Presidential Election of 2016

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    Gabbard Claims Obama Administration Tried to Undermine Trump in 2016

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    Democrats denounced a report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as politically motivated and error-ridden.The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration attempting to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016.Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said the information she was releasing showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump.Democrats denounced the effort as politically motivated, error-ridden and in contradiction with previous reviews of the assessment.Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Ms. Gabbard’s accusation of treason “baseless.”Intelligence agencies and Senate investigators spent years reviewing the work, and concluded that during the 2016 election, the Russians conducted probing operations of election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes. While they extracted voter registration data in Illinois and Arizona, and probed in other states, there was no evidence that Moscow’s hackers attempted to actually change votes.The Obama administration assessment never contended that Russian hackers manipulated votes.Russia also conducted influence operations to change public opinion. That included using fake social media posts to sow division among Americans and leaking documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee to denigrate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Democrats Can Learn From Mamdani’s Victory

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      Beyond his social media talent and approaches on affordability and Israel, Democratic voters have been inching to the left for years.Zohran Mamdani is more than a viral video star. Shuran Huang for The New York TimesUsually, there isn’t much to learn from a single idiosyncratic primary election.In the case of the recent New York mayoral contest, most candidates will not be able to replicate Zohran Mamdani’s viral campaign, and not many candidates will have Andrew Cuomo’s heavy baggage.Such a superficial analysis of the candidates might be enough to tell the tale for many primaries. But not this one. The New York Democratic mayoral primary was about much more than the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates, and as a consequence there’s a lot more to learn.Just consider how many political, demographic, economic and technological changes over the last decade helped make Mr. Mamdani’s victory possible. There was the Bernie Sanders campaign and the rise of a new democratic socialist left, along with a growing number of young millennial and Gen Z voters. There was the founding of TikTok and the rise of vertical video, #MeToo, Israel’s war in Gaza, the rising cost of housing and even halalflation.There’s room to debate the relative contributions of these and other factors to Mr. Mamdani’s victory. What can’t be disputed is that these developments helped him enormously, but even on the day of the election it was not obvious that these changes would be enough to put him over the top.Of all these changes, the most obvious one is that the Democratic electorate has simply moved farther to the left. Over the last few years, this hasn’t always been obvious. To many, the last presidential election seemed to mark a new rightward turn in the culture, including among the young voters who had powered the ascent of progressives. Looking even further back, progressives mostly seemed to stall after Mr. Sanders’s breakthrough in 2016, including in New York City.Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in a 2015 debate.Josh Haner/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      C.I.A. Says Its Leaders Rushed Report on Russia Interference in 2016 Vote

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      But the new review of the earlier assessment does not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.A C.I.A. review of its assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election criticized the agency’s leadership at the time for rushing the effort but did not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.The review also criticized John O. Brennan, who was the C.I.A. director when the assessment was written, for his oversight of the project and for too tightly controlling access to sensitive intelligence that formed the basis of the work.The original intelligence review, which was undertaken in the aftermath of the November 2016 vote, came amid concerns about Russian ties to Mr. Trump’s campaign and efforts by the Kremlin to sow dissent during the election.Before the vote, the Obama administration issued warnings about Russian cyberoperations, and the C.I.A. and F.B.I. intensified their scrutiny of Russian activity after the election.Early on, the intelligence assessment, an unclassified version of which was released in January 2017, came under criticism from Republican supporters of Mr. Trump. The criticism continued through his first term, though a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed the judgment of the assessment.John H. Durham, a Justice Department special counsel in the first Trump administration, looked at the C.I.A.’s and other intelligence agencies’ work on the assessment, but made no substantive mention of it in his final report.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      White House Swaps Obama Portrait With One of Trump From Assassination Attempt

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      The Trump administration said on Friday that it had moved a portrait of former President Barack Obama in a White House hallway and replaced it with a pop-art painting of President Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt last year on the campaign trail in Butler, Pa.The shuffling of décor is not uncommon at the White House, where portraits are rotated often. But the new, striking artwork depicting Mr. Trump drew criticism from some presidential historians, who could not recall another president hanging a painting of himself during his term in the White House.Typically, paintings of presidents and first ladies are hung in the White House after they have left office, historians said.A spokesman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.The portrait of Mr. Obama, which was unveiled in the East Room during the administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., shows the former president in a dark suit and silver tie, standing with his hands in his pockets. The background is white; the portrait was based on photographs taken by the artist Robert McCurdy.The new painting shows Mr. Trump embraced by a team of Secret Service agents as an American flag billows in a cloudless blue sky behind him. Streaks of red run across his face.In a post on social media, the White House announced the new portrait of President Trump.The White House, via XWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election

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      The Book That Predicted the 2024 ElectionThe G.O.P. pollster Patrick Ruffini’s book “Party of the People” outlined the realignments reflected in this year’s election results.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.You should be skeptical of anyone with a very detailed, confident take on the dynamics of the 2024 election right now. At the very least, you should be if they didn’t tell you before the election.But Patrick Ruffini, a longtime Republican pollster who is a founding partner at Echelon Insights, did tell you before the election. In 2023, he published a book called “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.”What he argued in that book is really two things: First, the educational divide reshaping American politics would continue, with non-college voters swinging right and college-educated voters swinging yet further left. But second, he argued that the 2020 election results, weird as they seemed to many, weren’t a fluke.Donald Trump performed a lot better in 2020 than the polls said he would. A major reason he performed so much better is that he did better among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. That was, to put it very mildly, not what Democrats expected. Trump was the xenophobe in chief. Democrats were appalled by the way he talked about immigrants, about Muslims, about China, about Black communities. The theory was that Trump was using racism and nationalism to drive up his margins among white voters.And then what actually happens after four years of his presidency is that Biden in 2020 does a bit better than Clinton did among white voters. And Trump in 2020 improves quite a bit among nonwhite voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Brief History of Messy Elections

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      Three times the results were disputed after the votes were in.This article is part of A Kid’s Guide to the Election, a collection of stories about the 2024 presidential election for readers ages 8 to 14, written and produced by The New York Times for Kids. This section is published in The Times’s print edition on the last Sunday of every month.America is the world’s oldest democracy. And part of why it has worked for so long is that people have faith that its elections are fair and honest. But not every election has gone smoothly. In the more than two centuries that we’ve been electing presidents, there have been a handful of elections in which people disputed the results.1876: A divided nationAbout a decade after the Civil War ended, America was still deeply divided between North and South. The 1876 election, between Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, came down to three Southern states where the results were disputed. Neither candidate had a majority of the Electoral College without those three states. So Congress appointed a committee to decide, and a deal was struck: Hayes would become president. But in exchange, the federal government would ease control over the Southern states that had been part of the Confederacy.2000: A 537-vote winThe 2000 election was very, very close. The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, won more votes across the country than his competitor, George W. Bush. But he didn’t have a majority in the Electoral College. It all came down to a single state, Florida, where Bush had a very slim lead. Gore went to court to challenge the vote counts in several counties there. But after a 36-day legal battle, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to end the recounts. That left Bush with just 537 more votes in Florida, which meant that he won the Electoral College and the presidency. After that, Gore conceded. “I accept the finality of this outcome,” he said.2020: A capitol riotIn 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by seven million votes nationwide and won the Electoral College. But Trump wouldn’t accept the loss. He filed many lawsuits and pressured state officials, the Justice Department and his own vice president to help switch the results to him. It didn’t work. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump told supporters to march to the Capitol, where Congress was counting the Electoral College votes. His supporters stormed the Capitol, and many people were hurt. Eventually, the police cleared the mob out, and Congress declared Biden the winner. More

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      Ignore the Polls

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      Here’s a bit of advice to help maintain your sanity over the next few weeks until Election Day: Just ignore the polls. Unless you’re a campaign professional or a gambler, you’re probably looking at them for the same reason the rest of us are: to know who’ll win. Or at least to feel like you know who’ll win. But they just can’t tell you that.Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points.You could imagine a world in which these errors are random and cancel one another out. Perhaps Donald Trump’s support is undercounted by three points in Michigan but overcounted by three points in Wisconsin. But errors often systematically favor one candidate or the other. In both 2016 and 2020, for instance, state-level polls tended to undercount Trump supporters. The polls overestimated Hillary Clinton’s margin by three points in 2016 and Joe Biden’s margin by 4.3 points in 2020.In a blowout election, an error of a few points in one direction or another is meaningless. In the California Senate race, for example, Adam Schiff, a Democrat, is leading Steve Garvey, a Republican, by between 17 and 33 points, depending on the poll. Even a polling error of 10 points wouldn’t matter to the outcome of the race.But that’s not where the presidential election sits. As of Oct. 10, The New York Times’s polling average had Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points nationally. That’s tight, but the seven swing states are tighter: Neither candidate is leading by more than two points in any of them.Imagine the polls perform better in 2024 than they did in either 2016 or 2020: They’re off, remarkably, by merely two points in the swing states. Huzzah! That would be consistent with Harris winning every swing state. It would also be consistent with Trump winning every swing state. This is not some outlandish scenario. According to Nate Silver’s election model, the most likely electoral outcome “is Harris sweeping all seven swing states. And the next most likely is Trump sweeping all seven.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What if Trump Wins Like This?

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      If Donald Trump wins, the people who voted for him would have a range of reasons for putting him in office. There are a lot of potential Trump voters who don’t like him that much, or who really like only parts of his personality or platform and tolerate the rest.There are probably also those who have their own understanding of what they’re getting, possibly rooted in the way they felt about the Trump administration or feel about the Biden one. Some of this could be summarized by how Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, pitched it recently: “Look, you may not like Donald Trump personally, but you’ll like his policies a lot better than Kamala Harris’s. It’s a business decision.”But how Mr. Trump understands that decision could be different. If he wins like this, how it’s been, how grim he’s taken things across the last two years but especially lately, his explanation for the victory — and the consequences of that reasoning — might be different and darker than even many of the people who voted for him wanted.The way he’s talked about towns like Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitians who officials have said are there legally to work resembles deeply the rhythms of the 2016 campaign: grim conflation of real and fake problems, real people caught up in the gears of awful scrutiny and abuse, the building pressure on politicians and people often in very normal and modest circumstances, and Mr. Trump weaving everything into a fable to prove that he was right.In his campaign speeches, intermixed with the jokes and riffs, Mr. Trump often talks about political retribution, the threat of World War III, the ruin that the country’s become. In just one speech, he talked about how he would “liberate” Wisconsin from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members,” and about how immigrant gangs had “occupied” “hundreds” of towns and cities across the Midwest, leaving law enforcement “petrified.”Mr. Trump seems to have twisted the reason that programs like Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole exist — for instance, Haiti has been deemed too unstable and dangerous to return to — into a reason for the programs not to exist. “So we have travel warnings,” he said. “‘Don’t go here, don’t go there, don’t go to the various countries’ and yet she’s taking in the worst of those people, the killers, the jailbirds, all of the worst of the people, she’s taking them in.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Twists Harris’s Position on Fentanyl After She Called for a Border Crackdown

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      When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border on Friday, she called fentanyl a “scourge on our country” and said that as president she would “make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”Ms. Harris pledged to give more resources to law enforcement officials on the front lines, including additional personnel and machines that can detect fentanyl in vehicles. And she said she would take aim at the “global fentanyl supply chain,” vowing to “double the resources for the Department of Justice to extradite and prosecute transnational criminal organizations and the cartels.”But that was not how her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, characterized her position on Sunday at a rally in Erie, Pa., where he made a false accusation against Ms. Harris that seemed intended to play on the fears and traumas of voters in communities that have been ravaged by fentanyl.“She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” Mr. Trump said during a speech that stretched for 109 minutes. It was the second straight day that Mr. Trump had amplified the same false claim about Ms. Harris; he did so on Saturday in Wisconsin.The former president did not offer context for his remarks, but his campaign pointed to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that Ms. Harris had filled out in 2019 during her unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.A question asking if Ms. Harris supported the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use appeared to be checked “yes.” Ms. Harris wrote that it was “long past time that we changed our outdated and discriminatory criminalization of marijuana” and said that she favored treating drug addiction as a public health issue, focusing on rehabilitation instead of incarceration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More