Presidential Election of 2008

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    Primaries Are Not the Most Democratic Way to Choose a Presidential Nominee

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    Is the Democratic Party making a mistake by renominating President Biden to face the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in 2024? A nontrivial number of voices in and outside the party seem to think so.But it’s already a mostly moot point. The system Americans use to nominate presidential candidates is not well equipped to make swift strategic adjustments. Voters choose candidates in a sequence of state-level primaries and caucuses. Those contests select delegates and instruct them on how to vote at a nominating convention. It’s an ungainly and convoluted process, and politicians begin positioning themselves a year in advance to succeed in it.It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be. Political parties in most democracies have the power to choose their leaders without going through a monthslong gantlet.The best way for a party to choose its leader is for that party to convene, confer and compromise on a candidate who serves its agenda and appeals to voters. The conventions of the mid-20th century, deeply flawed as they were, were designed for that purpose. If those flaws were fixed, they would be far better than what we use today.Should Mr. Biden run again or step aside? On the one hand, he has stubbornly low approval ratings, and a number of polls show him trailing Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polling a year out is often misleading, and so are job approval ratings in a polarized age. Mr. Biden is old, but so is Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden defeated him last time.Replacing an incumbent president with another nominee is very rare and probably should be. But a convention could do it if necessary. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stepped down at the beginning of the year, and Democrats could realistically expect to find a nominee before Election Day.The system was different then. When Mr. Johnson decided not to run for re-election, he declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”The “and I will not accept” matters. Mr. Johnson was acknowledging that the party might nominate him even if he didn’t run. In 1968, when the decision was made at the national convention, the party could do that. That’s not something it can easily do today.Only a small fraction of states held primaries that year, and most of those didn’t commit delegates. Primaries were a tool to gauge public support, not make the final decision. Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee, won no primaries or caucuses. Instead, he won with support of unpledged delegates selected through state conventions — delegates who represented an older, more establishment part of the party.The apparent injustice of Mr. Humphrey winning the nomination without winning primaries was a big part of how we got to our current system. Many members of the Democratic Party felt that their perspectives weren’t well represented by those establishment delegates; their voices were being heard in the primaries and caucuses.The party set out to create a national convention that was more representative of the party, but what evolved was something else, the system we use today — the one that has all but locked us into a candidate almost a year out from Election Day.Early states winnow the field. The next states largely determine who the nominee is. States that vote late in the process often have little effect. Success depends on the ability to stand up a campaign in state after state in the first few months of the year, which in turn depends on the ability to raise money and attract media attention. It’s a process, not a simple decision.This system could produce a candidate who is battle tested by the primaries and otherwise broadly popular. It might also select a candidate who appeals narrowly to a group of dedicated followers, especially in early states, where a close victory can be leveraged into later success. (Think of Mr. Trump in 2016.)In no way does it let party leaders take stock of an awkward situation, such as what Democrats face now (low approval ratings for an incumbent) or, for that matter, what Republicans face (a front-runner facing multiple indictments).Party leaders are not completely helpless. In “The Party Decides,” the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller and I argued that party activists and leaders could exert a lot of influence on their party’s choice — so much so that they typically get their way. When they can agree on a satisfactory candidate, they can help direct resources to that candidate and help that person stay in the race if he or she stumbles. (Think of Mr. Biden in 2020.)But that takes time. It is, at best, a blunt instrument (hence its failure among Republicans in 2016). The nomination is still won in the primaries, and an incumbent is especially hard to replace.Most democracies give far less power than that to a single political leader, even an incumbent or influential former leader. Healthy parties can limit their leaders.Empowering the Democrats to replace Mr. Biden or the Republicans to move on from Mr. Trump would come with costs. A party that could persuade a sitting president to stand down would also have the power to persuade outsiders, like Bernie Sanders and Mr. Trump, to not run at all.For some, giving party leaders this kind of influence is unsettling. It shouldn’t be. The job of choosing a nominee is complicated. It involves the strategic trade-off between what kind of candidate can win in November and what kind of candidate represents what the party wants in a leader.Letting the party make these decisions is not inherently undemocratic. Just as voters select members of Congress, who then gain expertise, forge compromises and bargain to make policy, so too could voters select party delegates, who would then choose nominees and shape their party’s platform.Polling and even primaries could continue to play a role. In many years, the voice of the party’s voters might speak loudly, and party leaders would simply heed it. In other years, such as for Democrats in 2008, voter preferences might be more mixed. It’s worth noting that in 2008, Democratic superdelegates (those not bound by the results of any primary) switched their support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama after seeing his appeal in the primaries. If all of the delegates had been free to switch, would the outcome have been the same? We don’t know, but in a representative democracy, elected representatives do often listen to voters.In other words, the development of a more active, empowered party convention would not have to be a return to the past. The nomination of Mr. Humphrey in 1968 was a problem, but it wasn’t because the decision was made at a convention. It was because the delegates at that convention didn’t represent the party’s voters.Moving the decision back to the convention would not be a trivial matter. Even if voters and politicians could adjust to the change — a big if — each party would need to select representative and competent delegates. Our experience with representative democracy should tell us that this is possible but far from inevitable.But such a convention would still be superior to the current system, in which a small number of voters in a handful of states choose from a pool of self-selected candidates who have been tested mostly by their ability to raise money and get attention in debates.Both of these systems have a claim to being democratic. But only the first would give the party the kind of agency implied by claims that it is making a mistake by renominating the incumbent.Hans Noel, an associate professor of government at Georgetown, is the author of “Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America” and a co-author of “Political Parties” and “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.”Source images by Drew Angerer, Rost-9D, and ajt/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Mike Johnson’s Rise to Speaker Cements Far-Right Takeover of GOP

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      After their party was decimated in the 2008 elections, mainstream Republican leaders believed they could harness rising far-right populist forces. Instead, they were overrun by them.The roots of the Republican crackup this fall that paralyzed the House, fueled the unexpected rise of Speaker Mike Johnson and now threatens to force a government shutdown crisis early next year lie in a fateful choice the party made more than a decade ago that has come back to haunt its leaders.In early 2009, congressional Republicans were staring down a long exile in the political wilderness. Barack Obama was about to assume the presidency, and Democrats were within reach of a filibuster-proof, 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and the largest House majority in more than 20 years after the economic crisis of 2008.But Republicans saw a glimmer of hope in the energized far-right populist movement that emerged out of a backlash to Mr. Obama — the first Black president — and his party’s aggressive economic and social agenda, which included a federal health care plan. Republicans seized on the Tea Party and associated groups, with their nativist leanings and vehemently anti-establishment impulses, as their ticket back to power.“We benefited from the anger that was generated against the one-way legislation of the Obama years,” said Eric Cantor, the former House leader from Virginia who became the No. 2 Republican after the 2010 midterm elections catapulted the party back into the majority. “It was my way or the highway.”Mr. Cantor and his fairly conventional leadership team of anti-tax, pro-business Republicans set out to harness that rage to achieve their party’s longstanding aims. But instead, the movement consumed them.Within four years, Mr. Cantor was knocked out in a shocking primary upset by a Tea Party-backed candidate who had campaigned as an anti-immigration hard-liner bent on toppling the political establishment. It was a sign of what was to come for more mainstream Republicans.“We decided the anger was going to be about fiscal discipline and transforming Medicare into a defined contribution program,” Mr. Cantor said recently. “But it turned out it was really just anger — anger toward Washington — and it wasn’t so policy-based.”The forces that toppled Mr. Cantor — and three successive Republican speakers — reached their inexorable conclusion last month with the election of Mr. Johnson as speaker, cementing a far-right takeover that began in those first months after Mr. Obama took office.Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia and House majority leader, was defeated in a 2015 primary by David Brat, a member of the Tea Party.Gabriella Demczuk/The New York TimesMr. Johnson, who identifies as an archconservative, is the natural heir to the political tumult that began with the Tea Party before evolving into Trumpism. It is now embodied in its purest form by the Freedom Caucus, the uncompromising group of conservatives who have tied up the House with their demands for steep spending cuts. And the situation won’t get any easier when Congress returns from its Thanksgiving respite to confront its unsettled spending issues and what to do about assistance to Israel and Ukraine.The ranks of more traditional Republicans have been significantly thinned after the far right turned on them in successive election cycles. They have been driven out of Congress in frustration or knocked out in primaries, which have become the decisive contests in the nation’s heavily gerrymandered House districts.“They thought they could control it,” Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who has studied the House’s far-right progression, said of G.O.P. leaders. “But once you agree essentially that Democrats are satanic, there is no room in the party for someone who says we need to compromise with Democrats to accomplish what we need to get done.”The result, Mr. Podhorzer said, is a Republican majority that his research shows across various data points to be more extreme, more evangelical Christian and less experienced in governing than in the past. Those characteristics have been evident as House Republicans have spent much of the year in chaos.“It isn’t that they are really clever at how they crash the institution,” Mr. Podhorzer said. “They just don’t know how to drive.”From the start, members who were more rooted in the traditional G.O.P., which had managed to win back the House majority in 1994 after 40 years, struggled to mesh with the Tea Party movement, which was driven to upend the status quo. Many top Republicans had voted for the bank bailout of 2008, a disqualifying capital crime in the eyes of the far-right activists.Leading congressional Republicans were leery of the Tea Party’s thinly veiled racism, illustrated by insulting references to Mr. Obama and the questioning of his birthplace, though they said they saw the activists as mainly motivated by an anti-tax, anti-government fervor.Traditional Republicans appeared at Tea Party rallies where they were barely tolerated, while the far-right Representatives Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Steve King of Iowa, then outliers in the party, were the stars. They tried to mollify activists with tough talk on taxes and beating back the Obama agenda, but saw mixed results.The Republican National Committee also sought to align itself with the Tea Party, encouraging angry voters to send virtual tea bags to Congress in a 2009 Tax Day protest. Tea Party activists rebuked the national party, saying it hadn’t earned the right to the tea bag message.But the Tea Party paid huge electoral benefits to the House G.O.P. in 2010, as it swept out Democrats and swept in scores of relatively unknown far-right conservatives, some of whom would scorn their own leaders as much as the Democrats. The steady march to the modern House Republican Conference had begun.“It truly was bottom up,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who was then the spokesman for the R.N.C. “Then how do you have control over that? When you have that big a win, you are going to have people who just aren’t on your radar screen, but if they were, you would have tried to prevent them from winning their primary.”In the Senate, the Tea Party was having a different effect. Far-right conservatives such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware managed to prevail in their primaries, only to lose in the general election. That cost Senate Republicans a chance to win a majority in that chamber. The extreme right has had less influence in the Senate than the House ever since.Speaker John A. Boehner resigned in 2015 amid opposition from hard-line conservatives.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe ramifications of the far-right bargain for congressional Republicans quickly became clear. Mr. Cantor was defeated in 2014, and Speaker John A. Boehner, dogged by hard-line conservatives he branded “knuckleheads,” resigned in 2015. In 2018, Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Boehner’s successor and the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012, had his fill of clashes with President Donald J. Trump — who aligned himself with the Tea Party in its early days — and chose not to run for re-election.Then Representative Kevin McCarthy — the last of a trio called the “Young Guns,” with Mr. Cantor and Mr. Ryan, that once seemed to be the future of the party — fell from the speakership in October. That ended the reign of House Republican speakers who had tried unsuccessfully to weaponize the ultraconservatives in their ranks while holding them at arm’s length.Mr. McCarthy’s ouster cleared the way for Mr. Johnson, who was chosen only after House Republicans rejected more established leaders, Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who would have easily ascended in the previous era.Despite his unquestioned conservative bona fides, Mr. Johnson is already encountering difficulties in managing the most extreme element within his ranks.Last week, Freedom Caucus members blocked a spending measure in protest of Mr. Johnson’s decision to team with Democrats to push through a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown.The move underscored the far-right’s antipathy to compromise and the dominance it now enjoys in the House, and raised the prospect that Mr. Johnson could face another rebellion if he strays again. More

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      Samuel Wurzelbacher, Celebrated as ‘Joe the Plumber,’ Dies at 49

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      For Republicans in 2008, he briefly became a symbol of Middle America when he questioned the presidential candidate Barack Obama in a televised encounter.Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who briefly became “Joe the Plumber,” the metaphorical American middle-class Everyman, by injecting himself into the 2008 presidential campaign in an impromptu nationally-televised face-off with Barack Obama over taxing small businesses, died on Sunday at his home in Campbellsport, Wis., about 60 miles north of Milwaukee. He was 49.The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Katie Wurzelbacher, said.Mr. Obama, then a United States senator from Illinois, was campaigning on Shrewsbury Street, in a working-class neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008, when Mr. Wurzelbacher interrupted a football catch with his son in his front yard to mosey over and ask the Democratic nominee about his proposed tax increase for some small businesses.During a cordial but largely inconclusive five-minute colloquy in front of news cameras, Mr. Wurzelbacher said he was concerned about being subjected to a bigger tax bite just as he was approaching the point where he could finally afford to buy a plumbing business, which he said would generate an income of $250,000 a year.Three days later, “Joe the Plumber,” as he was popularized by Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, was invoked some two dozen times during the final debate of the presidential campaign.Mr. Wurzelbacher became a folk hero of sorts during the campaign’s final weeks, particularly among McCain supporters and conservative commentators who cottoned to his remarks that Mr. Obama’s share-the-wealth prescriptions for the economy were akin to socialism or even communism and contradicted the American dream. Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, also jumped in, appearing onstage with Mr. Wurzelbacher at rallies.Mr. Wurzelbacher during his encounter with Barack Obama in Ohio in early October 2008. Captured by television cameras, the moment thrust Mr. Wurzelbacher, labeled “Joe the Plumber,” briefly into the national spotlight.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressBut by Election Day, his tenure as a burly, bald, iron-jawed John Doe eroded as the public learned that he was not a licensed plumber (he could work in Toledo only for someone with a master’s license or in outlying areas) and owed $1,200 in back taxes.He flirted with supporting Mr. McCain but later referred to him as “the lesser of two evils” on the ballot and never revealed for whom he had voted that November.“Let’s still keep that private,” his wife said by phone on Monday.In 2012, Mr. Wurzelbacher won the Republican nomination to challenge Representative Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic incumbent in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, but was crushed in the general election, winning only 23 percent of the vote to her 73 percent.During that campaign, he released a video defending the Second Amendment and blaming gun control as having helped enable the Ottoman Empire to commit genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century and Nazi Germany to carry out the Holocaust, saying gun laws had stripped the victims in both cases of the ability to defend themselves.Again defending a right to bear arms, he wrote to parents of the victims of a mass shooting in 2014 in Isla Vista, Calif., near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, saying, “As harsh as this sounds — your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher was born on Dec. 3, 1973, to Frank and Kay (Bloomfield) Wurzelbacher. His mother was a waitress, his father a disabled war veteran.After high school, he enlisted in the Air Force, where he was trained in plumbing. He was discharged in 1996, and worked as a plumber’s assistant as well as for a telecommunications company.Capitalizing on his celebrity after the 2008 election, he appeared in TV commercials promoting digital television; published a book, “Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream” (2009, with Thomas Tabback); and covered the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza in 2009 for PJ Media, a conservative website. In 2014, he went to work in a Jeep plant.In addition to his wife, who had been Katie Schanen when they married, he is survived by a son, Samuel Jr., from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and three children from his second marriage, Samantha Jo, Henry and Sarah Jo.Although Mr. Wurzelbacher ended his encounter with Mr. Obama by shaking hands with him, he didn’t seem satisfied by the candidate’s response to how his tax proposal would affect a small plumbing business.“If you’re a small business — which you would qualify, first of all — you would get a 50 percent tax credit, so you’d get a cut in taxes for your health care costs,” Mr. Obama explained. And if his business’s revenue were below $250,000, he added, its taxes would not go up.“It’s not that I want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too,” Mr. Obama added. “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody.“If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off,” he continued. “If you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you — and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody — and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”Mr. Wurzelbacher was unpersuaded.“It’s my discretion who I want to give my money to,” he would later say repeatedly. “It’s not for the government to decide that I make a little too much, and so I need to share it with other people. That’s not the American dream.”Ms. Wurzelbacher insisted on Monday that her husband’s encounter with Mr. Obama in 2008 was completely spontaneous, not staged by Republican operatives or anyone else, and that Mr. Obama’s appearance in the neighborhood had actually been arranged by a neighbor down the block.“It was completely coincidental,” she said. “It always amazed him that one question thrust him into the national spotlight.” More

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      Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right.

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      Over the last decade, almost every cohort of voters under 50 has shifted rightward.Fifteen years ago, a new generation of young voters propelled Barack Obama to a decisive victory that augured a new era of Democratic dominance.Fifteen years later, those once young voters aren’t so young — and aren’t quite so Democratic.Republican Voting Share in Presidential Elections, by Age More

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      Obamacare Is Everywhere in the Unlikeliest of Places: Miami

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      A decade after the Affordable Care Act’s federal health insurance marketplace was created, its outsize — and improbable — popularity in South Florida persists.MIAMI — Lídice Hernández opened an insurance agency last year on a busy street, affixing to the storefront a logo that has become deeply familiar in South Florida: a white sun rising over the red stripes of the American flag, all encased in a big, blue O.“Obamacare,” it read underneath.Similar displays are common along some of Miami’s main thoroughfares, almost 13 years after President Barack Obama’s signature health policy, the Affordable Care Act, became law and critics branded it with his name. Everywhere you look, especially during the open enrollment period that runs from November to January: Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare.“If we don’t use it,” Ms. Hernández explained of the moniker, “people don’t know that we sell it.”And in Miami, people really want it.On its face, the program’s outsize popularity in South Florida remains one of its most intriguing data points. The evidence is visible in every Obamacare logo deployed — not just on storefronts but on trucks, flags and billboards — to sell health insurance, as agents in the crowded local market jockey to enroll people. This year’s open enrollment period ends on Sunday.Florida has far more people enrolled in the federal health insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act than any other state does, a distinction that has been true since 2015. Driving those numbers has been the Miami area, where older, Republican-leaning Hispanics appeared loath to embrace government-subsidized health insurance when the law was enacted. At the time, it ignited some of the most pitched partisan battles in the nation’s recent history.In particular, some Miamians who had fled left-wing leaders in Cuba and other Latin American countries chafed at the law’s requirement — later eliminated — that people have health coverage or face a penalty, which critics decried as “socialism.”The region has only tilted more Republican since then, flipping red in the governor’s race last year for the first time in two decades. Yet in 2022, the two ZIP codes with the most enrollees in Affordable Care Act coverage nationwide were in Doral and Hialeah, cities west and north of Miami known for their right-leaning Venezuelan American and Cuban American communities. And the county with most enrollees in the country remained Miami-Dade.Lídice Hernández opened an insurance agency in Miami last year. Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesEverywhere you look, especially during the open enrollment period: Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“It’s ingrained in our community,” said Nicholas X. Duran, a former Democratic state representative who used to work for a nonprofit group that encouraged Americans to enroll in Obamacare plans and now works for the health insurer Aetna. “It’s stuck.”So is the ubiquitous logo, which got its start as the symbol for Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, said Sol Sender, who designed it. It was never intended to represent the health care law, Mr. Sender said, calling its co-opting by enterprising insurance agents “just pretty organic.”Which is not to say that policyholders, while glad to have coverage, are always happy with their plans. Gisselle Llerena, one of Ms. Hernández’s clients said she had been unable to get her insurer to sign off on a test her doctor recommended.“I have an M.R.I. pending from a century ago,” Ms. Llerena, 50, said in Spanish as she recently dropped in on Ms. Hernández’s office in a modest strip mall. “But the insurance doesn’t want to cover it.”Still, Ivan A. Herrera, the chief executive of the Miami-based UniVista Insurance agency, which caters to Hispanic people and prominently advertises Obamacare plans, said he has seen plenty of evidence that the coverage has helped people.“I know customers who have had open-heart surgery,” he said. “They never went to the doctor. They never had a blood test. They never visited a specialist. And now they can take care of themselves.”Each year, Mr. Herrera’s business has “doubled the amount of people that we have in Obamacare,” he said. “Obamacare is massive.”About 2.7 million Floridians out of the state’s population of about 22 million enrolled in a plan through the federal insurance marketplace, which the health law created, in 2022. Compared with Texas, which has about 30 million people but only about 1.8 million enrollees, “Florida is like an A.C.A. monster,” said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a charity focused on health.The average monthly premium last year for Floridians with marketplace plans was $611, and for those who qualified for federal premium subsidies, the average amount was $552 per month, slightly higher than the national average, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health policy group.Early federal data suggests enrollment has jumped again for 2023, with 15.9 million plan selections nationally in the federal marketplace and those run by states, including almost 3.2 million — roughly one-fifth of the total — in Florida.That Obamacare has become part of the fabric of Florida life is also striking given the state’s early opposition to the law, led by Rick Scott, then the Republican governor. Mr. Scott, who is now a U.S. senator, barred “navigators” — those who helped people sign up for coverage — from state health department offices in an effort to undermine enrollment.The Republican-controlled State Legislature has not expanded Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income people, as allowed under the Affordable Care Act, making Florida one of only 11 holdout states. About 790,000 currently uninsured Floridians would be eligible for expanded Medicaid, according to Kaiser; without it, other low-income residents have turned to the federal marketplace for subsidized coverage, which is one reason Florida has such high enrollment.Ivan Herrera, the chief executive and founder of UniVista Insurance, said his company had doubled the amount of clients signed up for federal marketplace plans each year.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesAbout 2.7 million Floridians out of the state’s population of about 22 million enrolled in a plan through the federal insurance marketplace in 2022.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesObamacare is also popular in the state because it is home to many retirees who are younger than 65 and not yet eligible for Medicare, the federal health insurance program for older people. Others opt for the health insurance because they have recently moved from other states and may be in between jobs. And many employers in the state do not offer working Floridians robust benefits that include health care coverage.“In South Florida especially, you’ve got a lot of people who are working in entertainment or restaurants, where they don’t have an offer of health insurance,” said Karoline Mortensen, an associate dean and professor of health management and policy at the University of Miami. That is especially true for Hispanics, she added.When the federal health insurance mandate lapsed, Dr. Mortensen found that some Latinos dropped their coverage, suggesting that they had gotten insurance only because they were required to. But Hispanic people still continued to get medical care at far higher rates than they had before the federal marketplace was created in 2013, she said.The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that Florida is the state with the second-highest percentage of eligible people who have enrolled in an Affordable Care Act plan, said Cynthia Cox, a Kaiser vice president.She credited local leaders and insurance agents with promoting the law’s benefits, even when the state did not. Similarly, Dr. Mortensen referenced a moderate Republican state senator who, when the federal marketplace opened, urged his constituents to enroll.Ilse Torres, an insurance agent in Miami, said she had educated her clients “bit by bit” that Obamacare is not health coverage, as many of them assume, but rather a law that created a federal marketplace and required insurers to cover pre-existing health conditions.After Republicans in Congress tried but failed to repeal the law during the Trump administration, Ms. Torres said, the marketplace stabilized, drawing more major insurers and attracting new policyholders.Ms. Hernández, who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 but later registered as a Republican, lamented that Congress had not updated the Affordable Care Act to make more people permanently eligible for subsidies to help cover their insurance premiums. (Subsidies were temporarily expanded through the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, and are in effect through 2025 — a major reason for the recent enrollment bumps.) But she was pleased, she said, that Republican lawmakers had stopped trying to repeal the law.“Obamacare needs to be fixed,” she said. “But when I saw how easy it was to get it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, people don’t know about this. Why don’t more people get it?’”She and her family are now insured through the program.Susan C. Beachy More

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      George Santos Is In a Class of His Own. But Other Politicians Have Embellished Their Resumes, Too.

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Sarah Palin Loses as the Party She Helped Transform Moves Past Her

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      The former Alaska governor, once the standard-bearer of the G.O.P.’s dog-whistling, no-apologies culture, was no match for the same forces she rode to national prominence.It is hard to overstate just how much of a jolt to the political system Sarah Palin delivered when she defeated her first fellow Republican 16 years ago.He was Frank Murkowski, the sitting governor of Alaska and a towering figure in the 49th state. She was a “hockey mom” and the former mayor of a small, working-class town who vowed to stick it to the “good ol’ boys.” That race put her on the map with the national Republican Party and set her on a path that would change her life, and the tenor of American politics for years to come.Then, Ms. Palin was at the vanguard of the dog-whistling, no-apologies political culture that former President Donald J. Trump now embodies.Today, having lost her bid for Congress after years out of the spotlight, Ms. Palin is a much diminished force.She was, in many ways, undone by the same political currents she rode to national prominence, first as Senator John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008 and later as a Tea Party luminary and Fox News star. Along the way, she helped redefine the outer limits of what a politician could say as she made dark insinuations about Barack Obama’s background and false claims about government “death panels” that could deny health care to seniors and people with disabilities.Now, a generation of Republican stars follows the template she helped create as a hybrid celebrity-politician who relished fighting with elements in her own party as much as fighting with Democrats — none more so than Mr. Trump, who watched her closely for years before deciding to run for president himself. He ensured this month that he would remain in the spotlight, announcing another bid for the White House in 2024.But as the next generation rose up, Ms. Palin’s brand of politics no longer seemed as novel or as outrageous. Next to Mr. Trump’s lies about a huge conspiracy to deny him a second term, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s casual allusions to political violence, Ms. Palin’s provocations more than a decade ago can seem almost quaint.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      Book Review: “The Unfolding,” by A.M. Homes

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      “The Unfolding” takes readers inside the homes and meeting rooms of a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with big plans for change.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. HomesWe are living in fractious times. Two decades into the new century, our nation is bitterly divided and our political institutions have never seemed more fragile. The genesis of these fissures in the American body politic is the central concern of “The Unfolding,” a sharply observed, wickedly funny political satire by the reliably brilliant A.M. Homes.The novel opens on election night, 2008. Candidate John McCain has just conceded to Barack Obama, and not everyone is celebrating. In a Phoenix hotel bar, our protagonist — a 60-something business tycoon referred to only as the Big Guy — is drowning his sorrows and contemplating next steps. “Something big,” he tells a stranger he meets in the bar. “A forced correction.” He scribbles notes on a napkin: “A patriot’s plan to preserve and protect.”The Big Guy is an old-school Republican — in his own words, “the last of an era.” His conservatism is sentimental, backward-looking, patriotic to its core. Fantastically rich, he bounces between Palm Springs and his ranch in Wyoming, an affable fellow who adores his teenage daughter and is largely faithful to Charlotte, his clever, acerbic and extravagantly alcoholic wife. For the Big Guy, McCain’s defeat sparks an existential crisis. “I can’t live like this,” he tells Charlotte. “I can’t spend the next 30 years watching it all come undone.” The “it” in question is an idealized version of the American past. Though the phrase is never uttered, it’s clear that the Big Guy hopes to Make American Great Again.Homes is a gifted satirist, a keen observer of bourgeois manners and mores. Here, she nails the psychic particularities of the politically conservative American male: the glorification of American military conquests, the quasi-religious reverence for the Founding Fathers. (“How much do you love George Washington?” the Big Guy’s daughter teases him.) Hoping to school her in his ideals, “he doesn’t talk about himself or his childhood. He talks about historical figures, battles, wars, treaties and the three branches of government.”In one of the novel’s most indelible scenes, the Big Guy indulges in his favorite pastime — staging miniature battle re-enactments on his basement pool table, with toy soldiers and orange Jell-O powder standing in for Agent Orange. “This is his idea of a good time, re-enactments, skirmishes,” Homes writes. “His men are the highest quality, tin, lead, mixed metal.”As he plays, the Big Guy ruminates on military strategy and ethics: “Today he is using rainbow herbicides, orange and strawberry mixed together, to defoliate the trees. People were allergic to it. Vietnamese babies were born deformed. Soldiers claimed it gave them everything from acne to diabetes to heart disease. Maybe the stuff wasn’t perfect or wasn’t handled properly, but people have to quit complaining; they can’t be expecting everyone to take care of them. This is war.”While the Big Guy plays with his Army men and ponders the future of the nation, his family is quietly coming apart. His daughter goes AWOL from boarding school and begins to question his conservative values. After finding Charlotte drunk and nearly drowned in the family pool, he packs her off to the Betty Ford Center. (Gerry and Betty were family friends.) Thus unencumbered, he is free to devote all his energies to saving America from ruin.He assembles a quorum of consiglieri reminiscent of the Eisenhower Ten, the group of civilians secretly tapped by the president to run the government in case of national emergency. Ike’s picks were titans of corporate America, captains of industry. The Big Guy chooses billionaires, a rogue general, a speechwriter and a tax attorney. The group’s first meeting is “like a eulogy for an America that perhaps never was. The air is awash with the unsmoked scent of cigars chewed on, gone wet — damp with the drool of men still dreaming.”To fans of the overheated telenovela that is American politics, “The Unfolding” is studded with Easter eggs, miniature romans à clef: a defeated John McCain thanking his supporters on election night, Condoleeza Rice eating Thanksgiving dinner, George W. Bush cleaning out his desk in the Oval and gifting the Big Guy’s daughter several boxes of commemorative White House M&M’s.Fittingly, the novel ends on Inauguration Day. At a restaurant in Great Falls, Virginia, the Big Guy’s cronies plot ways to foment revolution, swapping dire predictions of the chaos to come. “A slow-moving wave, a coup of sorts that will sweep across the country largely unnoticed until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually and spiritually,” says one of his co-conspirators. (Which one is hard to discern and doesn’t really matter; like characters in a David Mamet play, they all speak in the same voice.) “People will be ordered to stay home, not to congregate. It will be difficult to reach consensus about anything; no one will know what is fact and what is fiction. Between the plague and the toxic waste and the decentralization of the government, America will be a dead zone.”The Big Guy finds these predictions appalling. “We’re not here to self-destruct,” he protests. “We are here to protect and preserve.”“Sometimes you have to rebreak a bone to set it right,” his henchman counters. “We are breaking the back of America to set it straight.”In “The Unfolding,” Homes puts her finger on the fault line, giving voice to the nebulous fears and fantasies of the old Republican plutocracy. At the root of it all, the novel suggests, is race. With characteristic aplomb, the Big Guy sums up his current existential crisis: “My wife is a drunk, my kid is running off into the woods and the people elected an African as president.”His racism is presented as fact but never explored — a missed opportunity and ultimately, the novel’s greatest failing. From the outset, Homes walks a fine line between realism and caricature. By choosing not to examine her protagonist’s racism, she denies us full access to his psyche. This lack of particularity has a flattening effect: the Big Guy is racist not because of his own specific background and experience and psychological idiosyncrasies, but because he’s the kind of person who would be racist. Instead of a deeply imagined, fully human character, rife with complexities and contradictions, The Big Guy is reduced to a type.Novel-writing is a slow business. Producing a good one — or even a bad one — takes such an ungodly long time that any relevance to the current moment is largely a matter of luck. And indeed, “The Unfolding” — Homes’s first novel in 10 years — reads like a story conceived in another era. After all the nation has lived through in the Trump years, the 2008 election seems very far away.The publisher’s marketing copy attempts to address this, calling the book “prescient.” It’s a puzzling claim — “The Unfolding” was written long after its characters’ predictions had already come to pass — that ultimately does the book a disservice. Homes isn’t trying to predict the future. Her intentions are forensic. Obama vs. McCain may seem like a lifetime ago, but this witty, perceptive novel underscores its continuing relevance. Like an insurance investigator reconstructing an accident, Homes is interrogating the recent past. In “The Unfolding,” she connects the dots for us, tracing the tortuous path that got us where we are.Jennifer Haigh’s most recent novel, “Mercy Street,” was published in February.THE UNFOLDING, by A.M. Homes | 416 pp. | Viking | $28 More

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      The Bromance of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani

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      Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker, described on national television on Tuesday the smear campaign that Rudy Giuliani waged against her and her mother. Mr. Giuliani, speaking to Georgia legislators weeks after the 2020 presidential vote, had accused the two women of engaging in “surreptitious, illegal behavior” while working the polls on election night and conjured a racist image of them “passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine.” The fabricated allegations, based on a cynical misrepresentation of a video, were designed to persuade Georgia officials to overturn the election results in their state, and they triggered an avalanche of harassment and death threats against the women.How did America’s mayor get to this low point? Mr. Giuliani’s rise to power in New York was often marked by venality, but nothing from his mayoral or prosecutorial years resembles his near-complete moral collapse under Donald Trump. They have been a pernicious team, and the strength of their bond — and how it ultimately drove the attempted subversion of the 2020 election — is rooted in Mr. Trump’s veneration of a bygone champion and Mr. Giuliani’s almost primal need to remain relevant.On election night, Mr. Giuliani was the only one of Mr. Trump’s advisers pushing him to declare victory early, even though Mr. Trump was behind in the count, with millions of ballots outstanding. Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, said in video testimony released on June 13 that Mr. Giuliani appeared inebriated when he pushed this dubious strategy, bringing his mountain of personal problems to a defining moment in history. (Mr. Giuliani has denied that he was intoxicated on election night and has previously denied that he has a drinking problem. A spokesman for Mr. Giuliani declined to comment for this essay.)Rudy Giuliani onscreen during the Jan. 6 hearing on Thursday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Trump, never known for his loyalty to aides, has stood by Mr. Giuliani for years and through many embarrassments, including a raft of bungled television appearances, a compromising scene in a “Borat” film, a nationally televised news conference held in a parking lot of a landscaping company and another in which what appeared to be hair dye streamed down his cheeks. “Rudy was there when a lot of you guys weren’t,” the former president would snap at staff members.Mr. Trump rarely gushes about anyone besides himself, but there is something about Rudy Giuliani that has always made him swoon. “Some people don’t like him and some people love him totally,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Giuliani on “Larry King Live” on Oct. 7, 1999. “I happen to be in love.” As president, Mr. Trump often spoke about him with a deference that virtually no other aide received. Mr. Giuliani as mayor was a role model for Mr. Trump; his raw exercise of power, his use of bombast as a weapon and his relentless attacks on his critics and the media all made a huge impression. His style influenced Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency “more so probably than any other political figure,” Mr. Miller, the Trump adviser, told me over the course of reporting for a new biography of Mr. Giuliani.The two men go back decades. As mayor, Mr. Giuliani looked favorably upon Mr. Trump’s development projects. He spoke at the funerals of both of Mr. Trump’s parents. Mr. Trump, in turn, wasn’t just “in love” with the New York mayor — Mr. Giuliani was perhaps the most famous national political leader with whom Mr. Trump had longstanding ties as he explored a presidential bid in 2000 and beyond. Mr. Trump saw how Mr. Giuliani became a hero after Sept. 11 and how he became a punchline after losing the run for the White House in 2008. Mr. Trump went to some lengths to help Mr. Giuliani in that low period. Indeed, the hallmarks of what would become one of the most toxic partnerships in recent presidential history came into stark relief during the months after Mr. Giuliani’s lifelong hopes of becoming president ended in humiliation.Mr. Giuliani was the favorite to win that race. Beloved for his leadership after Sept. 11, the former mayor was at one point more admired than the pope. He spent nearly a year as the front-runner before the start of the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. But an almost comically misguided campaign ended nearly four weeks after the Iowa caucus, when he withdrew from the race with some $4 million in debt and just one delegate to show for his efforts.The ridicule that he endured in its aftermath was merciless. T. Boone Pickens, the Texas billionaire, went public with his displeasure in a written letter of apology to donors he recruited to the campaign. Mr. Giuliani “rode up to the grandstand and fell off his horse,” he wrote.Mr. Giuliani’s ex-wife Judith, who was with him at the time, told me that what gnawed at the former mayor most was a creeping fear of irrelevancy. (The couple divorced in 2019.) The flameout forced him to lower his sights from how to amass power to how to hold on to what he had left. When he offered a reporter a rare post-mortem on the race in 2009 he betrayed his concern. “I think I should’ve fought Iowa harder,” he told New York magazine. “That was the beginning of becoming irrelevant.”After endorsing John McCain at the end of January, Mr. Giuliani disappeared from public view. Eager to escape the dreary cold of February in New York, he and his wife packed their bags and went to Florida to stay at her parents’ two-bedroom condo in Palm Beach, which Mr. Giuliani bought for them. They lived in Palm Beach Towers, an upscale high-rise apartment complex, with views of the crystalline blue Intracoastal Waterway, a swimming pool, landscaped gardens and nearby golf courses — a natural place to relax after a brutal campaign. But he rarely left the apartment, spending his time sitting listlessly on his in-laws’ living room couch, sleeping late in the bedroom or smoking cigars in his bathrobe on the terrace facing a parking lot.Ms. Giuliani said he refused to socialize or sit for meals, even as her mother, Joan, tried to entice him with his favorite dish, pasticcio. “It started to really worry me because he was waking up only if I would wake him,” she said. He became melancholy and self-pitying (“You should leave me”), she said. Her response — “You still have kids that love you, you have me, you have your health” — failed to assuage his sense of failure. “He just could not get over it,” she said.She said he started to drink more heavily. While Mr. Giuliani was always fond of downing a scotch with his cigars, his friends never considered him a problem drinker. Ms. Giuliani felt he was drinking to dull the pain. The situation was concerning enough to send the couple searching for a more discreet locale for his recuperation, as the press caught on to their stay at Palm Beach Towers and photographers started popping up.In search of a friend to turn to, they found one in Donald Trump. “We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” Ms. Giuliani said.Mr. Trump provided them with a hideaway that was secluded from the press and passers-by, a safe space for an ailing friend who was a magnet for photographers. He had a perfect spot for them — a bungalow across the street from Mar-a-Lago. A small tunnel ran underneath South Ocean Boulevard, a narrow two-lane highway, allowing the Giulianis to walk to dinner beyond the glare of the press. “He thought he was finished,” she told me. His drinking accelerated, she said, the beginning of a series of episodes in which he fell and hurt himself. “He was always falling shitfaced somewhere,” she said.The true depth of his depression was something that only she and Mr. Giuliani knew for certain, because they were largely isolated at the time. Many of Mr. Giuliani’s aides considered his wife a loose cannon, prone to exaggeration. Mr. Giuliani’s only mention of that period was to tell The New York Times in 2018 that he “spent a month at Mar-a-Lago, relaxing.” Their friends in New York said the two were out of touch with them. Joseph Lhota, the former deputy mayor, told me that his vague recollection was that Mr. Giuliani “kind of lost himself. No one heard from him for a while.” He recalled that Tony Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s political adviser and closest aide, told him at the time that Mr. Giuliani was “in a dark place.”Mr. Carbonetti now says that only the Giulianis know for sure how bad things were for his old boss. “There was a period where it was just the two of them for two or three months,” he told me. “She was the only person really spending significant time with him.”Both Donald and Melania Trump kept a protective eye on them, Ms. Giuliani said. According to a confidante of hers, she and Ms. Trump were practicing yoga on the beach one day when Ms. Trump spotted a Mar-a-Lago employee shooting photos of them. Ms. Trump complained to her husband, who marched to the scene and confronted the employee. After some back-and-forth, the man grudgingly handed Mr. Trump his camera. When Mr. Trump saw the photos his employee had taken of his wife and her companion, he fired him on the spot.During their stay, Ms. Giuliani said, she and her husband decided to see a movie at a West Palm Beach shopping center one afternoon. The outing ended soon after it began. She said he stumbled out of the car, fell to the ground and gashed his forehead so badly he needed stitches. Several weeks later, he made his first public appearance since arriving at Mar-a-Lago, traveling to New York to appear on “Saturday Night Live.” He sat on the set of “Weekend Update” making self-deprecating jokes about the failure of his campaign. His makeup just barely hid a scar above his right eyebrow.Notwithstanding the turmoil in Mr. Giuliani’s life, it was clear that he and Mr. Trump had found a compelling kinship. The former mayor and the celebrity developer were two New York colossuses, dinosaurs from another time and place — or perhaps it was just a state of mind — in which powerful men flaunted their money and influence to prove their dominance over other powerful men, and wives were first and foremost arm candy, the more beautiful and diamond bedecked the better. “He would always come home and bring these beautiful gifts,” Ms. Giuliani said of her former husband. “He wanted it to be ostentatious, he wanted me to walk down Madison Avenue with a big pearl necklace or a big diamond ring. He loved that it was emblematic for him of his not being, as he used to say, just a Brooklyn boy. He needed that validation.”That Mr. Trump would take Mr. Giuliani under his protective wing at a desperate time in the former mayor’s life was a glimpse into their unique bond, and may well have solidified the relationship. What’s clear is that it survived when other Trump relationships died away like so many marriages of convenience. For decades the two have performed a dance of respect and loyalty that has endured their shifting power dynamics.When Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy reeled from the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, Mr. Giuliani was one of few who defended him. When Robert Mueller investigated Mr. Trump’s Russia ties, Mr. Giuliani promoted a theory about a nonexistent Biden-Ukraine conspiracy. When Mr. Trump faced the abyss in 2020, the two needed each other more than ever. Mr. Giuliani was the last of the president’s high-profile advisers willing to lead his immoral battle. Seventy-six years old at the time, Mr. Giuliani’s political and financial future, possibly even his escape from prosecution, was now dependent upon Mr. Trump’s remaining in office.Ms. Giuliani always felt that her husband’s Achilles’ heel was his bottomless need for validation. It would lead him to make a lot of bad decisions. He would never stop protecting Mr. Trump. As the nation witnessed in the hearings of the past two weeks, he worked to upend a legitimate presidential election, destroying reputations and sabotaging American democracy in the process, all without batting an eye.Andrew Kirtzman, a former New York political reporter and the writer of books about Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty and the Bernie Madoff scandal, is the author of the forthcoming “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.”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