Presidential Election of 2016

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      ‘Gut-level Hatred’ Is Consuming Our Political Life

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      Divisions between Democrats and Republicans have expanded far beyond the traditional fault lines based on race, education, gender, the urban-rural divide and economic ideology.Polarization now encompasses sharp disagreements over the significance of patriotism and nationalism as well as a fundamental split between those seeking to restore perceived past glories and those who embrace the future.Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, described the situation this way in an email to me:Because political beliefs now reflect deeply held worldviews about how the world ought to be — challenging traditional ways of doing things on the one hand and putting a brake on that change on the other — partisans look across the aisle at each other and absolutely do not understand how their opponents can possibly understand the world as they do.The reason we have the levels of polarization we have today, Hetherington continued,is because of the gains non-dominant groups have made over the last 60 years. The Democrats no longer apologize for challenging traditional hierarchies and established pathways. They revel in it. Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality, or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it. It’s just something we are going to have to live with until a new set of issues rises to replace this set.Democrats are determined not only to block any drive to restore the America of 1963 — one year before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — but also to press the liberal agenda forward.Toward the end of the 20th century, Republicans moved rightward at a faster pace than Democrats moved leftward. In recent decades, however, Democrats have accelerated their shift toward more liberal positions while Republican movement to the right has slowed, in part because the party had reached the outer boundaries of conservatism.Bill McInturff, a founding partner of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, released a study in June, “Polarization and a Deep Dive on Issues by Party,” that documents the shifting views of Democratic and Republican voters.Among the findings based on the firm’s polling for NBC News:From 2012 to 2022, the percentage of Democrats who describe themselves as “very liberal” grew to 29 percent from 19.In 2013, when asked their religion, 10 percent of Democrats said “none”; in 2023, it was 38 percent. The percentage of Republicans giving this answer was 7 percent in 2012 and 12 in 2023.The percentage of Democrats who agreed that “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people” grew from 45 percent in 1995 to 67 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in 2021, a 37-point gain. Over the same period, Republican agreement rose from 17 to 23 percent, a six-point increase.“The most stable finding over a decade,” McInturff reports, is that “Republicans barely budge on a host of issues while Democrats’ positions on abortion, climate change, immigration, and affirmative action have fundamentally shifted.”The Democrats’ move to the left provoked an intensely hostile reaction from the right, as you may have noticed.I asked Arlie Hochschild — a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “Strangers in Their Own Land” who has been working on a new book about Eastern Kentucky — about the threatening policies conservatives believe liberals are imposing on them.She wrote back: “Regarding ‘threats felt by the right’ I’d say, all of them — especially ‘trans’ issues — evoke a sense that ‘this is the last straw.’” In their minds, “the left is now unhinged, talking to itself in front of us, while trying to put us under its cultural rule.”For example, Hochschild continued:When I asked a Pikeville, Ky., businessman why he thought the Democratic Party had become “unhinged,” Henry, as I’ll call him here, studied his cellphone, then held it for me to see a video of two transgender activists standing on the White House lawn in Pride week. One was laughingly shaking her naked prosthetic breasts, the other bare-chested, showing scars where breasts had been cut away. The clip then moved to President Biden saying, “these are the bravest people I know.”The sense of loss is acute among many Republican voters. Geoffrey Layman, a political scientist at Notre Dame, emailed me to say:They see the face of America changing, with white people set to become a minority of Americans in the not-too-distant future. They see church membership declining and some churches closing. They see interracial and same-sex couples in TV commercials. They support Trump because they think he is the last, best hope for bringing back the America they knew and loved.Republican aversion to the contemporary Democratic agenda has intensified, according to two sociologists, Rachel Wetts of Brown and Robb Willer of Stanford.In the abstract of their 2022 paper, “Antiracism and Its Discontents: The Prevalence and Political Influence of Opposition to Antiracism Among White Americans,” Wetts and Willer write:From calls to ban critical race theory to concerns about “woke culture,” American conservatives have mobilized in opposition to antiracist claims and movements. Here, we propose that this opposition has crystallized into a distinct racial ideology among white Americans, profoundly shaping contemporary racial politics.Wetts and Willer call this ideology “anti-antiracism” and argue that it “is prevalent among white Americans, particularly Republicans, is a powerful predictor of several policy positions, and is strongly associated with — though conceptually distinct from — various measures of anti-Black prejudice.”Sympathy versus opposition to antiracism, they continue, “may have cohered into a distinct axis of ideological disagreement which uniquely shapes contemporary racial views that divide partisan groups.”They propose a three-part definition of anti-antiracism:Opposition to antiracism involves (1) rejecting factual claims about the prevalence and severity of anti-Black racism, discrimination and racial inequality; (2) disagreeing with normative beliefs that racism, discrimination and racial inequality are important moral concerns that society and/or government should address; and (3) displaying affective reactions of frustration, anger and fatigue with these factual and normative claims as well as the activists and movements who make them.The degree to which the partisan divide has become still more deeply ingrained was captured by three political scientists, John Sides of Vanderbilt and Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck, both of U.C.L.A., in their 2022 book, “The Bitter End.”Vavreck wrote by email that she and her co-authors describedthe state of American politics as “calcified.” Calcification sounds like polarization but it is more like “polarization-plus.” Calcification derives from an increased homogeneity within parties, an increased heterogeneity between the parties (on average, the parties are getting farther apart on policy ideas), the rise in importance of issues based on identity (like immigration, abortion, or transgender policies) instead of, for example, economic issues (like tax rates and trade), and finally, the near balance in the electorate between Democrats and Republicans. The last item makes every election a high-stakes election — since the other side wants to build a world that is quite different from the one your side wants to build.The Sides-Tausanovitch-Vavreck argument receives support in a new paper by the psychologists Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle of the University of Limerick in Ireland. The authors demonstrate not only how ingrained polarization has become, but also how attuned voters have become to signals of partisanship and how adept they now are at using cues to determine whether a stranger is a Democrat or Republican.“Learning a single attitude (e.g., one’s standpoint toward abortion rights),” they write, “allows people to estimate an interlocutor’s partisan identity with striking accuracy. Additionally, we show that people not only use attitudes to categorize others as in-group and out-group members, but also to evaluate a person more or less favorably.”The three conducted survey experiments testing whether Americans could determine the partisanship of people who agreed or disagreed with any one of the following eight statements:1) Abortion should be illegal.2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal.3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country.4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased.5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry.6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment.7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun.8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.The results?“Participants were able to categorize a person as Democrat or Republican based on a single attitude with remarkable accuracy (reflected by a correlation index of r = .90).”While partisan differences over racial issues have a long history, contemporary polarization has politicized virtually everything within its reach.Take patriotism.A March Wall Street Journal/NORC poll at the University of Chicago found that over the 25-year period since 1998, the percentage of adults who said patriotism was “very important” to them fell to 38 percent from 70.Much of the decline was driven by Democrats and independents, among whom 23 and 29 percent said patriotism was very important, less than half of the 59 percent of Republicans.A similar pattern emerged regarding the decline in the percentage of adults who said religion was very important to them, which fell to 39 percent from 62 percent in 1998. Democrats fell to 27 percent, independents to 38 percent and Republicans to 53 percent.Or take the question of nationalism.In their 2021 paper, “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’: How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein and Sean Bock, sociologists at N.Y.U., the University of Haifa and Harvard, argue that the United States has become increasingly divided by disagreement over conceptions of nationalism.“Nationalist beliefs shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” they write. “The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties.”In addition, Bonikowski, Feinstein and Bock argue, “over the past 20 years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have come to define America in more exclusionary and critical terms, and Democrats have increasingly endorsed inclusive and positive conceptions of nationhood.” These trends “suggest a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce partisan divisions.”Bonikowski and his co-authors contend that there are four distinct types of American nationalism.The first, creedal nationalism, is the only version supported by voters who tend to back Democratic candidates:Creedal nationalists favor elective criteria of national belonging, rating subjective identification with the nation and respect for American laws and institutions as very important; they are more equivocal than others about the importance of lifelong residence and language skills and view birth in the country, having American ancestry, and being Christian as not very important.The other three types of nationalism trend right, according to Bonikowski and his colleagues.Disengaged nationalists, “characterized by an arm’s-length relationship to the nation, which for some may verge on dissatisfaction with and perhaps even animus toward it,” are drawn to “Trump’s darkly dystopian depiction of America.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists both apply “elective and ascriptive criteria of national belonging,” including the “importance of Christian faith.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists differ, according to the authors, “in their degree of attachment to the nation, pride in America’s accomplishments, and evaluation of the country’s relative standing in the world.” For example, 11 percent of restrictive nationalists voice strong “pride in the way the country’s democracy works” compared with 70 percent of ardent nationalists.These and other divisions provide William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings who studies how well governments work, the grounds from which to paint a bleak picture of American politics.“Issues of individual and group identity — especially along the dimensions of race and gender — have moved to the center of our politics at every level of the federal system,” Galston wrote by email. “The economic axis that defined our politics from the beginning of New Deal liberalism to the end of Reagan conservatism has been displaced.”How does that affect governing?When the core political issues are matters of right and wrong rather than more and less, compromise becomes much more difficult, and disagreement becomes more intense. If I think we should spend X on farm programs and you think it should be 2X, neither of us thinks the other is immoral or evil. But if you think I’m murdering babies and I think you’re oppressing women, it’s hard for each of us not to characterize the other in morally negative terms.Despite — or perhaps because of — the changing character of politics described by Galston, interest in the outcome of elections has surged.Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, cited trends in polling data on voter interest in elections in an email:In 2000, only 45 percent of Americans said that it really matters who wins that year’s presidential election. Since then, increasing shares of Americans say that who wins presidential elections has important consequences for addressing the major issues of the day: about 63 percent of registered voters provided this response in each of the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections, which then increased to 74 percent in 2016 and 83 percent in 2020.Why?As the parties have become increasingly differentiated over the last several decades, and as presidential candidates have offered increasingly distinct political visions, it is no surprise that greater shares of Americans perceive greater stakes in which party wins the presidential election.Where does all this leave us going into the 2024 election?Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, provided the following answer by email: “When partisan conflict is no longer primarily about policies, or even values, but more about people’s basic worldviews, the stakes do feel higher to partisans.”Weiler cited poll data showing:In 2016, 35 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral than Democrats and 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral. In 2022, those numbers had jumped dramatically — 63 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral, and 72 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral.In this context, Weiler continued:It’s not that the specific issues are unimportant. Our daily political debates still revolve around them, whether D.E.I., abortion, etc. But they become secondary, in a sense, to the gut-level hatred and mistrust that now defines our politics, so that almost whatever issue one party puts in front of its voters will rouse the strongest passions. What matters now isn’t the specific objects of scorn but the intensity with which partisans are likely to feel that those targets threaten them existentially.Perhaps Bill Galston’s assessment was not bleak enough.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump’s Judges: More Religious Ties and More N.R.A. Memberships

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      A new study also found that judges appointed by the former president were more likely to vote for claims of religious freedom — unless they came from Muslims.When Donald J. Trump was running for president in 2016, he vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Three justices and six years later, he made good on that promise.Mr. Trump also made a more general pledge during that campaign, about religion. At a Republican debate, a moderator asked whether he would “commit to voters tonight that religious liberty will be an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint, not just to the Supreme Court, but to all courts.”Mr. Trump said he would, and a new study has found that he largely delivered on that assurance, too. Mr. Trump’s appointees to the lower federal courts, the study found, voted in favor of claims of religious liberty more often than not only Democratic appointees and but also judges named by other Republican presidents.There was an exception: Muslim plaintiffs fared worse before Trump appointees than before other judges.“There seems to be a very big difference on how these cases come out, depending on the specific religion in question,” said Stephen J. Choi, a law professor at New York University, who conducted the study with Mitu Gulati of the University of Virginia and Eric A. Posner of the University of Chicago.Another part of the study explored what was distinctive about Mr. Trump’s appointees to the lower courts, considering 807 judges named by seven presidents as of late 2020.The study found, for instance, that judges named by Mr. Trump had “stronger or more numerous religious affiliations” with churches and other houses of worship, with religious schools, and with groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty, which have won a series of major Supreme Court cases for conservative Christians.Trump appointees were also much more likely to be members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, than other Republican appointees: 56 percent versus 22 percent.For appeals court nominations in the Trump administration, the study found that membership in the group was “virtually required,” with a rate of more than 88 percent, compared with 44 percent for other Republican appointees.Mr. Trump made another pledge at another 2016 debate about the judges he would appoint. “They’ll respect the Second Amendment and what it stands for, what it represents,” he said.The new study did not try to measure how Mr. Trump’s appointees voted in gun rights cases. But it did find that more than 9 percent of Trump appointees were members of the National Rifle Association, compared with less than 2 percent of other Republican appointees and less than 1 percent of Democratic appointees.“In light of the polarizing nature of gun rights and the N.R.A.’s association with extreme views on gun ownership,” the study’s authors wrote, “jurists who seek a reputation for impartiality would normally want to avoid membership in the N.R.A.”The study did document how Mr. Trump’s appointees voted in cases on claims of religious liberty, examining some 1,600 votes in more than 500 cases in the federal appeals courts from 2000 to 2022.Trump appointees voted in favor of plaintiffs claiming that their right to free exercise of religion had been violated about 45 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent for other Republican appointees and 33 percent of Democratic appointees. The gap grew for cases that involved only Christians, to more than 56 percent, compared with 42 percent for other Republican appointees and 29 percent for Democratic ones.And the numbers flipped when it came to Muslims, with Trump appointees at 19 percent, compared with 34 percent for other Republican appointees and 48 percent for Democratic ones.“The pattern that emerges,” the study said, “is consistent with conventional wisdom: Democrats tend to protect minority religions, and Republicans tend to protect Christianity (and possibly Judaism).”The study considered a common critique of Trump appointees: that they are less qualified than other judges. It found that the evidence did not support the charge, at least on average and at least as measured by the prestige of the law schools the judges attended, whether they had served as law clerks and ratings from the American Bar Association.“We find little evidence that Trump judges break the historical pattern of judicial appointments,” the study’s authors wrote. “Women and minorities are less well represented among Trump judges than among Democratic judges, but that reflects a historical partisan difference; Trump judges do not differ much from Republican judges in this respect.”“A few more Trump judges received top A.B.A. ratings, but not quite as many Trump judges attended top-10 law schools,” the study said. “Our view is that the data do not support the view that Trump’s judges were less qualified than judges appointed by other presidents.”But the study’s main finding, on religion, was that Mr. Trump was true to his word.“Trump is not known to be personally religious,” the study’s authors wrote, “but he appears to have believed that he could obtain votes by promising to appoint religious judges, and he kept his promise.” More

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      Polls Were Great in 2022. Can They Repeat Their Success in 2024?

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      Experiments that yielded promising results in 2022 may not be enough if Trump is on the ballot again.With a highly successful polling cycle behind them, some pollsters believe a tactic that gained widespread adoption in 2022 may help carry them through the next presidential election. But even the tactic’s adherents say it may not be a panacea, particularly if former President Donald J. Trump is once again on the ballot.Pollsters have increasingly been weighting surveys based on whom respondents recall voting for in a previous election, in addition to adjusting for standard demographics such as race and age. This tactic has long been used in other countries to improve poll accuracy, but has become widely used in the United States only in recent years.“We are all terrified,” said Cameron McPhee, the chief methodologist at SSRS, CNN’s polling partner and a pollster that weighted some of its polls on recalled vote in 2022. She added, “We all feel good about the changes we made in 2022, but I think there is still a big question mark” headed into 2024.By weighting on recalled vote, pollsters can more easily correct partisan imbalances in who responds to polls, and in recent years Democrats have tended to respond to polls at higher rates than Republicans. Perhaps more important, weighting on recalled vote can specifically increase the influence of Trump supporters, a group that polls struggled to measure accurately in 2016 and 2020.The tactic’s adoption by pollsters in the United States remains far from universal. Several prominent pollsters achieved accurate results without it — including The New York Times/Siena College, which was named America’s most accurate political pollster by FiveThirtyEight after the 2022 cycle.Overall, 2022 was one of the most accurate years for polling in recent history, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight. Many pollsters “probably would have gotten 2022 right even without that extra weighting step, because we did,” said Patrick Murray of the Monmouth University Poll.After 2016, post-election analyses found that polls had consistently underrepresented less educated voters, who tended to disproportionately support Mr. Trump. To fix this, pollsters widely adopted education as an additional survey weight, and a cycle of accurate polls in 2018 seemed to reflect a return to normalcy.But in 2020, polls were more biased than they had been in any modern election, over-representing Democratic support by nearly five percentage points, as opposed to three percentage points — a more normal amount of error — in 2016.“I think one of the reasons 2022 was successful — and even to some extent 2018 — was that Trump himself was not on the ballot.” Mr. Murray said. “If history is any guide, we are probably going to see that nonresponse going into 2024 based on how the Republican nomination is going.”The 2020 election presented another distinct challenge — it took place amid the pandemic. Pollsters found that some Americans, stuck at home and lonely, were more likely to respond to surveys. While that was initially seen as a boon, it might have led to even more bias if it meant the uneven adherence to stay-at-home orders added another source of bias to who picked up the phone.Weighting on recalled vote is not without its concerns.Voters have been shown to have poor recall of whom they voted for or even whether they voted at all, typically being more likely to recall voting for the winner. One study of Canadian voters found up to a quarter of voters were inconsistent when recalling whom they had voted for.This misrepresentation of past vote can push polls in different directions depending on who won the most recent election. In 2022, that meant respondents were more likely to say they had supported Joe Biden, and pollsters using recalled vote would end up giving them less weight, meaning Republican support was bolstered.But with a prior winner from a different party, the effect would be reversed. An assessment by The Times found that weighting its 2020 polls using recalled 2016 vote would have made them even more biased toward Mr. Biden. And a report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research examining how 2020 polls could have been improved found that polls that weighted on recalled vote were no better than those that didn’t.Similarly, in 2022, weighting by recalled vote would have made Times/Siena polls less accurate. As published, without weighting on recalled vote, the final polls of Senate, governor and House races had an average error of less than two percentage points and zero bias toward Democrats or Republicans. When weighted using recalled vote to 2020 election results, average error would have increased by a percentage point, and overall the polls would have been slightly biased toward Republicans.But that might have been a consequence of other decisions The Times makes, which includes weighting to demographic information available on the voter file that is not always available to other pollsters.Other pollsters have found the recalled vote method to yield significant improvements over typical weighting schemes. SSRS used a range of weighting methods in 2022, including recalled vote for some of its polls, and also experimented with weighting on political identification. Its post-election analysis found that using recalled vote as a weight would have been the most accurate overall approach, increasing average accuracy by more than three percentage points over just weighting on standard demographics.“It’s a brute force method,” said Clifford Young, the president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos. “That is, we don’t really know what it corrects for. Does it correct for only nonignorable nonresponse? Or does it correct for coverage bias? Or maybe a likely voter problem? Maybe all three.”Even so, pollsters are generally optimistic. “What the evidence is showing is that it gets us in a much better place in our polls than not using it,” Mr. Young said, noting that he believed most pollsters would be weighting on past vote in 2024. “I think the evidence thus far suggests it does more good than harm.” He added, “If we use the same weighting and correction methods that we used in 2020 in 2024, we’re going to miss the mark.” More

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      Future of Prigozhin’s Vast Empire Is Clouded After Rebellion

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      Over decades, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin amassed considerable clout in Russia and built businesses in at least 15 countries. His whereabouts and the future of his extensive portfolio are now uncertain.A chocolate museum in St. Petersburg. A gold mine in the Central African Republic. Oil and gas ventures off the Syrian coast.The economic ventures of Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a former hot dog seller turned Wagner group warlord who staged a brief mutiny against Russia’s military last month, stretch far beyond the thousands of mercenaries he deployed in Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East.Through a vast network of shell companies and intermediaries, Mr. Prigozhin’s activities have included catering, producing action movies, making beer and vodka, cutting timber, mining diamonds and hiring people to sow disinformation in elections abroad, including the 2016 U.S. election.The exact size of his business is a mystery.A worker removes the logo of the Wagner Group from a building in St. Petersburg, Russia, after Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion.Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via ShutterstockWith Mr. Prigozhin’s whereabouts unknown, the fate of his sprawling empire is uncertain. President Vladimir V. Putin has said Russia financed Mr. Prigozhin’s enterprises, but it’s unclear how much control the Kremlin has over the business network, which reaches thousands of miles away from Moscow, experts say.“It will certainly not look exactly as it has, in terms of who is leading it, how much oversight the Kremlin will have, and how long the leash it will allow Wagner to operate with,” said Catrina Doxsee, an expert on irregular warfare at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based research organization.Here is a look at Mr. Prigozhin’s business interests.Russia and UkraineCatering, real estate and mercenaries.From his humble beginnings as an amateur cross-country skier and former convict, Mr. Prigozhin carved a path through the tumult of post-Soviet Russia, laying the foundations for his empire by opening hot dog kiosks in 1990 and later providing catering for the Kremlin — earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef.”Over the decades, he secured billions in state contracts and controlled an extensive portfolio of businesses, mostly in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city and his birthplace.Mr. Prigozhin’s ventures have included construction, catering and entertainment. He ran a media company, which has begun being dismantled since his mutiny, and pioneered troll farms that sought to shape the 2016 American presidential election. His companies run hotels, restaurants, business centers and a gourmet grocery store on St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare.Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Mr. Prigozhin, right, in a photograph released by Russian state media, during a 2010 tour of Mr. Prigozhin’s catering business in St. Petersburg.Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, via Associated PressWhether his businesses made consistent profits is not clear: Some have gone under, others have stayed afloat. Over the years, Mr. Prigozhin used money from state contracts paid to some of his companies to finance his other projects, including shadowy tasks apparently ordered by the Kremlin.“They were all interconnected, these vessels, in the sense of general management and in the sense of possible flow of funds,” said Marat Gabidullin, a former assistant of Mr. Prigozhin’s who fought for the Wagner group before seeking asylum in France.The Wagner group was paid almost $10 billion by the Russian government, according to Russian state media. Mr. Prigozhin secured contracts worth another $10 billion from the Kremlin for his catering company.On Thursday, the autocratic leader of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who intervened in the mutiny, signaled that at least some of Wagner’s fighting force could stay intact.“Wagner” carved into the wall of a classroom in a school in Velyka Oleksandrivka, Ukraine, which Russian soldiers occupied until the town was liberated by Ukrainian troops in October.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesIn June, Mr. Prigozhin admitted that he used profits from lucrative state contracts to finance Wagner in Africa, Syria and elsewhere — but always “to pursue the interests of the Russian state.”“It all functions as a business model — he uses state resources to pursue various projects,” Mr. Gabidullin said. “And within this, he gets his own bonus.”AfricaSoldiers for hire, and interests in gold and timber.Wagner’s primary business in Africa is mercenaries: From Libya in the north to Mozambique in the south, the group has deployed troops in five African countries, providing security to presidents, propping up authoritarian leaders and fighting armed groups, often at a high cost for civilian populations.In the Central African Republic, Wagner provides security to the president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, and trains the army. Observers have called the group’s actions in the nation “state capture” because of how Wagner has influenced political decisions to further its interests at the expense of the public.According to the United States, a military-led government in the West African nation of Mali has paid Wagner around $200 million since late 2021, essentially for mercenaries to fight against groups affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.Wagner operatives also helped boot out a decade-long United Nations peacekeeping operation, according to White House officials, forcing Mali to rely almost exclusively on Russia.Commandos trained by the Wagner group standing guard during Labor Day celebrations in Bangui, Central African Republic, in 2019.Ashley Gilbertson for The New York TimesBeyond mercenary work, businesses affiliated with Mr. Prigozhin have been present in more than a dozen countries. They mine gold in Sudan and the Central African Republic, where they also export timber, make beer and vodka, run a radio station, and have produced action movies and organized a beauty pageant.A firm affiliated with Mr. Prigozhin also controls the Central African Republic’s largest gold mine, and recently signed new mining permits there for the next 25 years. The mine could bring $100 million in revenues to the group each year, according to Hans Merket, a researcher on minerals for the Brussels-based IPIS organization.Fidèle Gouandjika, a top adviser to the country’s president, said Wagner had protected against rebels; made quality wood available to Central Africans through their timber business; and was selling cheap beer.“So we’re telling them, ‘Take some diamonds, take some gold,’” Mr. Gouandjika said about what Central African officials were offering Wagner for its services. “The West is jealous.”SyriaBashar al-Assad’s protectors and oil and gas explorers.As Mr. Prigozhin staged his mutiny last month, Russian troops in Syria surrounded several bases where Wagner mercenaries were stationed, including around the capital, Damascus. Fearing movement from Wagner fighters, Syrian forces set up checkpoints around the bases; the country’s intelligence services were put on alert; and telecommunications were jammed. The response was another sign of Mr. Prigozhin’s long reach.Officially, Russia intervened in Syria in late 2015 to help the authoritarian regime of President Bashar al-Assad turn the tide against rebels trying to oust him.But Russian paramilitary fighters with a group known as the Slavonic Corps were detected in Syria as early as 2013, experts say. Although detailed connections between the Slavonic Corps and Wagner remain unclear, many Wagner commanders were originally part of the corps, according to Gregory Waters, a scholar at the Middle East Institute.Wagner asserted its presence in Syria in 2017. While the Russian military brought in its air force and commanders, the bulk of its frontline personnel came from Wagner, Mr. Waters said.Wagner fighters both captured territory from rebels and the Islamic State and guarded oil and gas fields and Palmyra, an important tourist site.Wagner fighters now guard Palmyra, an important tourist site in Syria.Omar Sanadiki/Associated PressU.S. intelligence officials have described Wagner’s goal in Syria as seizing oil and gas fields and protecting them for Mr. al-Assad.At least four companies linked to Wagner and registered in Russia have exploration permits for sites in Syria, according to Lou Osborn, an analyst at All Eyes on Wagner, an open-source research group. All have been placed under sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department.These activities have been central to Russia’s quest to become an energy superpower, said Candace Rondeaux, an expert on Wagner who is a senior director at New America, a Washington research group.“With Russia there’s no deconflicting or disentangling military interests from energy interest,” Ms. Rondeaux said.Mr. Gabidullin, the former Wagner fighter, said that Mr. Prigozhin’s far-reaching network abroad had grown too much for the Kremlin to fully control it.“He has so many specialists there,” he said. “It is the Ministry of Defense’s specialists who need to learn from his staff.” More

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      The Biden-Trump Rematch Is Already Here

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      One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million.Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — an increasingly Democratic constituency — has grown by 13.3 million.These trends do not bode well for the prospects of Republican candidates, especially Trump. President Biden won whites with college degrees in 2020, 51-48, but Trump won by a landslide, 67-32, among whites without degrees, according to network exit polls.Even so, there is new data that reflects Trump’s ongoing and disruptive quest for power.In a paper published last year, “Donald Trump and the Lie,” Kevin Arceneaux and Rory Truex, political scientists at Sciences Po-Paris and Princeton, analyzed 40 days of polling conducted intermittently over the crucial period from Oct. 27, 2020, through Jan. 29, 2021.The authors found that Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him has had continuing ramifications:The lie is pervasive and sticky: the number of Republicans and independents saying that they believe the election was fraudulent is substantial, and this proportion did not change appreciably over time or shift after important political developments. Belief in the lie may have buoyed some of Trump supporters’ self-esteem.In reaction to the lie, Arceneaux and Truex write, “there was a significant rise in support for violent political activism among Democrats, which only waned after efforts to overturn the election clearly failed.”Endorsement of the lie pays off for Republicans, Arceneaux and Truex argue: “Republican voters reward politicians who perpetuate the lie, giving Republican candidates an incentive to continue to do so in the next electoral cycle.”These trends are among the most striking developments setting the stage for the 2024 elections.Among the additional conditions working to the advantage of Democrats are the increase in Democratic Party loyalty and ideological consistency; the political mobilization of liberal constituencies by adverse Supreme Court rulings; an initial edge in the fight for an Electoral College majority; and the increase in nonreligious voters along with a decline in churchgoing believers.These and other factors have prompted two Democratic strategists, Celinda Lake and Mike Lux, to declare, “All the elements are in place for a big Democratic victory in 2024.” In “Democrats Could Win a Trifecta in 2024,” a May 9 memo released to the public, the two even voiced optimism over the biggest hurdle facing Democrats, retaining control of the Senate in 2024, when as many as eight Democratic-held seats are competitive while the Republican seats are in solidly red states:While these challenges are real, they can be overcome, and the problems are overstated. Remember that this same tough Senate map produced a net of five Democratic pickups in the 2000 election, which Gore narrowly lost to Bush; six Democratic pickups in 2006, allowing Democrats to retake the Senate; and two more in 2012. If we have a good election year overall, we have a very good chance at Democrats holding the Senate.Republican advantages include high rates of crime (although modestly declining in 2023 so far), homelessness and dysfunction in cities run by Democrats; a parents’ rights movement opposed to teaching of so-called critical race theory and gender-fluid concepts; and declining public support for gay rights and especially trans rights.There are, needless to say, a host of uncertainties.One key factor will be the salience on Election Day of issues closely linked to race in many voters’ minds, including school integration, affordable housing, the end of affirmative action, crime, urban disorder and government spending on social programs. As a general rule, the higher these issues rank in voters’ priorities, the better Republicans do. In that respect, the success of conservatives in barring the use of race in college admissions has taken a Republican issue off the table.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, noted in an email that in the “sour environment” of today’s politics, “many voters may be tempted toward a protest vote, and it is likely that there will be some options available for such voters.” It is not clear, Lee added, “what No Labels will do, but the potential there introduces considerable additional uncertainty.”Asked what factors he would cite as crucial to determining the outcome of the 2024 election, Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, pointed out by email:The economy is the source of the most uncertainty — it is doing well, although inflation is not fully tamed. Will things continue to improve and will Biden start to get credit? This is especially important for white working-class voters in swing states like Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, documents growing Democratic unity in two 2023 papers, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats Are Moving Left” and “The Transformation of the American Electorate.”As a result of these trends toward intraparty consensus, there has been a steady drop in the percentage of Democratic defections to the opposition, as the party’s voters have become less vulnerable to wedge-issue tactics, especially wedge issues closely tied to race.From 2012 to 2020, Abramowitz wrote in the Transformation paper, “there was a dramatic increase in liberalism among Democratic voters.” As a result of these shifts, he continued, “Democratic voters are now as consistent in their liberalism as Republican voters are in their conservatism.”Most important, Abramowitz wrote, therise in ideological congruence among Democratic voters — and especially among white Democratic voters — has had important consequences for voting behavior. For many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.Three Supreme Court decisions handed down in the last week of June — rejecting the Biden administration’s program to forgive student loan debt, affirming the right of a web designer to refuse to construct wedding websites for same-sex couples and ruling unconstitutional the use of race by colleges in student admissions — are, in turn, quite likely to increase Democratic turnout more than Republican turnout on Election Day.Politically, one of the most effective tools for mobilizing voters is to emphasize lost rights and resources.This was the case after last June’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the right to abortion and in the 2022 midterm elections mobilized millions of pro-choice voters. By that logic, the three decisions I mentioned should raise turnout among students, gays and African Americans, all Democratic constituencies.My Times colleague Jonathan Weisman argued in a July 1 article, “Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening,” that the rulings giveDemocrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.In addition, Weisman wrote, “Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024.”The education trends favoring Democrats are reinforced by Americans’ changing religious beliefs. From 2006 to 2022, the Public Religion Research Institute found, the white evangelical Protestant share of the population fell from 23 percent to 13.9 percent. Over the same period, the nonreligious share of the population rose from 16 to 26.8 percent.Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, found that the nonreligious can be broken down into three groups: atheists, who are the most Democratic, voting 85-11 for Biden over Trump; followed by agnostics, 78-18 for Biden; and those Burge calls “nothing in particular,” 63-35 for Biden.The last of the pro-Democratic developments is an initial advantage in Electoral College votes, according to an analysis at this early stage in the contest.Kyle D. Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, published “Electoral College Ratings: Expect Another Highly Competitive Election” last week.“We are starting 260 electoral votes worth of states as at least leaning Democratic,” Kondik writes, “and 235 as at least leaning Republican,” with “just 43 tossup electoral votes at the outset.”In other words, if this prediction holds true until November 2024, the Democratic candidate would need to win 20 more Electoral College votes while the Republican nominee would need to win 35.The competitive states, Kondik continues, “are Arizona (11 votes), Georgia (16) and Wisconsin (10) — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada (6), which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins each time.”In the case of Arizona, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, argued in an email that domestic migration from California to Arizona is substantial enough to help shift the state from red to purple.“In some recent work we have done comparing California, Arizona and Texas,” Cain added, “we find that the movement of Californians is greater in absolute numbers to Texas, but proportionately more impactful to Arizona.”People who move, Cain continued,make Arizona a bit more polarized and close to the Arizona purple profile. They contribute to polarized purpleness. Enough move over a four-year period to have a measurable impact in a close race. Unlike immigrants, domestic migrants can become voters instantly.How about the other side of the aisle?Daniel Kreiss, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina, writing by email, cited the Republican advantage gained from diminished content regulation on social media platforms: “This platform rollback stems broadly from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which gave other platforms a green light to drop electoral and public health protections.”The beneficiaries of this deregulation, Kreiss continued, are “Trump and Republicans more broadly who use disinformation as a strategic political tool.”These content regulation policies are a sharp policy shift on the part of the owners and managers of social media websites, Bridget Barrett, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, and Kreiss write in a June 29 paper, “Platforms Are Abandoning U.S. Democracy.”They argue that in the aftermath of the 2020 electionplatforms took serious steps to protect elections and the peaceful transfer of power, including creating policies against electoral disinformation and enforcing violations — including by Trump and other candidates and elected officials. And deplatforming the former president after an illegitimate attempt to seize power was a necessary step to quell the violence.More recently, Barrett and Kreiss note, “social media platforms have walked away from their commitments to protect democracy. So much so that the current state of platform content moderation is more like 2016 than 2020.”Frances Lee pointed out that Cornel West’s entry into the presidential election as a candidate of the Green Party will siphon some liberal voters away from Biden: “West has announced a presidential bid and has now moved from the People’s Party to the Green Party, which will have ballot access in most states,” she wrote.Insofar as West gains support, it will in all likelihood be at Democrats’ expense. West is a prominent figure in progressive circles and his agenda is explicitly an appeal to the left.In a June 28 appearance on C-SPAN, West declared:We need jobs with a living wage. We need decent housing, quality education, the basic social needs. You can imagine disproportionately Black and brown are wrestling with poverty. The abolition of poverty and homelessness. I want jobs with a living wage across the board. I want a U.S. foreign policy that is not tied to big money and corporate interests.While West will draw support from very liberal Democrats, there is another factor that may well weaken Democratic support among some moderate voters: the seeming insolubility of homeless encampments, shoplifting, carjacking and crime generally in major cities. This has the potential to tilt the playing field in favor of Republican law-and-order candidates, as it did in the 2023 Wisconsin Senate race and in suburban New York House contests.In 2022, crime ranked high among voter concerns, but Republicans who campaigned on themes attacking Democrats as weak on crime met with mixed results.A recent trend raising Republican prospects is the Gallup Poll finding that the percentage of people “who say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable” fell by 7 percentage points, from a record high of 71 percent in 2022 to 64 percent this year.There was a six-point drop among Democrats on this question, from 85 to 79 percent approval, and a precipitous 15-point falloff among Republicans, 56 to 41 percent. Independents, in contrast, went from 71 percent approval to 72 percent. The overall decline reversed 20 years of steadily rising approval, which has grown from 39 percent in 2002 to 71 percent in 2022. Gallup also found that the public is holding increasingly conservative views on key issues related to gender transition.Asked “Do you think transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity or should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” the public favored birth gender by 28 points, 62-34, in May 2021. In May 2023, the margin grew to 41 points, 69-28.Similarly, Gallup asked “Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong to change one’s gender.” In May 2021, 51 percent said morally wrong, 46 percent said acceptable. In May 2023, 55 percent said morally wrong, 43 percent said acceptable.President Biden is a strong supporter of transgender rights. On March 31, the White House released “Statement From President Joe Biden on Transgender Day of Visibility,” in which Biden vowed:My administration will never quit fighting to end discrimination, to stand against unjust state laws, and to guarantee everyone the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are. We’ll never stop working to create a world where everyone can live without fear; where parents, teachers and whole communities come together to support kids, no matter how they identify; and every child is surrounded by compassion and love.Republican candidates are moving in the opposite direction. At the Faith and Freedom conference last month in Washington, Mike Pence promised to “end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, and we will ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatment for kids under the age of 18.”Ron DeSantis told the gathering:The left is lighting the fire of a cultural revolution all across this land. The fire smolders in our schools. It smolders in corporate board rooms. It smolders in the homes of government. We’re told that we must accept that men can get pregnant. We are told to celebrate a swimmer who swam for three years on the men’s team, then switches to the women’s team and somehow is named the women’s champion.The 2020 election raised a new concern for Democrats: Trump’s success in increasing his support from 2016 among Latino voters.Kyle Kondik’s analysis shows that Nevada (17 percent of the vote was Hispanic in 2020) and Arizona (19 percent was Hispanic) are two of the four tossup states in 2024. This suggests that the Latino vote will be crucial.While acknowledging the gains Trump and fellow Republicans have made among Latino voters, a June 2023 analysis of the 2022 election, “Latino Voters & The Case of the Missing Red Wave,” by Equis, a network of three allied, nonpartisan research groups, found that with the exception of Florida, “at the end of the day, there turned out to be basic stability in support levels among Latinos in highly contested races.” In short, the report’s authors continued, “the G.O.P. held gains they had made since 2016/2018 but weren’t able to build on them.”In Florida, the report documented a six-year collapse in Democratic voting among Hispanics: In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 66 percent of the Latino vote; in 2020, Biden won 51 percent and in 2022 Democratic congressional candidates won 44 percent.The Equis study also pointed to some significant Democratic liabilities among Latino voters: Substantial percentages of a key bloc of pro-Democratic Hispanics — those who say they believe Democrats “are better for Hispanics” — harbor significant doubts about the party. For example, 44 percent agreed that “Democrats don’t keep their promises” and 44 percent agreed that “Democrats take Latinos for granted.”In addition, the percentage of Latino voters describing immigration as the top issue — a stance favoring Democrats — has nose-dived, according to the Equis analysis, from 39 percent in 2016 to 16 percent in 2020 and 12 percent in 2022.Where, then, does all this contradictory information leave us as to the probable outcome of the 2024 election? The reasonable answer is: in the dark.The RealClearPolitics average of the eight most recent Trump vs. Biden polls has Trump up by a statistically insignificant 0.6 percent. From August 2021 to the present, RealClear has tracked a total of 101 polls pitting these two against each other. Trump led in 56, Biden 38, and the remainder were ties.While this polling suggests Trump has an even chance, surveys do not fully capture the weight of Trump’s indictments and falsehoods on his own candidacy and, as evidenced in competitive races in 2022, on Republicans who are closely tied to the former president.Among the key voters who, in all likelihood, will pick the next president — relatively well-educated suburbanites — Trump has become toxic. He is, at least in that sense, Biden’s best hope for winning a second term.Even before the votes are counted on Nov. 5, 2024, the most important question may well turn out to be: If Trump is the Republican candidate for a third straight time and loses the election for a second, will he once again attempt to claim victory was stolen from him? And if he does, what will his followers — and for that matter, everyone else — do?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Special Counsel Who Hunted for a Deep-State Conspiracy Presents Muted Findings

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      John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, criticized the F.B.I. during a six-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, told lawmakers on Wednesday that F.B.I. officials had exhibited confirmation bias — even as he defended his work against Democratic accusations that he became a partisan tool.In a nearly six-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Durham rarely offered new information, repeatedly saying he did not want to go beyond his report. That approach echoed an appearance in 2019 before the same committee by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.The hearing may be the final — official, at least — chapter in the complex saga of the Russia investigation and former President Donald J. Trump’s repeated efforts to reframe it as a deep-state plot, which has been a source of turbulence in American political life for more than six years. Mr. Durham retired after completing his report last month, and Senate Democrats have not invited him to testify.For years, Mr. Trump and his allies stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would find a conspiracy lurking in the origins of the Russia investigation and would prosecute high-level officials. But Mr. Durham developed only two peripheral cases, both of which ended in acquittals, while citing flaws in the F.B.I.’s early investigative steps he attributed to confirmation bias.“There were identified, documented, significant failures of a highly sensitive, unique investigation that was undertaken by the F.B.I.,” Mr. Durham said. “The investigation clearly reveals that decisions that were made were made in one direction. If there was something that was inconsistent with the notion that Trump was involved in a well-coordinated conspiracy with the Russians, that information was largely discarded or ignored.”The hearing was largely a predicable display of partisanship, with each party trading claims about the merits of the underlying investigation into Russia’s attempt to manipulate the 2016 election in Mr. Trump’s favor. Mr. Mueller documented myriad links between Russia and Trump campaign officials, but did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.Republicans railed against the Russia investigation as unjustified and portrayed it as politically motivated and corrupt, focusing on flawed wiretap applications and text messages in which F.B.I. officials expressed animus toward Mr. Trump.Democrats defended it as legitimate and necessary by turning to the substance of Mr. Mueller’s work. Not only did he indict numerous Russians — and win convictions of multiple Trump associates on other crimes — but he also uncovered how the Trump campaign’s chairman had shared internal polling and strategy with a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant the government says is a Russian intelligence agent, among other things.For large portions of the hearing, Mr. Durham served as a foil for both purposes, as lawmakers on each side asked questions intended to affirm whatever facts or claims they wanted to emphasize.President Donald J. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr and their allies in Congress stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would find a “deep state” conspiracy.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMuch of his own critique of the investigation was familiar territory. The most factually grounded portions — especially errors and omissions in a set of wiretap applications that relied in part on claims in the so-called Steele dossier, a dubious compendium of what turned out to be opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — echoed a December 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Mr. Durham repeated those findings, but offered no concrete new suggestions for reforms.Other parts were more ephemeral. After Mr. Durham’s initial effort to find intelligence abuses at the heart of the Russia investigation came up empty, he shifted to hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign. He used court filings and his report to insinuate that the campaign set out to defraud the F.B.I. and frame Mr. Trump, although he never charged any such conspiracy. Some Republicans, however, treated that idea as established fact.“What role did the Clinton campaign play in this hoax?” asked Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California, adding, “Exactly what was the ‘Clinton Plan?’”But some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters expressed disappointment that Mr. Durham did not live up to the grander expectations that he would put high-level officials in prison and prove a deep-state conspiracy.For example, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, insisted that suspicions about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia emerged because of an operation by Western intelligence agencies — a conspiracy theory that Mr. Durham set out to prove but failed to find evidence to support. Mr. Gaetz said Mr. Durham had let the country down, and compared the special counsel’s inquiry to the Washington Generals, the basketball team whose job is to lose in exhibition games against the Harlem Globetrotters.“When you are part of the cover-up, Mr. Durham, then it makes our job harder,” Mr. Gaetz said.Mr. Durham replied that Mr. Gaetz’s comments were “offensive.”Representative Matt Gaetz suggested that Mr. Durham was part of a cover-up.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesBut while most of the Republicans on the committee gave Mr. Durham a warmer welcome, he did not always say things that supported their position. Mr. Durham called Mr. Mueller a “patriot” and did not contradict any of his findings. He said that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election — and characterized that intelligence operation as a “significant threat.”Pushed by Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, to go beyond his report’s conclusion that F.B.I. agents had acted with “confirmation bias” and accuse them in his testimony of having taken steps motivated by political favoritism, Mr. Durham demurred, saying that “it’s difficult to get into somebody else’s head.”And he said that the F.B.I. had “an affirmative duty” to open some kind of investigation into the allegation that served as the Russia investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat said that a Trump campaign adviser had made a comment suggesting that the campaign had advance knowledge that Russia would anonymously dump out hacked Democratic emails.Still, he also testified that “in my view,” that information did not amount to “a legitimate basis to open as a full investigation” and that the bureau ought to have opened it as a lower-tier inquiry, like an “assessment” or a “preliminary” investigation. That went slightly beyond his report, which had argued that opening the inquiry at a lower level would have been better.The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, concluded in 2019 that the same information was a sufficient basis to open a “full” counterintelligence inquiry.Throughout the hearing, Democrats pressed Mr. Durham to acknowledge or explain certain findings from a New York Times article in January examining how his inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes.Mr. Durham rarely offered new information, repeatedly saying he did not want to go beyond his report. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThey asked him, for example, why his longtime deputy, Nora R. Dannehy, resigned from his team in September 2020. The Times reported that she did so in protest after disputes over prosecutorial ethics, including the drafting of a potential interim report before the 2020 election.Mr. Durham spoke highly of Ms. Dannehy but declined to say why she had resigned. He called the Times article “unsourced” but did not deny its findings, adding, “To the extent The New York Times wrote an article suggesting certain things, it is what it is.”Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, asked Mr. Durham whether it was true, as the Times also reported, that when he and Attorney General William P. Barr traveled to Italy to pursue a certain pro-Trump conspiracy theory, Italian officials denied it but passed on a tip about unrelated financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump.Mr. Barr decided the allegation, whose details remain unclear, was too serious to ignore but had Mr. Durham control an investigation into it, and he filed no charges, The Times reported.“The question’s outside the scope of what I think I’m authorized to talk about — it’s not part of the report,” Mr. Durham replied, but added: “I can tell you this. That investigative steps were taken, grand jury subpoenas were issued and it came to nothing.” More

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      DeSantis Takes Clear Aim at Trump in Nevada, an Important Early State

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida avoided mentioning Donald Trump at a G.O.P. fund-raiser in Nevada, but he took clear aim at the former president.In black boots, jeans and an untucked shirt — the fund-raiser dress code specified “ranch casual” — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Saturday tried to persuade Republican voters in Nevada still loyal to former President Donald J. Trump that the party’s formula for winning elections was beyond its shelf life.Headlining a conservative jamboree in the swing state, where loyalties to Mr. Trump still run deep, Mr. DeSantis never mentioned his rival for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination during a speech in Gardnerville, Nev.But the Florida governor sought to draw a not-so-subtle contrast between himself and the former president, a onetime ally who is the party’s overwhelming front-runner in a crowded Republican field. He described last year’s midterm elections as another disappointment in a string of defeats for the party, while touting his more than 1.2 million-vote margin of victory in his re-election last November.“We’ve developed a culture of losing in this party,” Mr. DeSantis said, adding, “You’re not going to get a mulligan on the 2024 election.”Mr. DeSantis spoke for nearly an hour at the Basque Fry, a barbecue fund-raiser that supports conservative groups in Nevada.Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Trump, hit back at Mr. DeSantis in a statement to The Times on Saturday.“Ron DeSantis is a proven liar and fraud,” he said. “That’s why he’s collapsing in the polls — both nationally and statewide. He should be careful before his chances in 2028 completely disappear.”The Basque Fry has risen in stature since it was first held in 2015, drawing a stream of Republican presidential candidates to the Corley Ranch in the Carson Valley with its rugged backdrop of the Sierra Nevada.Past headliners have included Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who earlier this month entered the race, had been scheduled to attend in 2017 but canceled because Hurricane Harvey was bearing down on the Gulf Coast.It’s an opportunity for White House aspirants to make an elevator pitch to rank-and-file conservatives in Nevada, a crucial early proving ground that in 2021 replaced its party-run caucuses with a primary. Republicans oppose the change, passed by the State Legislature, and are suing the state to keep the caucuses.Mr. DeSantis’s visit to Nevada punctuated a week in which Mr. Trump dominated the news cycle with his arraignment on Tuesday in a 37-count federal indictment over his handling of classified documents after leaving office.As Mr. Trump’s chief Republican rival, Mr. DeSantis did not mention the indictment outright, but instead echoed G.O.P. attacks on the Justice Department and pledged to replace the director of the F.B.I. if elected.“We are going to end the weaponization of this government once and for all,” Mr. DeSantis said.In 2016, the last presidential election during which the G.O.P. did not have a sitting president, Mr. Trump won the Republican caucuses in Nevada, where rural activists and Mormon voters wield influence. He finished 22 percentage points ahead of his closest rival, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.During the midterm elections last fall, Mr. Trump campaigned for Republicans in Nevada at a rally in Minden, which is next to Gardnerville. The elections turned out to be a mixed showing for the G.O.P., which flipped the governor’s office but lost pivotal races for the Senate and the House, including the seat held by Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat who had been considered vulnerable.Ms. Cortez Masto’s defeat of Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general who was the de facto host of Saturday’s fund-raiser, helped give Democrats outright control of the Senate.Mr. Laxalt, who was a roommate of Mr. DeSantis when they were both Navy officers, introduced him to the crowd of about 2,500 people.“This is the kind of leader we need,” he said.Mr. Laxalt began the Basque Fry in 2015, building on a tradition that was started by his grandfather, Paul Laxalt, a former United States senator and governor of Nevada who died in 2018.Northern Nevada has one of the highest concentrations in the nation of people of Basque ancestry, a group that includes Mr. Laxalt, who also ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018.Jim McCrossin, 78, a retiree from Virginia City, Nev., who surveyed the ranch in a DeSantis cap, said that he had previously supported Mr. Trump but worried about his electability.“I just think there’s so much hate for him,” he said, adding, “Trump’s been arrested twice, and that’s probably not the last time.”He said that Mr. DeSantis “doesn’t have the drama.”His household is divided: His wife, Jacquie McCrossin, said that she still favored Mr. Trump, even though she had on a DeSantis cap.Shellie Wood, 72, a retired nail technician and gold miner from Winnemucca, Nev., who sported a Trump 2020 camouflage cap, said that Mr. DeSantis would make a strong running mate for Mr. Trump, but that it was not his moment.Still, Ms. Wood said Mr. DeSantis had made a positive impression on her with his record in Florida.“He’s stood up against Disney, and that’s something a lot of people didn’t have the gumption to do,” she said.Mr. DeSantis repeatedly reminded the crowd of his feud with Disney, which he and other Republicans turned into an avatar of “woke” culture after the company criticized a state law that prohibited classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity.In the buildup to his formal debut as a candidate last month, Mr. DeSantis grappled with being labeled by the media and rivals as awkward at retail politics and in one-on-one settings with voters.Before stepping up to the podium, with the snow-peaked mountains behind him, Mr. DeSantis mingled with a group of V.I.P.s for about 30 minutes in a reception that was closed to the news media.Mr. DeSantis waves as he walks behind his wife, Casey DeSantis, and their children, Madison, Mamie and Mason.Jason Henry for The New York TimesOutside the reception, Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, who has been an omnipresent campaigner and influence on the policies of her husband’s administration, took selfies and signed autographs for local Republicans. She had on boots, too.While Mr. DeSantis impressed many of the attendees, there was still a pro-Trump undercurrent at the event. Shawn Newman, 58, a truck driver from Fernley, Nev., who hovered near a table with DeSantis campaign swag while wearing a ubiquitous red Trump cap, said Mr. Trump was still his candidate.“Trump’s above their reach,” he said of the other Republican candidates.As Mr. DeSantis worked a rope line after his speech, one man handed him a campaign hat to sign. In his other hand, he clutched a Trump cap. More

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      Trump’s Candidacy: Evaluated by 11 Opinion Writers

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Donald Trump, the former president. More