80, and his vice president, Kamala Harris.A CNN poll released on Thursday found that 73 percent of all respondents were “seriously concerned” that the president’s age might affect his mental and physical competence. Some 67 percent of Democrats said the party should nominate someone else.Mr. Newsom has, by his account, sought to reassure the White House in both public and private that he is no threat to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign. And in turn, Mr. Biden’s team has appeared to pull him closer. The governor will be a top Democratic surrogate defending Mr. Biden when Republican candidates debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library later this month.This dance — of raising one’s profile without undercutting the president — is the challenge for a class of Democrats-in-waiting, which also includes Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. But Mr. Newsom, a 55-year-old telegenic, popular-in-his-own-state leader, has made himself the most visible in this group, and he may serve as a reminder of Mr. Biden’s shortcoming as he seeks re-election.Mr. Newsom has raised $3.5 million for Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden among them.Doug Mills/The New York Times“He’s got to be careful about it,” Joel Benenson, a pollster who advised Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, said of Mr. Newsom’s effort to raise his profile. “You don’t want to be too cute by half. If you are going to run, do it. If not, go out there and make the connections and talk to Democrats, learn about these states. The worst mistake would be the way to do it and seem sly about doing it.”Mr. Newsom presents his travel to Republican states as an attempt to build up the Democratic Party in places he argues it has neglected. And while defending Mr. Biden, particularly on questions about his age and fitness, he also engages in a debate over cultural issues — transgender rights and gun control, to name two — that Democrats have sometimes avoided.Mr. Newsom spent nearly an hour with Sean Hannity on Fox News in June to make the case for Mr. Biden and to defend his own record in California. “You have to give Gavin Newsom a lot of credit,” Mr. Hannity said in an interview. “He knew it wasn’t going to be an easy interview.”Mr. Newsom recently turned up at a Boise, Idaho, bookstore to denounce “the insane book bans happening across the country. ” He has picked arguments with Republican governors like Mr. DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, on abortion, gun control and trans rights.“He is taking the fight to the Republicans,” said Jared DeLoof, the executive director of the Democratic Party in Idaho, where Mr. Newsom appeared in July. “Too often Democrats shy away from things like critical race theory or transgender rights or some of these issues that Republican like to pop off about. The governor showed he was really effective on this issues — we can take them on, and we can win.”On his tour of Republican states, Mr. Newsom has engaged in the kind of cultural issues — transgender rights and gun control, to name two — that Democrats have at times avoided.Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesMr. Newsom said his activities were done with the consultation and approval of the White House, an assertion confirmed by White House aides.“I am sensitive to that,” he said, noting that he has made a point of not visiting states that are at the center of the presidential battleground. “I am trying not to play into the presidential frame.”(Mr. Newsom, however, did suggest that his still-unscheduled debate with Mr. DeSantis take place in, among other states, Nevada and Georgia, both of which are likely to be in play in 2024.)A spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, T.J. Ducklo, said in a statement Friday that Mr. Newsom had “forcefully and effectively makes the president’s case publicly and is an enormous asset to our fund-raising and organizing operations.”There are other potential sources of friction as Mr. Newsom’s profile rises. Mr. Newsom and Ms. Harris are both ambitious Democrats from the same state who are of similar ages — she is 58 — and have, over the years, had to navigate around each other as they traveled down the same political roads. Ms. Harris would almost certainly be a rival in a Democratic presidential primary in 2028.Mr. Newsom said he and Ms. Harris speak regularly and rejected the suggestion that his success comes at her expense. “This is a true story — I shouldn’t even share it. There were a couple of unknown numbers on my voice mail the other day, and it was Kamala checking in,” he said. “I am really proud of her, and I don’t say that to be patronizing.”Ms. Harris’s aides said she had most recently called the governor to ask how California was faring after it was struck by Hurricane Hilary and an earthquake.Mr. Newsom, who is barred from seeking a third term as governor, has assembled a skeleton structure of campaign aides, in effect a campaign-in-waiting.He has raised $3.5 million for Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden among them. He is also distributing money from his political action committee, Campaign for Democracy, further enhancing his standing with Democrats candidates and political operatives around the country. “If he ever ran for national office, he has a record to run on,” said Sean Clegg, one of Mr. Newsom’s top advisers.Still, should Mr. Newsom seek to expand his political ambitions, he faces some serious obstacles.Mr. Newsom has rejected the notion that his rising profile was undercutting Vice President Kamala Harris, about whom Democrats have expressed doubt.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Newsom won a second term as governor in 2022 with nearly 60 percent of the vote. But he is a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic state and has never had to face a tough Republican opponent.Mr. Newsom has become the face of a state with a long history of innovation and prosperity, but that state also brings with it some of his party’s biggest challenges: homelessness, a housing crisis and what may be the end the kind of growth that has defined the California dream. California has always been a political and cultural outlier and has, more than ever, become a rallying point of the right on issues like crime.Jessica Millan Patterson, the leader of the California Republican Party, said Mr. Newsom could prove an appealing national candidate, but that he would not play well with swing voters in many states.“It’s a really difficult sale,” she said. “I don’t think most of the country is looking at California and saying, ‘That’s what we should be doing.”The last California governor elected president was Ronald Reagan, a Republican; but by the time of that election, in 1980, he had been out of office for five years.Jerry Brown, a former California governor who ran for the White House and lost three times, said that none of the hurdles Mr. Newsom faced were insurmountable. “The most important thing is the candidate and the times,” Mr. Brown said. “If the candidate fits the time, I don’t think the geography and the cultural differences matter as much.”Mr. Newsom acknowledged all the hurdles. “It’s the surround-sound nature of the anger machine that is 24/7, wall-to-wall anti-California,” he said. “People’s entire careers are built on tearing this state down.”But Mr. Newsom argued — while insisting he was engaging in a hypothetical discussion, since he is not running for president — that being governor of a state like California would make someone particularly qualified to run the nation.Not that it matters, by the governor’s telling. Mr. Newsom said becoming president was “never on my list” and that he was not one of those Democrats who grew up with a photograph of John F. Kennedy on his wall, as he put it, drawing an unstated comparison to Bill Clinton and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary who ran for president in 2020 and may well run again in 2028.“Look, in 2028, 99.9999 percent of people will not remember a damn thing about what we did in this election,” he said. “They will all fall in love with whomever it is — and there will be 30 of them on the stage. No one is naïve about that.”Michael D. Shear More

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      Ron DeSantis Accepts Gavin Newsom’s Challenge to Debate on Fox News

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      The California governor had taunted his Florida counterpart for months. Now, with his presidential campaign struggling, Mr. DeSantis agreed to a debate hosted by Sean Hannity.Since last September, Gavin Newsom, the ambitious, proudly liberal governor of California, has been tauntingly challenging Ron DeSantis, the ambitious, proudly conservative governor of Florida, to a debate. He would even agree, he said, to let the right-wing Fox News host Sean Hannity moderate.On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis accepted.“You heard Gavin make the offer,” Mr. Hannity said on his show. “Your answer is?”“Absolutely,” a smiling Mr. DeSantis replied. “I’m game. Let’s get it done. Just tell me when and where.”In a letter last week, Mr. Newsom had outlined his proposed terms: a date of Nov. 8 or 10; a location in Georgia, Nevada or North Carolina; and a focus “on the impact of representation at the state level.”Nathan Click, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom, said in a statement late Wednesday: “November 8th or 10th. DeSantis should put up or shut up. Anything else is just games.”Such an event would, perhaps, be a mutually agreeable proposition for two men eager for as much attention as they can get.Mr. Newsom has made no secret of the fact that he is interested in running for president, perhaps as soon as 2028. And Mr. DeSantis’s own presidential campaign is being drowned out by the inescapable presence of former President Donald J. Trump, who led him by more than 35 percentage points in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll on the Republican primary, and whose three criminal indictments have dominated the news for months.Both Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Newsom have sought to present themselves as the platonic ideal of a governor of their party, and their state as a haven.Mr. DeSantis has moved Florida sharply to the right, signing laws that ban abortion after six weeks and restrict transgender rights, and advertising his rejection of public health measures during the pandemic. Mr. Newsom has signed extensive climate measures, sought to make California a “sanctuary” for abortion access for people from out of state and recently called for a constitutional amendment to enact gun regulations.Last year, Mr. Newsom ran ads in Florida telling voters there, “Freedom is under attack in your state.” In June, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Newsom of having a “fixation” on Florida and dared him to announce a primary challenge to President Biden.From the perspective of the current presidential race, though, Mr. Newsom is not exactly the sparring partner Mr. DeSantis would prefer. The man he actually needs to defeat to have a chance of becoming president — Mr. Trump — is threatening to skip the Republican debate this month.Shane Goldmacher More

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      DeSantis Raises Cash in California and Pokes at Newsom

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      The Florida governor made a fund-raising stop in Sacramento not far from the home of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The two are in the midst of a mutually beneficial feud.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, took his campaign into the backyard of his most vocal Democratic critic on Monday, courting donors at an event near the home of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California weeks after sending two planeloads of migrants to California’s capital.The $3,300-a-plate fund-raiser, hosted by a Republican real estate developer at a suburban country club in Sacramento, was closed to the press, and Mr. DeSantis did not make a public statement. But the location itself underscored the tit-for-tat that has escalated for more than a year between the two governors, who have increasingly used each other as political foils.Florida officials acknowledged this month that the state had orchestrated the abrupt relocation of some three dozen Latin American asylum seekers from Texas to Sacramento. Mr. DeSantis, who for months has been moving migrants, mostly from Texas, into Democratic-run towns and cities, has said the initiative is intended to equalize the burden of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.Mr. Newsom suggested the moves were tantamount to “kidnapping” and denounced them as callous political stunts, noting that California, too, shares a stretch of the Mexican border. An investigation by the California attorney general’s office is underway.Days after the migrants’ flights, Mr. Newsom made a rare appearance on Fox News, the conservative network, assertively defending California policies and assailing those of governors such as Mr. DeSantis. He told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would be “all in — count on it” for a debate about the issues with Florida’s governor.Mr. DeSantis later retorted at a news conference that Mr. Newsom should “stop pussyfooting around” and run for president if he wanted to air their differences on a debate stage.“Are you going to get in and do it?” he demanded. “Or are you just going to sit on the sidelines and chirp?”“So … debate challenge accepted? Or do you need your notes for that, too?” California’s governor retorted, posting a video of Mr. DeSantis at a podium apparently glancing down at a crib sheet before making the “pussyfooting” challenge.Although Mr. Newsom has said he has “subzero” interest in running for president and has energetically supported President Biden’s re-election, he is widely viewed as a potential contender for the White House after the 2024 election.Mr. DeSantis has been regarded as Donald J. Trump’s leading rival for the Republican nomination in 2024, but even as the former president faces a federal indictment, national polls have consistently shown Mr. DeSantis running some 30 points behind Mr. Trump.“Look, DeSantis needs to poke Gavin the Bear,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant in California. “He needs to keep that fire going — it’s the main thing that gives him oxygen.”But, he added, the feud also elevates Mr. Newsom’s profile.“This fight over the cultural direction of the country is in many ways being spearheaded by Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, and it serves both of their interests,” said Mr. Madrid, who did not attend the fund-raiser.True to form, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign signaled his arrival in California on Monday by tweeting that “the debate is already settled” and posting a new campaign ad describing California as plagued with population loss and homelessness and strewn with “needles and feces.”“California’s liberal governance is a disaster,” the DeSantis campaign declared.The Florida governor’s appearance, in a county where more than 60 percent of voters supported President Biden in 2020, drew no protesters and filled the small parking lot at the Del Paso Country Club with supporters from the capital area’s more conservative precincts.It was one of several stops planned for Mr. DeSantis in California on Monday, including a second event at the Harris Ranch in Coalinga, in Fresno County. It was also among a flurry of visits to California by White House contenders as momentum gathers for the 2024 presidential race.President Biden was in Silicon Valley on Monday — with Mr. Newsom — to announce some $600 million in federal funding for climate resilience at a marshland preserve in Palo Alto. Mr. Biden also was scheduled to appear at two private fund-raisers for his re-election campaign.Other Republican presidential candidates stopping in California in recent days included Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Tim Scott, a U.S. senator from South Carolina.California is the most populous state in the nation, with an economy larger than that of most countries, and candidates in both parties regard it as a major source of political funding.Although President Biden carried the state by an overwhelming margin in 2020, more than six million Californians also voted for Mr. Trump, who received more votes from California than from any other state. More

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      With Migrant Flights, Ron DeSantis Shows Stoking Outrage Is the Point

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      The flights to California illustrate the broader bet Gov. Ron DeSantis has made that the animating energy in the G.O.P. has shifted from conservatism to confrontationalism.Ron DeSantis’s decision to send migrants from near the Mexico border to the capital city of California is at first glance the latest in a series of escalating clashes between the Florida governor and his Democratic counterpart, Gavin Newsom.But the performative gambit in the early days of Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 presidential run is better understood as an opening bid to prove to Republican primary voters that he can be just as much a provocateur, and every bit as incendiary, as former President Donald J. Trump.For Mr. DeSantis, the flights illustrate the broader bet he has made that the animating energy in the Republican Party today has shifted from conservatism to confrontationalism. And that in this new era, nothing is more fundamental than picking fights and making the right enemies, whether it’s the migrants who have slogged sometimes thousands of miles to slip through the border, the news media or the chief executive of the biggest blue state on the map.Mr. DeSantis has used this playbook before. He ordered up flights from the Texas border last year to the symbolically liberal hamlet of Martha’s Vineyard, a stunt that drew exactly the outrage he sought. Those flights are now a staple of his stump speech, usually to cheers from the crowd. His allies in the Florida Legislature earmarked $12 million of taxpayer money into the state budget this year for just this purpose.“The easiest way to prove one’s tribal loyalty in 2020s America is by theatrically hating the other tribe,” said Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.A private charter plane that carried more than a dozen migrants, at Florida’s direction, at a Sacramento airport on Monday.Andri Tambunan for The New York TimesIn recent days, two charter flights orchestrated by the DeSantis administration carried roughly three dozen migrants from a New Mexico airport to Sacramento. The migrants, who are mostly Venezuelan, said they had been recruited from outside a shelter in El Paso, with promises of employment that California officials have said amounted to deception. Mr. Newsom, the California governor who is a potential future presidential contender himself, has suggested that the affair could merit “kidnapping charges,” calling Mr. DeSantis in a tweet a “small, pathetic man.”Mr. Moore said he believed “that migrants and asylum seekers are created in the image of God and shouldn’t be mistreated or treated as political theater for anybody.” But he could also see the more crass calculations that Mr. DeSantis is making in a polarized era where politicians are most clearly defined not by what they’re for, but who they’re against.“The one heresy that no tribe seems to allow is a refusal to hate the other tribe,” Mr. Moore said.Mr. DeSantis, who flew to Arizona on Wednesday for a border event, is not a trailblazer in this regard. It was Mr. Trump who began his 2016 campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, who promised to “build the wall” and later pitched a Muslim ban, making an “America First” approach to immigration a central theme of the party. And it was Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas who first began busing immigrants to blue cities and states last year (an idea Mr. Trump floated as president in 2018 but never pursued). Mr. DeSantis later one-upped Mr. Abbott’s buses with the dramatic flights to Martha’s Vineyard, which are now the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit.At the demographic and geographic epicenter of Mr. DeSantis’s presidential candidacy is an effort to appeal to deeply conservative evangelical voters in Iowa, where the Republicans’ 2024 nominating contest begins. Evangelical voters helped propel the Iowa victories of Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee in the last three open contests.Yet the DeSantis campaign and its allies see fighting the left as the fastest way to appeal to those voters rather than overt displays of religiosity. “Christians aren’t looking for a savior to be a president, they already have one,” said one DeSantis adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly to discuss strategy, explaining how Mr. Trump has dominated that voting bloc despite concerns about his moral character.Kevin Madden, who served as a top adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, said transporting migrants, however cynical, allowed Mr. DeSantis to agitate all the right people.Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, praying at a campaign stop in Iowa last month.Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“He’s provoking Gavin Newsom,” Mr. Madden said. “He’s provoking the most extreme liberal voices to attack him. He is provoking media voices. And that works to his favor because it endears him to the forces on the right who want to see a clash of political civilizations.”Outrage sells. Campaign contributions have repeatedly surged to the fury merchants on the right, whether the politicians selling the lie that the 2020 election was stolen or the G.O.P. hard-liners who battled Representative Kevin McCarthy’s ascent to the House speakership. An “own the libs” mentality has come to drive, if not define, the right online.On the left, Mr. Newsom has sought to elevate himself through his tussles with Mr. DeSantis, too. He ran a television advertisement in Florida attacking him last year. He challenged him to a debate. He traveled this spring to the New College of Florida, a public liberal arts institution where Mr. DeSantis is engineering a right-wing intellectual takeover. In his personal Twitter account, Mr. Newsom has slammed Mr. DeSantis by name at least 20 times.“I think I’m being generous — ‘small and pathetic’ — very generous,” Mr. Newsom said in an interview on NBC’s “Today Show” broadcast on Wednesday. He accused Mr. DeSantis of using migrants as “pawns,” adding, “He’s just weakness masquerading as strength.”Mr. Newsom’s new PAC has been running a rotation of online fund-raising ads that attack Mr. DeSantis. “In my book, a bully and a coward doesn’t deserve to be the leader of the free world,” Mr. Newsom says of Mr. DeSantis in a video ad that began running on Facebook on Wednesday.Mr. DeSantis’s round-table discussion in Arizona on border security was a government event underwritten by taxpayers, not his campaign. After days of mystery, Mr. DeSantis’s administration took credit for the Sacramento flights on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he did not mention Mr. Newsom by name, though he said “sanctuary jurisdictions” had “incentivized” illegal immigration.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a possible eventual presidential hopeful, has sought to elevate himself through his tussles with Mr. DeSantis, too.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThen Mr. DeSantis shifted to pick another fight with President Biden. “I don’t know how you can just sit there and let the country be overrun with millions and millions of people coming illegally,” Mr. DeSantis said.Mr. DeSantis has become expert at agitating the right’s boogeymen. He once called Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, a “little elf” who needed to be chucked “across the Potomac.” And when Mr. DeSantis’s motives are questioned by reporters, his snapbacks have been quickly packaged and posted on social media in hopes of generating viral hits.If he were to become president, Mr. DeSantis has made plain he would use the White House’s powers to the fullest. He is fond of saying that although he first won the governorship in 2018 with barely 50 percent of the vote, that victory came with 100 percent of the executive authority.As governor, he proudly used the power of the state to overrule local governments, ousting a prosecutor and prohibiting school districts from imposing mask mandates. Such actions are a departure from the limited-government conservatism of yesteryear. His allies say it is a vivid signal to voters that Mr. DeSantis will leverage the powers of government to battle their enemies, at a moment when many Republicans feel that their values and nation are under siege.Cesar Conda, a former chief of staff to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida who, two decades ago, served as the top domestic policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, said that “Ronald Reagan would be rolling over in his grave using taxpayer dollars” to fly migrants from one faraway state to another.“DeSantis’s move is part of a growing strain in conservatism, endorsed by younger conservatives, to aggressively use the power and resources of government to achieve — or coerce — policy goals,” Mr. Conda said. “The ‘less government, lower taxes, more freedom’ mantra of conservatism is becoming quaint and old-fashioned, unfortunately.”Shawn Hubler More

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      Katie Porter Announces Run for US Senate

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      Ms. Porter is the first announced challenger to Senator Dianne Feinstein, 89, who has yet to declare her 2024 plans but is widely expected to not seek re-election.WASHINGTON — Representative Katie Porter, a third-term California Democrat who studied under Elizabeth Warren at Harvard University and became a social media darling of liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that she would run in 2024 for the Senate seat held by Dianne Feinstein.Ms. Porter, 49, is the first announced challenger to Ms. Feinstein, 89, who has not declared her intentions about 2024 but is widely expected to not seek re-election amid Democratic worries about her age and ability to serve. Last year, Ms. Feinstein declined to serve as president pro tem of the Senate and earlier relinquished her post as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee under immense pressure after the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.“It’s time for new leadership in the U.S. Senate,” Ms. Porter said in a video announcing her campaign. Ms. Feinstein, in a statement released by her office, said she would “make an announcement concerning my plans for 2024 at the appropriate time.” She said she was focused on addressing the deadly storms battering California. Ms. Porter’s early campaign announcement — which carries echoes of Ms. Warren’s entrance to the 2020 presidential contest, when she was the first major Democrat to embark on a bid — jump-starts a race that is certain to be among the most expensive intraparty contests in the country. A vaunted fund-raiser, Ms. Porter became widely known for her combative treatment of witnesses from the financial sector and Trump administration officials who appeared before her on the House Oversight Committee.More on CaliforniaStorms and Flooding: A barrage of powerful storms has surprised residents across Central and Northern California with an unrelenting period of extreme weather stretching over weeks.Facebook’s Bridge to Nowhere: The tech giant planned to restore a century-old railroad to help people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up.U.C. Employee Strike: Academic employees at the University of California voted to return to work, ending a historically large strike that had disrupted research and classes for nearly six weeks.Wildfires: California avoided a third year of catastrophic wildfires because of a combination of well-timed precipitation and favorable wind conditions — or “luck,” as experts put it.The Iowa-born Ms. Porter was a leading surrogate for Ms. Warren’s 2020 campaign and often hosted small events promoting her mentor. She worked as a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and in 2012 was appointed by Kamala Harris, then the California attorney general, to oversee a $9 billion settlement after the mortgage crisis. She was elected to Congress in 2018.Ms. Porter won re-election in November by 3.4 percentage points in a district made much more Republican in California’s redistricting process, after prevailing in 2020 by seven points. Her seat may be tougher for Democrats to hold in 2024 without a candidate on the ballot who has Ms. Porter’s fund-raising acumen. Other California Democrats who have not announced campaigns for Ms. Feinstein’s Senate seat but are believed to be considering bids include Representative Adam Schiff, who has already hired staff members in preparation for a statewide campaign; Representative Barbara Lee, who has told donors of her plans to run; and Representative Ro Khanna, an aide for whom said Mr. Khanna would decide on the Senate race “in the next few months.” “It’s going to be a very exciting race with fabulous people — several have already talked to me,” said former Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who served for four terms alongside Ms. Feinstein before retiring in 2016. “The fact that Katie Porter has announced, I think, is going to open the door for a lot of early announcements.” California, the nation’s most populous state with nearly 40 million residents, has not hosted a highly competitive contest for an open Senate seat since 1992, when Ms. Feinstein and Ms. Boxer were both elected for the first time.Ms. Feinstein, in her sixth term, has been dogged by questions about her fitness to serve. Issues with her short-term memory have become an open secret on Capitol Hill, though few Democrats have been willing to discuss the subject publicly.She has made no moves to suggest she will seek re-election in 2024. She has not hired a campaign staff and, in the latest campaign finance report for the period ending in September, had less than $10,000 in cash on hand, a paltry sum for a sitting senator. More

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      Why Isn’t Biden Ever on TV?

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      Americans are seeing a lot less of the president than they did of his predecessor. That’s partly by design.On a sweltering day last month, President Biden traveled to Somerset, Mass. Appearing on a bulldozed patch of land where a coal-fired power plant recently stood, and where a substation for an offshore wind farm eventually will, Biden delivered what the White House press office billed as remarks on “actions to tackle the climate crisis.” The previous week, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia seemingly torpedoed Biden’s ambitious climate package (though Manchin would soon resurrect it). In the meantime, much of the country was suffering from extreme weather: wildfires, floods, record heat. Now Biden, sporting Ray-Bans and forgoing a tie in the blistering heat, looked out at the crowd and the cameras. “Let me be clear,” he declared. “Climate change is an emergency.”Does any of this sound familiar? Can you picture it? Probably not: None of the three major cable news channels carried the speech live. All three network news shows led with stories about record-high temperatures — “the suffocating heat gripping more than 100 million Americans,” as NBC’s Lester Holt described it, only to be one-upped by ABC’s David Muir, who spoke of “heat warnings and advisories for 29 states now, more than 140 million Americans.” But they didn’t cover Biden’s speech until well into their newscasts, and then only for a minute or so; if you had stepped away to adjust your air-conditioner, you might have missed it.The leader of the free world does not have much of a visual presence in it.If you saw any of the president’s speech online, it was most likely the brief segment in which he recalled the oil refineries near his childhood home and said they were “why I and so many damn other people I grew up with have cancer.” Critics, seizing on what they saw as a gaffe, circulated that clip all over social media: “Did Joe Biden just announce he has cancer?” an official Republican National Committee account posted on Twitter. Biden’s defenders said he was referring to the nonmelanoma skin cancers he has had removed in the past. Bill Clinton once prompted a debate about “the meaning of the word ‘is’”; Biden’s speech started one about the semantics of “have.”The lack of substantive coverage of the climate speech itself illustrates an unusual feature of Biden’s presidency: The leader of the free world does not have much of a visual presence in it.No president, of course, could have quite the visual presence of Biden’s predecessor. Donald Trump filled our screens. The cable channels went live for his speeches and cabinet meetings and grip-and-grins with foreign dignitaries — even his walks from the White House to a helicopter — in the entirely justified hope that he would do something newsworthy. Try to pick the indelible image of Trump’s presidency. It’s impossible: There are too many. The white-knuckled squeeze of Emanuel Macron’s hand during an uncomfortably long shake. Standing on the South Lawn reading from a Sharpie-festooned legal pad, denying any “quid pro quo” with Ukraine. Holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church during the protests over George Floyd’s murder. These images compete with dozens, maybe hundreds, more. Now try to select an image from — much less the indelible image of — Biden’s presidency. You can’t, because there aren’t any. This is partly by design. Biden’s 2020 campaign was founded, in large part, on the promise of a return to normalcy, and it is not normal for Americans to be thinking about their president as relentlessly as they did during the Trump years. “People got tired of listening to and seeing the president,” Martha Joynt Kumar, a scholar of presidential media strategy, told me. “They were exhausted by the end of the Trump administration.”Biden has provided a respite. According to Kumar’s tabulations, he has held about half as many as news conferences and given around a third as many interviews as Trump had at this point in his presidency. It’s not just submitting to fewer questions from the press; he’s in front of cameras less frequently than Trump as well, even spending days with nothing at all on his public schedule. To Republicans, this is proof of Biden’s senescence; to the press, his lack of transparency. But when CNN asked the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, what Biden was doing during two days out of view last month, she replied that he had been “very busy dealing with the issues of the American people, and meeting with his staff and senior staff the last two days.”That could well be true. The problem, for Biden, is that his predecessor redefined what’s expected of the president. There has long been a performative component to the role, but Trump made public performance the entire job. The press covered his every appearance not just because his behavior resulted in gaffes but because it set policy. A defining feature of the Trump years was the president publicly fulminating about something, and then administration officials scrambling to cobble together policy proposals that matched his fulminations. To pick one of many instances, in 2018 Trump announced, while venting to reporters about immigration, that he was enlisting the U.S. military to guard the border with Mexico. The White House subsequently clarified that Trump meant he was mobilizing the National Guard, not active-duty military, but when Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen was produced to explain the plan to reporters, she had no details to offer: “We’ll let you know as soon as we can,” she said. “I’m going to get on phone calls right now.” Biden, somewhat anachronistically, still insists on putting the horse before the cart. After Manchin seemed to sink the administration’s climate agenda last month, Democrats called on the president to formally declare a climate emergency, which would theoretically allow him to circumvent Congress in taking action. But he demurred. Speaking to reporters after the Massachusetts speech — in which he pointedly did not declare a climate emergency — he explained, “I’m running the traps on the totality of the authority I have.” This should be an admirable trait. But Biden’s reticence often registers as an absence. When Democrats criticized him for not being forceful enough in his response to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, it wasn’t necessarily because they expected him to do anything; as a matter of law, there was little he could do. But they did want the face of their party to assume a mantle of leadership, demonstrate resolve and help channel their energies. Considering Biden’s limitations — his age, his focus on policy — you might expect to see his young vice president out making the case for the administration. But Kamala Harris has her own problems. In the pair’s absence, Democrats are looking elsewhere. Some get excited whenever Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s secretary of transportation, goes on Fox News to dismantle a few loaded questions, circulating YouTube clips with titles like “Pete Buttigieg HUMILIATES Fox News Host with EPIC Response on Live TV.” Others hail Gov. Gavin Newsom of California as “an effective and fierce fighter,” in the words of the liberal pundit Dean Obeidallah, for running ads in Florida and Texas trolling those states’ Republican governors. A Michigan state senator named Mallory McMorrow raised more than $1 million from donors in 50 states after her speech on the G.O.P.’s treatment of the L.G.B.T.Q. community went viral. On their screens and in their imaginations, Democrats are experiencing a great and public void. At some point, someone is going to have to fill it for them.Source photographs: Jim Watson/Getty Images; Andrew Merry/Getty Images; Joseph Prezioso/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images; Frans Lemmens/Getty ImagesJason Zengerle is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is working on a book about Tucker Carlson and conservative media. More

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      ‘Governors Are the C.E.O.s’: State Leaders Weigh Their Might

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      At a National Governors Association gathering, attendees from both parties speculated about 2024 at a moment of increasing frustration with Washington.PORTLAND, Maine — A single senator put parts of President Biden’s domestic agenda in grave danger. The president’s approval ratings are anemic amid deep dissatisfaction with Washington. And as both Mr. Biden, 79, and Donald J. Trump, 76, signal their intentions to run for president again, voters are demanding fresh blood in national politics.Enter the governors.“Governors are the C.E.O.s,” said Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican who hopes a governor will win his party’s 2024 presidential nomination. He added that Washington lawmakers “don’t create new systems. They don’t implement anything. They don’t operationalize anything.”In other years, those comments might have amounted to standard chest-thumping from a state executive whose race was overshadowed by the battle for control of Congress.But this year, governors’ races may determine the future of abortion rights in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mass shootings and the coronavirus pandemic are repeatedly testing governors’ leadership skills. And at a moment of boiling voter frustration with national politics and anxiety about aging leaders in both parties, the politicians asserting their standing as next-generation figures increasingly come from the governors’ ranks, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, a California Democrat, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican.Supporters of abortion rights protested outside the National Governors Association meeting.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesAll of those dynamics were on display this week at the summer meeting of the National Governors Association in Portland, Maine, which took place as Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia appeared to derail negotiations in Washington over a broad climate and tax package.His move devastated vital parts of Mr. Biden’s agenda in the evenly divided Senate, although the president vowed to take “strong executive action to meet this moment.” And it sharpened the argument from leaders in both parties in Portland that, as Washington veers between chaos and paralysis, America’s governors and would-be governors have a more powerful role to play.“Washington gridlock has been frustrating for a long time, and we’re seeing more and more the importance of governors across the country,” said Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, pointing to Supreme Court decisions that have turned questions about guns, abortion rights and other issues over to states and their governors.Americans, he added, “look at governors as someone who gets things done and who doesn’t just sit at a table and yell at each other like they do in Congress or state legislatures.”The three-day governors’ conference arrived at a moment of growing unease with national leaders of both parties.A New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 64 percent of Democratic voters would prefer a new presidential standard-bearer in 2024, with many citing concerns about Mr. Biden’s age. In another poll, nearly half of Republican primary voters said they would prefer to nominate someone other than Mr. Trump, a view that was more pronounced among younger voters.And at the N.G.A. meeting, private dinners and seafood receptions crackled with discussion and speculation about future political leadership. “I don’t care as much about when you were born or what generation you belong to as I do about what you stand for,” said Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a 47-year-old Republican. “But I think certainly there is some angst in the country right now over the gerontocracy.”In a series of interviews, Republican governors in attendance — a number of them critical of Mr. Trump, planning to retire or both — hoped that some of their own would emerge as major 2024 players. Yet for all the discussions of the power of the office, governors have often been overshadowed on the national stage by Washington leaders, and have struggled in recent presidential primaries. The last governor to become a presidential nominee was now-Senator Mitt Romney, who lost in 2012.Democrats, who are preoccupied with a perilous midterm environment, went to great lengths to emphasize their support for Mr. Biden if he runs again as planned. Still, some suggested that voters might feel that Washington leaders were not fighting hard enough, a dynamic with implications for elections this year and beyond.“People want leaders — governors, senators, congresspeople and presidents — who are vigorous in their defense of our rights, and people who are able to galvanize support for that among the public,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat.Mr. Pritzker has attracted attention for planning appearances in the major presidential battleground states of New Hampshire and Florida and for his fiery remarks on gun violence after a shooting in Highland Park, Ill. Mr. Biden, for his part, faced criticism from some Democrats who thought he should have been far more forceful immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.Asked if Mr. Biden had been sufficiently “vigorous” in his responses to gun violence and the abortion ruling, Mr. Pritzker, who has repeatedly pledged to support Mr. Biden if he runs again, did not answer directly.“President Biden cares deeply about making sure that we protect those rights. I have said to him that I think that every day, he should be saying something to remind people that it is on his mind,” Mr. Pritzker replied. He added that Americans “want to know that leadership — governors, senators, president — you know, they want to know that we all are going to fight for them.”Gov. Phil Murphy, a New Jersey Democrat and the new chairman of the National Governors Association (who hopes to host next year’s summer meeting on the Jersey Shore), praised Washington lawmakers for finding bipartisan agreement on a narrow gun control measure and said Mr. Biden had “done a lot.”Two Republican governors, Mr. Cox, left, and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, center, spoke with a Democratic governor, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, at the meeting in Maine.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesBut asked whether voters believe Washington Democrats are doing enough for them, he replied: “Because governors are closer to the ground, what we do is more immediate, more — maybe more deeply felt. I think there is frustration that Congress can’t do more.”Few Democrats currently believe that any serious politician would challenge Mr. Biden, whatever Washington’s problems. He has repeatedly indicated that he relishes the possibility of another matchup against Mr. Trump, citing The New York Times/Siena College poll that found that he would still beat Mr. Trump, with strong support from Democrats.A Biden adviser, also citing that poll, stressed that voters continued to care deeply about perceptions of who could win — a dynamic that was vital to Mr. Biden’s 2020 primary victory. He is still working, the adviser said, to enact more of his agenda including lowering costs, even as there have been other economic gains on his watch.“We had younger folks step forward last time. President Biden won the primary. President Biden beat Donald Trump,” said another ally, former Representative Cedric Richmond, who served in the White House. “The Biden-Harris ticket was the only ticket that could have beat Donald Trump.”But privately and to some degree publicly, Democrats are chattering about who else could succeed if Mr. Biden does not ultimately run again. A long list of governors — with varying degrees of youth — are among those mentioned, including Mr. Murphy, Mr. Pritzker, Mr. Newsom and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, if she wins her re-election.Some people around Mr. Cooper hope he will consider running if Mr. Biden does not. Pressed on whether that would interest him, Mr. Cooper replied, “I’m for President Biden. I do not want to go there.”Indeed, all of those governors have stressed their support for Mr. Biden. But the poll this week threw into public view some of the conversations happening more quietly within the party.“There’s a severe disconnect between where Democratic Party leadership is and where the rest of our country is,” said former Representative Joe Cunningham, a South Carolina Democrat who is running for governor and who has called on Mr. Biden to forgo re-election to make way for a younger generation.Signs of Mr. Biden’s political challenges were evident at the N.G.A., too. Asked whether she wanted Mr. Biden to campaign with her, Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat in a competitive race for re-election this year, was noncommittal.“Haven’t made that decision,” she said.Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, right, addressed the gathering alongside Gov. Janet Mills of Maine. Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesIn a demonstration of just how much 2024 talk pervaded Portland this week, one diner at Fore Street Restaurant could be overheard discussing Mr. Biden’s legacy and wondering how Mr. Murphy might fare nationally. At the next table sat Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a Republican, who confirmed that he was still “testing the waters” for a presidential run.Some of the most prominent Republican governors seen as 2024 hopefuls, most notably Mr. DeSantis, were not on hand. But a number of others often named as possible contenders — with different levels of seriousness — did attend, including Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland.“I call them the ‘frustrated majority,’” Mr. Hogan said, characterizing the electorate’s mood. “They think Washington is broken and that we’ve got too much divisiveness and dysfunction.” More