Presidential Election of 2024

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      Should Trump Be Removed From the Ballot?

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      More from our inbox:Reflections After Claudine Gay’s Resignation at HarvardLegal challenges similar to the one former President Donald J. Trump faces in Colorado are pending in at least 16 additional states. Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Seeing Threat to Democracy, With Trump on Ballot or Not” (front page, Dec. 31):The argument by Republicans like J.D. Vance and Chris Christie and Democrats like Gavin Newsom that removing Donald Trump from the ballot would be anti-democratic and would deprive voters of the right to choose their president is flawed in two respects.First, the 14th Amendment — like the rest of the Constitution — was adopted through a democratic process. It is no more anti-democratic to deny Mr. Trump a place on the ballot because he engaged in insurrection than it is to disqualify a 34-year-old from running for president because of the age requirement.Second, if the Supreme Court chooses not to enforce the 14th Amendment on the premise that voters should be able to make an unfettered decision, it must give voters an opportunity to assess all of the facts for themselves. If the court were to reverse the Colorado decision to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot, a necessary corollary must be an expedited criminal trial on the Jan. 6-related indictment so that voters can be fully informed before deciding whether to vote for Mr. Trump.The polls suggest that the results of this trial could change the votes of a significant number of Mr. Trump’s supporters and could determine the outcome of the election.Randy SpeckWashingtonTo the Editor:“Seeing Threat to Democracy, With Trump on Ballot or Not” leaves out a crucial problem: the glacial pace of the criminal justice system. Whether former President Donald Trump is guilty of insurrection should have already been decided in court. But our justice system is too slow, and too vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s favorite legal strategy, to delay, delay, delay.Since March 2023, Mr. Trump has been charged with 91 felonies in four cases: falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, and attempting to overturn the 2020 election through an insurrection and by trying to strong-arm Georgia officials. But we haven’t seen Mr. Trump cleared or convicted of these charges, charges filed only years after the fact.With courtroom justice delayed, and mountains of compelling evidence publicly available, it’s no surprise that challenges have been filed in 32 states to consider whether Mr. Trump is guilty of insurrection and thus ineligible to run for president.Deciding Mr. Trump’s guilt or innocence before the next election is still possible. But it will require judicial officials to act faster than may be comfortable or usual. American democracy is at stake, making it imperative that justice not be denied through delay.Tom LevyOakland, Calif.To the Editor:Re “How Justices May Weigh Trump Case,” by Adam Liptak (news analysis, front page, Dec. 30):In 2000, I wrote a statement eventually signed by 673 law professors (and run as a full-page ad in The Times) denouncing the Bush v. Gore justices for acting as “political partisans, not judges of a court of law.” Will they do so again?The Republican-appointed justices can escape partisanship by rejecting the feeble arguments against removing Donald Trump from the ballot.First, the 14th Amendment plainly applies to the presidency. Who can take seriously the notion that the amendment’s authors wanted to prevent insurrectionists from running for dogcatcher but not the most powerful office in the land?Second, Jan. 6 was obviously an insurrection — a violent attempt to overturn an election and prevent a lawfully elected president from taking office.Finally, those who argue “let the voters decide” ignore that it was precisely the point of the constitutional provision to prevent voters from deciding to put insurrectionists back into power.Anti-democratic? In a way. Those who wrote Section 3 of the 14th Amendment recognized that American democracy remained at risk from those who had once tried to overthrow our government. When it came to insurrection, their view was: “One strike, you’re out.”We face the very same risks today. An insurrectionist wants another shot at dictatorship. The Constitution says no way.Mitchell ZimmermanPalo Alto, Calif.To the Editor:Re “In Trump Case, Voters’ Will vs. Rule of Law,” by Charlie Savage (news analysis, Dec. 23):Mr. Savage considers the argument that removing Donald Trump’s name from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment would deprive voters of the right to pick their leaders, and he sees a clash between voters’ rights and the principle that no one is above the law.But there is no such conflict here. We must of course respect voters’ rights, if our democracy is to endure. Which is all the more reason to enforce the 14th Amendment and keep Mr. Trump off the ballot.He was already rejected by the voters in 2020, and he refused to accept their decision. He refused to honor his constitutional duty to enable the peaceful transfer of power. He attempted to deprive millions of voters of their right to have their votes counted. One purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is to prevent such people from repeating such a travesty.Let us also dispense with the argument that we should keep Mr. Trump on the ballot to avoid social unrest. The coming election — assuming a rematch between President Biden and Mr. Trump — will be fraught with problems, no matter the outcome.If Mr. Trump wins, he will keep his promises to destroy many of our democratic institutions; if he loses, he will not accept his defeat, and we will see a replay of 2020, and possibly of Jan. 6, 2021.The consequences of enforcing the law might be dire, but the consequences of not enforcing it might be worse.Larry HohmSeattleReflections After Claudine Gay’s Resignation at Harvard Adam Glanzman for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “What Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” by Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 4):I applaud Dr. Gay’s guest essay. She emphasizes how her position as a Black woman in a position of power partly explains the venom with which she has been attacked. The press, including The New York Times, should be drawing greater attention to the rampant misogyny unleashed in these attacks on leading women in academia.Susan Laird ModyPlattsburgh, N.Y.The writer is emerita associate professor of education and gender and women’s studies at SUNY Plattsburgh.To the Editor:Claudine Gay wraps herself in Harvard’s toga of integrity. It simply won’t work, not for herself nor for Harvard. Plagiarism allegations are serious, especially for an academic researcher — or for a president of a leading academic institution. The best she can do now is to leave gracefully, without excuses or explanations.Mark CastelinoNewarkThe writer is an associate professor of finance at Rutgers Business School.To the Editor:As a Harvard alumnus, I for one am sorry to see Claudine Gay go. Not because she was a perfect president. But because she demonstrated several qualities often lacking in public figures today: kindness, humility and a commitment to growth.I also don’t understand people who say she wasn’t “qualified” because she didn’t have a voluminous research record. The presidency of Harvard is not a Nobel Prize. It’s an administrative role, and Dr. Gay was an accomplished university administrator. We should consider the agendas of those who suggest otherwise.Bernie ZipprichNew York More

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      How Donald Trump Has Used Fear and Favor to Win GOP Endorsements

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      The former president keeps careful watch over his endorsements from elected Republicans, aided by a disciplined and methodical behind-the-scenes operation.On his last day as president on Jan. 20, 2021, Donald J. Trump stood in a snapping wind and waved goodbye to relatives and supporters before he took his final flight on Air Force One back to Mar-a-Lago. No elected Republican of any stature showed up at Joint Base Andrews for the bleak farewell.Mr. Trump, at that moment, was a pariah among Republican elites. The party’s leaders in the House and Senate, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, blamed him for the Capitol siege. Party fund-raisers assured donors they were done with him. On conference calls, House Republican leaders contemplated a “post-Trump” G.O.P.Today, three years after Jan. 6 and more than a week before the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Trump has almost entirely subjugated the elected class of the Republican Party. As of this week, every member of the House Republican leadership is formally backing his campaign to recapture the White House.Mr. Trump has obsessed over his scorecard of endorsers, according to more than half a dozen Trump advisers and people in regular contact with him, most of whom insisted on anonymity to describe private conversations.He sees gathering the formal endorsements as a public validation of his triumphant return that serves his strategy of portraying himself as the inevitable victor. He calls endorsements the “E word”; when lawmakers merely say they “support” him, he considers it insufficient and calls that the “S word.” In recent weeks, his allies have told lawmakers that Mr. Trump will be closely watching who has and hasn’t endorsed him before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15.Mr. Trump works his endorsements through both fear and favor, happily cajoling fellow politicians by phone while firing off ominous social media posts about those who don’t fall in line quickly enough. In October, he felled a top candidate for House speaker, Representative Tom Emmer, by posting that voting for him “would be a tragic mistake!” On Wednesday, Mr. Emmer capitulated and endorsed him.“They always bend the knee,” Mr. Trump said privately of Mr. Emmer’s endorsement, according to a person who spoke to him.And Mr. Trump is privately ranting about and workshopping nicknames for other holdouts, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.“Ted — he shouldn’t even exist,” Mr. Trump said recently of Mr. Cruz, a 2016 rival, according to a person who heard the remarks and recounted them soon after. “I could’ve destroyed him. I kind of did destroy him in 2016, if you think about it. But then I let him live.”Aided by a disciplined and methodical political operation and by the rallying effect that his criminal charges have had on Republicans, Mr. Trump has demonstrated a remarkable show of force for a former president whose impeachment on the way out of office was supported by more members of his own party than any previous impeachment in American history. And he has done this while facing 91 felony charges across four criminal cases.Though he still brands himself an outsider, Mr. Trump is now unequivocally the favored candidate of Republican insiders. His rivals, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, are promoting their endorsements by the governors of the first two nominating states in Iowa and New Hampshire. Beyond that, the endorsements race, at the national level, has been a wipeout.Mr. Trump has endorsements from nearly 100 members of the House of Representatives. The next closest candidate, Mr. DeSantis, who served in the House, has only five. Ms. Haley has one.In the Senate — the body of elected Republicans most resistant to Mr. Trump — he has 19 endorsements. Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley have zero. More G.O.P. senators will soon follow. Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming are expected to endorse Mr. Trump before the Iowa caucuses, according to two people briefed on their thinking.Senator John Barrasso listening to Mr. Trump speak with reporters after a weekly Senate Republican weekly luncheon in 2020.Patrick Semansky/Associated PressThe chairmen of the Republican Party’s House and Senate campaign committees were both early endorsers of Mr. Trump. He has almost four times as many endorsements from governors as Mr. DeSantis has. Mr. Trump’s political team, meanwhile, has told people it plans to not work with the Republican Governors Association because the group’s executive director has been an adviser to Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who endorsed Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Trump has been courting Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, placing several calls to him since he ended his campaign on Nov. 12 and deploying allies like Lindsey Graham, a fellow South Carolina senator, to make the case for Mr. Scott to issue an endorsement before their state’s primary on Feb. 24, two people familiar with the outreach said.Mr. Trump has dealt with his 2024 campaign rivals differently from 2016 — with a longer view to gaining their endorsements.In 2016, he derided nearly all of his competitors in deeply personal terms, mocking their physical appearances and even giving out the phone number of Mr. Graham, then a candidate, at a rally. In this campaign, Mr. Trump has saved his attacks for Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, but has avoided criticizing others whose support he hopes to gain.“People are looking around, ‘Hell, look at all these endorsements’ — that doesn’t happen overnight,” Mr. McCarthy, who announced his retirement from Congress after being driven out of the speakership, said in an interview. “He has a sophisticated system to going about it.”Tim Scott during the third Republican presidential primary debate in November. Mr. Scott ended his campaign later that month and is now being courted by Mr. Trump for an endorsement.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesBlunt force and threatsEarly in his post-presidential life, Mr. Trump weaponized the power of his endorsement to an extent that no predecessor had ever attempted.He made it known he was eager to intervene in Republican primaries. Given his cult following among G.O.P. voters, his endorsement, at times, packed the power to end a race.Entire primary campaigns were organized around winning his endorsement. Trump insiders were hired by candidates as “consultants” for the sole purpose of saying nice things about them to Mr. Trump in the hope he might endorse them. Mr. Trump received these candidates at his homes in Florida and New Jersey and watched gleefully as they, in Mr. Trump’s own words to aides, “kissed my ass.”In 2021, Mr. Trump endorsed dozens of candidates at every level. No chit was too small to collect, as when he endorsed Vito Fossella for borough president in Staten Island, N.Y. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Mr. Trump accelerated his efforts, ultimately endorsing more than 200 candidates.Nowhere was his power more evident than in the Ohio and Pennsylvania Senate primaries. Mr. Trump endorsed J.D. Vance in Ohio and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, taking two candidates not expected to win and ensuring their nominations. Mr. Oz lost in November, showing the limits of Mr. Trump’s sway in general elections. Mr. Vance became one of the first senators to endorse Mr. Trump and has been lobbying colleagues to do the same.Republicans facing primaries saw that Mr. Trump could destroy their political careers. Then there were the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in 2021. He sought revenge in 2022, and only two of the 10 are still in Congress.Supporters cheering for Mr. Trump as he arrived at a campaign rally in Reno in December.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesPersonal courtshipAn underrated factor in Mr. Trump’s domination of party elites is his intense courtship of them — offering a level of direct access that no president in recent times has granted to rank-and-file lawmakers.Since 2017, Mr. Trump has invested hundreds of hours in his political relationships, repeatedly using the trappings of the presidency to do so. He is constantly on the phone to Republican lawmakers. He invites them to dinner at his clubs, for rounds of golf and for flights on his jet.His relationship-building paid huge dividends when he needed it most.On Nov. 15, 2022, Mr. Trump announced his thirdcampaign for president. The midterms had been horrible for Republicans and Mr. Trump received most of the blame. Trump-endorsed election deniers lost winnable races. The much-hyped “red tsunami” never materialized. Democrats defied expectations to hold onto power in the Senate. And Republicans, favored to seize the House by a big margin, won only the barest majority.Making matters worse for Mr. Trump, the Republican who had the best night was his expected top rival in the 2024 primaries, Mr. DeSantis, who was re-elected in Florida in a landslide.Only a handful of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters endorsed him right away. But Mr. Trump knew he had more support than was publicly evident. His team structured its early campaign activity around gathering endorsements, with Brian Jack, his former White House political director, who serves as his liaison to Congress, managing the process.Last January, Mr. Trump traveled to the South Carolina Capitol for his first public campaign event, where he announced his leadership team in the state, led by Gov. Henry McMaster and Mr. Graham. This was a display of power in the backyard of his future 2024 competitors — Ms. Haley, the state’s former governor, and Mr. Scott, its junior senator.Mr. Trump and his team replicated this approach in state after state — and by the early spring of 2023 they had momentum. The most important moment in the endorsement battle, according to Trump advisers, was his humiliation of Mr. DeSantis in Florida. As Mr. DeSantis took a heavily publicized trip to Washington in April, a month before he declared his candidacy, the Trump team ruined his visit by rolling out a series of congressional endorsements, including in Florida.On April 20, Mr. Trump invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago the 10 Florida lawmakers who had endorsed him. They arrived to signed Make America Great Again hats on their place settings. Representative Byron Donalds, a close DeSantis ally in the past, sat directly next to Mr. Trump.Representative Byron Donalds with Mr. Trump in 2019.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesA permission structureThe Trump team has focused on creating permission structures for Republican lawmakers queasy about Mr. Trump to feel comfortable again supporting him.Senator Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Senate campaign arm, has been one of the most important players in that strategy.In early February, Mr. Daines had his first face-to-face meeting with the former president after being elected to serve as chairman. They met in Mr. Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago and Mr. Daines walked him through the Senate electoral map for 2024.“It’s very important that the president and myself work closely not only on his re-election, but also, importantly, what we can do here to win back the United States Senate,” Mr. Daines said in an interview.Mr. Daines did not endorse Mr. Trump that day. Instead, the chairman and Mr. Trump conveyed a powerful image to the rest of the party: They posed for a photograph, thumbs up, amid the familiar Mar-a-Lago décor of golden drapes and upholstery.Less than three months later, in late April, Mr. Daines became the first member of the Republican Senate leadership to endorse Mr. Trump. More

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      Trump Wants Jack Smith Held in Contempt of Court in Federal Election Case

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      The former president’s lawyers sought to have Jack Smith and two deputies explain why they should not be held in contempt of court for taking new steps in the case after it was put on hold.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that they want the special counsel, Jack Smith, and two of his top deputies to be held in contempt of court and sanctioned for violating a judge’s order that effectively froze the criminal case accusing Mr. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.The lawyers in their request seek to force Mr. Smith and his team to explain why they should not be held in contempt and possibly pay a portion of Mr. Trump’s legal fees. The request was the latest aggressive move in what has quickly turned into a legal slugfest between the defense and prosecution, underscoring how critical the issue of timing has become in the election subversion case.The spat began last month when Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case in Federal District Court in Washington, put all of its proceedings on hold until Mr. Trump resolved his attempts to have the underlying charges dismissed with claims that he has immunity from prosecution in the case.Those arguments will be heard on Tuesday by a federal appeals court in Washington and are likely to make their way to the Supreme Court for another level of review.The trial in the election case is set to begin in early March. Hoping to keep it on schedule, prosecutors working for Mr. Smith have, on occasion, sought to nudge the matter forward despite Judge Chutkan’s order.A few days after the order was imposed, for instance, they told the judge that they had sent Mr. Trump’s legal team a draft list of exhibits that they intended to use at the trial and thousands of pages of additional discovery materials. They noted that the list and the documents had been turned over “to help ensure that trial proceeds promptly if and when” the case was back in action.Then, two days after Christmas, the prosecutors filed a memo to Judge Chutkan, asking her to stop Mr. Trump from making “baseless political claims” or introducing “irrelevant disinformation” at the trial.After Mr. Smith sent the draft list of exhibits, lawyers for Mr. Trump fired off an angry letter to Judge Chutkan, complaining about how prosecutors had “improperly and unlawfully attempted to advance this case” in violation of her order pausing it.But the lawyers were silent about Mr. Smith’s second such move until Thursday.In a 15-page motion, John F. Lauro, writing for Mr. Trump’s legal team, accused the prosecution of “partisan-driven misconduct” and said they had treated Judge Chutkan’s decision to pause the case as “merely a suggestion meaning less than the paper it is written on.”Mr. Lauro also asked for a series of potentially severe consequences, starting with an order that would force Mr. Smith and two of his deputies — Thomas P. Windom and Molly Gaston — to come up with answers for why they should not be held in contempt and be made to pay whatever legal fees Mr. Trump may have incurred by dealing with their recent filings and productions.Moreover, Mr. Lauro asked the judge to make the prosecutors tell her why they should not be forced to “immediately withdraw” the last motion they filed and be “forbidden from submitting any further filing” without express permission.“These were no accidents,” Mr. Lauro wrote about Mr. Smith’s attempts to keep pushing the case forward. “The submissions were fully planned, intentional violations of the stay order, which the prosecutors freely admit they perpetrated in hopes of unlawfully advancing this case.”The skirmish over the stay order reflects how central the question of timing is to the election interference case. In addition to the back and forth about legal issues large and small, the defense and prosecution have been waging a second war over when the case will go to trial — specifically, if it will be held before or after the 2024 election.For weeks, Mr. Smith and his team have been trying to keep the trial on schedule, arguing that the public has an enormous interest in a speedy prosecution of Mr. Trump, who is the Republican Party’s leading candidate for the presidency. In doing so, they have gone to unusual lengths, at one point making a failed request to the Supreme Court to leap ahead of the appeals court that is now hearing Mr. Trump’s immunity claims and to render a quick decision.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have used every means at their disposal to slow the case down, hoping to delay a trial until after the election is decided. If that happened and Mr. Trump won, he would have the power to order the federal charges against him dropped. More

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      Christie Says in a New Ad That He Was Wrong to Support Trump in 2016

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      Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said in a new ad released Thursday that he had been wrong to endorse Donald J. Trump in 2016.“I have an admission to make,” Mr. Christie said directly to the camera in the 60-second ad, part of a series his campaign is running in New Hampshire, where he has staked his campaign on a strong showing. “Eight years ago, when I decided to endorse Donald Trump for president, I did it because he was winning, and I did it because I thought I could make him a better candidate and a better president. Well, I was wrong. I made a mistake.”Mr. Christie endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016 after ending his own presidential campaign, and he went on to be a powerful surrogate. His campaign argues that, while several Republicans who previously supported Mr. Trump are now running against him for the party’s nomination, Mr. Christie is the only one willing to say he erred by supporting Mr. Trump in the first place. He suggested in the ad that this was evidence of his “character.”“Now, we’re confronted with the very same choice again,” he said in the ad, which was first reported by Axios. “Donald Trump is ahead in the polls, so everyone says, ‘Anyone who’s behind him should drop out, and we should make our choice Donald Trump versus Joe Biden.’ Well, Joe Biden has had the wrong policies, and Donald Trump would sell the soul of this country. Neither choice is acceptable to me, and it shouldn’t be acceptable to you.”Over the past few weeks, an increasing number of Republicans — most prominently Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — have called on Mr. Christie to end his campaign. Their argument is not for a rematch between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, but rather for narrowing the field of Mr. Trump’s primary opponents to a single candidate who can defeat him and prevent such a rematch.Mr. Sununu and many Republican donors and strategists think that candidate should be Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor.Mr. Christie is polling better in New Hampshire than in other early-voting states — he is averaging about 11 percent there, good enough for third place ahead of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — but he is still far behind Ms. Haley, who is herself far behind Mr. Trump. Mr. Christie says Ms. Haley is not sufficiently distinguishing herself from the former president.Mr. Sununu’s endorsement of Ms. Haley last month was a blow to the Christie campaign. He followed it a couple of weeks later by declaring Mr. Christie’s bid to be “at an absolute dead end” and suggesting that his continued presence in the race would only help Mr. Trump. More

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      Haley Jokes That New Hampshire Primary Will ‘Correct’ the Result of the Iowa Caucuses

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      Campaigning in New Hampshire on Wednesday, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina said that voters there would “correct” the result of the Iowa caucuses — the night before she was scheduled to appear for events in Iowa.“You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it,” Ms. Haley said, prompting laughter from the crowd of New Hampshire voters. “And then my sweet state of South Carolina brings it home.”Local campaign surrogates for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is vying with Ms. Haley for second place in Iowa polls for the Republican presidential nomination, seized upon the remark as dismissive of the state’s first-in-the-nation balloting, scheduled for Jan. 15.Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said, “I trust Iowans to make their own decisions. No ‘corrections’ needed.” Bob Vander Plaats, the Iowa evangelical leader who has also thrown his support behind Mr. DeSantis, called Ms. Haley’s quip an “admission of getting beat in the Hawkeye State.”Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley are scheduled to participate in back-to-back town halls Thursday night in Iowa. The events, to be broadcast live on CNN, will be among the few remaining opportunities for the two candidates to draw away support from former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Haley’s teasing remark also reflects her dim chances of a victory in Iowa, where Mr. Trump is the overwhelming favorite; he is polling around or slightly below 50 percent support. Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are polling below 20 percent in Iowa in a virtual tie for second place.In contrast, Ms. Haley has decisively risen from the pack of Mr. Trump’s rivals in New Hampshire. Recent polls there have shown her in second place far above other candidates, except for Mr. Trump.Ms. Haley’s quip also reflects the perils of campaigning across state lines in quick succession: Remarks playing to the local crowd in one state can become a liability in the next. More

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      DeSantis and Haley Will Appear in Dueling Town Halls Tonight

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      It’s another busy day on the presidential campaign trail in Iowa.Eleven days out from the caucuses, two of Donald J. Trump’s rivals, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will participate Thursday night in back-to-back town halls to be broadcast live on CNN.For Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, who have been battling for second place, the town halls will provide prime-time opportunities for them to win over Iowans ahead of the Jan. 15 caucuses. Mr. DeSantis will go first at 9 p.m. Eastern time, followed by Ms. Haley an hour later.Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur, is keeping up his fevered sprint across Iowa, aiming to beat the odds on Caucus Day despite his fourth-place position in state polls.The man they are all trying to take down, Mr. Trump, won’t start appearing at Iowa events until Friday, but his surrogates are stumping on his behalf. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right firebrand from Georgia, and Eric Trump, a son of the former president, will hold simultaneous campaign events in different parts of Iowa Thursday night.Mr. Trump, the overwhelming favorite of Republicans in Iowa, is regularly shown in state polls to be around or slightly below 50 percent support, with Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley polling below 20 percent in a virtual tie.But Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis have so far spent far more money attacking each other than they have Mr. Trump, and they have both been very cautious whenever they do venture toward criticizing the former president.Ms. Haley has focused on policy differences between her and Mr. Trump, on attack ads Mr. Trump has put out against her, and on the “chaos” that she says has followed him throughout the years. Although Mr. DeSantis has gone after Mr. Trump for making campaign promises in 2016 that he failed to keep while in office, Mr. DeSantis so far appears more comfortable attacking Ms. Haley. He has called her a liberal, a flip-flopper and the favored candidate of Wall Street, while Ms. Haley has mostly ignored him when speaking on the campaign trail.Mr. DeSantis’s refusal to more directly criticize Mr. Trump is a version of a problem every other candidate in the race faces: Seemingly every approach to talking about Mr. Trump, whether it’s aggressively attacking him or coming to his defense, has failed to draw away significant support.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is not campaigning in Iowa and is instead staking his candidacy on the later New Hampshire primary, has most aggressively gone after Mr. Trump throughout the race. However, Republicans have so far had little appetite for that message.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.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?  More

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      Want to Understand 2024? Look at 1948.

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      Americans were angry with Truman because of high prices in the aftermath of World War II, even as other economic signals looked promising.President Truman and his wife, Bess, during his 1948 whistle-stop campaign.Associated PressIn the era of modern consumer confidence data, there has never been an economy quite like this recent one — with prices rising so high and unemployment staying so low.But just a few years before the consumer sentiment survey index became widely available in 1952, there was a period of economic unrest that bears a striking resemblance to today: the aftermath of World War II, when Americans were near great prosperity yet found themselves frustrated by the economy and their president.If there’s a time that might make sense of today’s political moment, postwar America might just be it. Many analysts today have been perplexed by public dissatisfaction with the economy, as unemployment and gross domestic product have remained strong and as inflation has slowed significantly after a steep rise. To some, public opinion and economic reality are so discordant that it requires a noneconomic explanation, sometimes called “vibes,” like the effect of social media or a pandemic hangover on the national mood.But in the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.The source of postwar inflation was fundamentally similar to post-pandemic inflation. The end of wartime rationing unleashed years of pent-up consumer demand in an economy that hadn’t fully transitioned back to producing butter instead of guns. A year after the war, wartime price controls ended and inflation skyrocketed. A great housing crisis gripped the nation’s cities as millions of troops returned from overseas after 15 years of limited housing construction. Labor unrest roiled the nation and exacerbated production shortages. The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.According to the historian James T. Patterson, “no domestic issue of these years did Truman more damage than the highly contentious question of what to do about wartime restraints on prices.”Mr. Truman’s popularity collapsed. By spring in 1948, an election year, his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, down from over 90 percent at the end of World War II. He fell behind the Republican Thomas Dewey in the early head-to-head polling. He was seen as in over his head. The New Republic ran a front-page editorial titled: “As a candidate for president, Harry Truman should quit.”Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis and later a vice president and Democratic presidential nominee, spoke before a Senate committee on anti-inflation controls in 1948.Associated PressIn retrospect, it’s hard to believe voters were so frustrated. Historians generally now consider Mr. Truman one of the great presidents, and the postwar period was the beginning of the greatest economic boom in American history. By any conceivable measure, Americans were unimaginably better off than during the Great Depression a decade earlier. Unemployment remained low by any standard, and consumers kept spending. The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.Yet Americans were plainly dissatisfied. Incomes in 1948 were twice what they were in 1941, but statistically their dissatisfaction is probably best explained by the decline in real incomes in 1947, just as real incomes declined in 2021-22. The polling in the run-up to the 1948 election — archived at the Roper Center — bears the hallmarks of voter dissatisfaction:Despite the extraordinarily positive developments of the last decade, voters were pessimistic about the future. They believed a depression was likely in the next few years. As late as summer 1948, they were likelier to think things in America would get worse in the years ahead than to get better. They expected prices to keep rising.In November 1947, Gallup found that more than two-thirds of Americans said they were finding it harder to make ends meet than the year before, while almost no one said it was easier.In polling throughout 1947 and 1948, a majority supported reinstating wartime rationing and price controls.In December 1947, more than 70 percent of adults said they would want their own wages to decline in order to bring prices down.Prices seemed to weigh heavily on Americans heading into the election. Voters said that if they got a chance to talk with Mr. Truman about anything, it would be the cost of living and getting the economy back to normal. Ahead of the conventions, voters said a plan to address high prices was the No. 1 priority they wanted in a party platform. More voters said they wanted prices to be addressed over the next four years than any other issue.A rally for equal rights outside the 1948 Democratic convention in Philadelphia.Bettman/Getty ImagesThe Dixiecrats, a breakaway segregationist party, held a convention of their own in Birmingham, Ala.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe importance of the economic issue faced stiff competition from the rising Cold War, the enactment of the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, the formation of Israel and the subsequent First Arab-Israeli War, Mr. Truman’s decision to desegregate the military and the rise of the Dixiecrats.The Cold War, civil rights, Israel and other domestic issues combined to put extraordinary political pressure on an increasingly fractured Democratic coalition. On the left, the former vice president Henry Wallace ran against Mr. Truman as a Progressive; he also ran as someone who was unequivocally pro-Israel, threatening to deny Mr. Truman the support of Jewish voters who had voted all but unanimously for Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the right, the segregationist South defected from the Democrats at the convention over the party’s civil rights plank, again threatening to deny him the support of an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc.Truman and the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, in August 1948. Dewey led in the polls.Nat Fein/The New York TimesHe won, actually.Frank Cancellare/United Press InternationalIn the end, Mr. Truman won in perhaps the most celebrated comeback in American electoral history, including the iconic “Dewey Beats Truman” headline and photograph. He had barnstormed the country with an economically populist campaign that argued Democrats were on the side of working people while reminding voters of the Great Depression. You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous “Do Nothing Congress” for not enacting his agenda.What you might not have learned in history class is that Mr. Truman attacked the “Do Nothing Congress“ first and foremost for failing to do anything about prices. The text of his speech at the Democratic convention does not quite do justice to his impassioned attack on Republicans for failing to extend price controls in 1946, and for their platform on prices. Finally, he called for a special session of Congress to act on prices and housing shortages (the links correspond to the YouTube video of those parts of his convention speech, for those interested). In short, congressional failure to act on prices was central to his critique of Republicans.In this respect, Mr. Truman was probably in a stronger position than Mr. Biden. Mr. Truman could blame Republicans for inflation; he could argue he had a solution for inflation; and he could link his position on inflation to his broader message about the Democrats as a party for working people. Polling at the time suggested that voters supported price controls, supported his special session, and did not necessarily blame Mr. Truman for inflation. In fact, more voters blamed Congress, business and labor than the president himself.Where Mr. Biden can still hope to match Mr. Truman is in economic reality, as inflation today is falling just as it was in the run-up to the 1948 election.In January 1948, inflation was 10 percent; by the end of October, it had fallen by half, and would reach one percent by January 1949. At election time, only 18 percent of voters expected prices would be higher in six months; just a few months earlier in June, a majority did so. It seems reasonable to wonder whether Mr. Truman might have lost the election had it been held a few months earlier.Despite those excellent conditions for a comeback, Mr. Truman’s electoral weakness was still stark. He had a powerful message and an improving economy, but he won by just 4.5 percentage points. The third-party candidates Mr. Wallace and Strom Thurmond succeeded in denying Mr. Truman key elements of the Democratic base that the party might have imagined it could take for granted just a few years earlier. He lost much of the Deep South without the support of the Dixiecrats and even lost New York, thanks to considerable defections on the left and among Jewish voters. No Democratic presidential would ever again reassemble the so-called New Deal coalition.But if 1948 is a mixed precedent for Mr. Biden, it’s a good precedent for today’s sour economic mood. It might betray a simple fact about public opinion: Voters hate inflation so much that they won’t ever like the economy if prices go up. There is no precedent in the era of consumer sentiment data for voters to have an above-average view of the economy once inflation cracks 5 percent — the recent high was 9 percent in June 2022 — even when unemployment is extremely low. It may just be that simple; indeed, consumer sentiment has begun to tick up over the last year, as inflation has declined to 3 percent.Alternately, 1948 and this era may suggest a more complex lesson about public opinion in the wake of pandemic or war, as high postwar and post-pandemic expectations quickly get dashed by the reality that the world isn’t returning to “normal” quite so quickly. Not only are high hopes dashed, but they also yield many kinds of economic dysfunction beyond high prices, from supply chain problems and housing shortages to “help wanted” signs and rising interest rates.Indeed, the famous “return to normalcy” election in 1920 — the largest popular vote landslide in American history — followed World War I and the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, which brought a recession and even higher inflation than in the 1940s.Normalcy did not come fast enough to save the party in power in 1920, the Democrats, but in retrospect it wasn’t too far off. The Roaring Twenties were just around the corner. And normalcy was just beginning to arrive in 1948, when Mr. Truman won re-election. The country was at the dawn of the prosperous, idealized 1950s “Leave It to Beaver” era that still lingers in the public imagination.If something similar is almost at hand, it can’t come soon enough for Mr. Biden. More