Presidential Election of 2024

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      Why Doug Burgum Is Staying in a Race He Can Afford to Lose

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      With a substantial personal fortune, the North Dakota governor is insistent on spreading his message despite calls to drop out.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota knows that many people, including powerful voices in his own party, think he should quit the Republican presidential primary, abandoning his quixotic bid so that momentum can gather behind a challenger to Donald J. Trump, and ultimately President Biden.“This seems like they’re trying to do the job of the voters,” he said in an interview on Saturday. But Mr. Burgum is committed to staying on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he says he regularly meets people who are eager to vote for him. “They are the ones that are going to decide how the field gets narrowed, not some other group,” he said.Mr. Burgum, 67, was sitting in a stately conference room, somewhere in the carpeted labyrinth of a convention center in Las Vegas, which was hosting a major gathering of Jewish donors. Less than an hour earlier, in a ballroom upstairs, former Vice President Mike Pence had dropped out of the race, yielding to the reality that he was short on votes and running out of money.Mr. Burgum’s reality is different in at least one critical respect: Though he is barely cracking 1 percent in Iowa polls, his net worth is in the hundreds of millions. He has largely self-financed his campaign, lending it more than $12 million — a further $3 million has come in from donations, according to the campaign’s most recent filing.He can afford to be quixotic. As of the end of September, his campaign had spent $12.9 million — more than the campaigns of Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and Mr. Pence combined. About a third of that was spent on television advertising time.He is a testament to the power of private wealth to sustain a campaign, and to elevate a largely unknown, business-minded conservative from a largely rural U.S. state to the national stage — or, at least, the edge of the stage.“I think he does bring perspective and experience that resonate with a lot of voters,” said Miles D. White, the former chairman and chief executive of Abbott Laboratories and a longtime friend of Mr. Burgum. “I think the early process doesn’t give a lot of opportunity to demonstrate that.”Mr. White, who gave $2 million to a super PAC backing Mr. Burgum, said Mr. Burgum’s financial resources meant he could stay in and raise awareness of himself as a potential alternative to Mr. Trump, outside the confines of the debate stage.“His biggest challenge is being known, nationwide, and getting known, which takes a lot of time, a lot of ads, which in turn takes a lot of funding,” Mr. White said.Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist, said that most candidates, at this point, were merely helping Mr. Trump. On Monday, in an editorial in The Bulwark, he called for all of them except Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, to drop out.“I like Burgum,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “He is in a desperate battle with the margin of error in the polling. Because the stakes with Trump are so high, he’s got to step back.”He added, “When your argument is, ‘Let me flame out in Iowa, where I’ll do collateral damage to others,’ you don’t have an argument.”Mr. Burgum said he first sought the governor’s seat in 2015 because he felt he could have more of an impact on North Dakota from Bismarck than he could from his perch of private enterprise. The same thing motivated him to seek the presidency — but first he had to persuade his 25-year-old son, he said, who was concerned about the attention it might bring to his family.Finally, his son told him, “You should run, because my friends would have somebody they can vote for, instead of voting against.” Telling the story, Mr. Burgum began to cry.Friends from the business community have also jumped in with support. The super PAC backing him, called Best of America, had taken in more than $11 million as of the end of June from about two dozen wealthy supporters, including people with links to his business world.“Anybody who’s donated significantly so far is someone who’s known us for a long time,” Mr. Burgum said. “Because they’re like, OK, this is the real deal.”Mr. Burgum entered the race in June on a platform that focused on his economic acumen and business record as a software executive, as well as his conservative record as governor.“People are yearning for leadership, and leadership to them does not mean a life spent as a career politician in North Dakota,” he said. “It means someone who’s got the characteristics of integrity and honesty. Someone you can trust and someone who’s willing to take risks, someone who can take a leap and not know where they’re going to land.”He added, of his competitors, “Just factually, I’ve created more jobs than everybody else on that stage combined, in the private sector.”Since entering the race, Mr. Burgum has spent heavily to introduce himself to voters and to draw support.In the early nominating states, Mr. Burgum’s business bona fides, horseback skills and distinctive eyebrows have been fixtures on television, set against the scenic backdrop of North Dakota — he said he saw his campaign in part as an opportunity to introduce his state to the rest of the country.(As for the eyebrows, Mr. Burgum credits them to his mother’s side of the family, and acknowledges the uncanny likeness to the comedian Eugene Levy. Along with his flowing mane of hair, they get a lot of attention on the campaign trail: “If the only people voting were women over 75 or 80 years old, then we’d have a lock on it,” he said.)Mr. Burgum’s campaign has bought $4.3 million of local and national advertising time, according to an analysis by AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Since July, the super PAC backing him has bought nearly $13 million in ad time.The PAC’s ads describe him as “the only conservative business leader running for president,” promising that he can bring “small-town common sense back in Washington, D.C.”Advertising spending by the super PAC is the fifth-highest in the race, according to the AdImpact analysis, which also includes outlays for ads in the coming weeks. Never Back Down, a super PAC backing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has spent $35.6 million. A super PAC for Mr. Trump has spent $27.6 million; one for Ms. Haley, $22.8 million; and one for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, $19.8 million.Before the first debate, in late August, Mr. Burgum’s campaign offered $20 gift cards to anyone who donated a dollar to his campaign so that he could meet the threshold of 40,000 individual donors to earn a spot onstage.The gambit worked. Then, the day of the debate, he ruptured his Achilles’ tendon in a game of pickup basketball with his aides. He showed up anyway. Two months later, he still uses a knee scooter to move around.A major hurdle lies ahead: While Mr. Burgum’s campaign has the requisite number of donors, it has not yet met the Republican National Committee’s polling threshold for the third G.O.P. debate, next week in Miami.He described the threshold as an arbitrary bar set by the party leadership. “It might achieve a winnowing, but it may not produce what Iowa or New Hampshire would produce, where people are actually investing time,” he said. More

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      Union Victories May Lift Biden, as U.A.W. Targets Tesla and Others

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      President Biden’s support for autoworkers helped them make big wage gains, and labor organizers are looking to bring about similar gains elsewhere as carmakers transition to electric vehicles.The United Automobile Workers’ big wins with Detroit’s Big Three automakers could also prove to be a significant political victory for President Biden, who openly sided with striking workers to pressure the companies, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, to produce generous concessions.But the U.A.W.’s turn now toward nonunionized automakers like Tesla, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes will test whether Mr. Biden’s support, as well as measures that he signed into law, will produce the expansion of organized labor that he has long promised.For unionized autoworkers, many of them in the swing state of Michigan, the tentative contracts, which are awaiting rank-and-file ratification, would bring substantial wage gains, “another piece of good economic news,” Mr. Biden said on Monday. The tentative contracts would lift the top U.A.W. wage to more than $40 per hour over four and a half years, from $32 an hour. Stellantis, maker of Chryslers, Jeeps and Ram trucks, agreed to reopen its assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill., near the border of Wisconsin, another crucial swing state.“The impact of Biden’s public support can’t be overstated,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the umbrella A.F.L.-C.I.O., which includes the autoworkers’ union. “There’s a lot of upside here for Biden. The contracts set a new standard for the industry that clearly show the benefit of collective bargaining.”Beyond that, G.M. agreed to bring its electric vehicle battery joint venture, Ultium, under the national contract, a boon for Ultium workers but also a pressure point for unions as they seek to organize battery plants sprouting up around the country. Such plants are using generous subsidies from Mr. Biden’s signature legislative achievements — especially the climate change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act — as the administration pushes to speed the country’s transition to electric vehicles.“This historic contract is a testament to the power of unions and collective bargaining to build strong middle-class jobs while helping our most iconic American companies thrive,” Mr. Biden said Monday evening.Jason Walsh, the executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which has brought together labor and environmental groups to marshal support for the clean energy transition, said the contracts, if ratified by U.A.W. workers, would be a watershed moment for the economy — and possibly the planet.“The legislative intent behind the industrial policy in the Inflation Reduction Act was an implicit deal: We as a nation are going to invest in the sectors of the economy that are important to the country and the planet in the long run, but in return we want the companies that receive those benefits to maximize returns to workers, communities and the environment,” Mr. Walsh said. To that end, the contract settlement is “huge,” he added. “It highlights the lie peddled by Donald Trump and at times the Big Three that the E.V. transition means lower-quality jobs in a nonunion work force.”The U.A.W. actions took on strikingly political meaning. In May, the autoworkers’ union opted to withhold an endorsement of Mr. Biden’s re-election, openly expressing “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition” that the president was pushing through legislation and regulation.Last month, Mr. Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, castigated striking workers, saying “they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.”Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, visited a nonunion parts plant in Michigan to rail against electric vehicles and to demand that Shawn Fain, the new and aggressive U.A.W. president, endorse him for another term in the White House.Mr. Fain said he would never do that, and supporters of the president pointed to provisions in federal laws championed by Mr. Biden that may have helped secure the deals. Subsidies for electric vehicle production will go only to domestic manufacturing plants, meaning Detroit management could not credibly threaten to move new auto plants overseas in search of cheaper labor.But union officials did not say on Monday what their intentions were for a presidential endorsement. Mr. Fain did make clear over the weekend that he was not resting on his laurels with the gains achieved with its escalating wave of strikes against the Big Three. The union plans to target Tesla, the nonunion automaker that dominates the domestic electric vehicle market, as well as foreign automakers with factories in the Southeast, where unions have struggled to gain a foothold. Some of the biggest new plants are under construction in Georgia, a critical swing state for 2024, including a Hyundai electric vehicle plant that will be the state’s biggest economic development project ever.Organizers will be able to lean on provisions of the three big laws that Mr. Biden signed — a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy to combat climate change — to push their case.Tucked into all of those laws were measures to give unions the power to effectively tell employers that accept rich federal tax incentives this: You must pay union-scale wages and use union apprenticeship and training programs, so you might as well hire union workers.How electric vehicle and battery makers respond to the U.A.W.’s next push will go a long way toward determining whether Mr. Biden can make good on his promise that his effort to curtail climate change and wean the nation off fossil fuels will indeed produce “good union jobs.” More

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      14th Amendment Trump Disqualification Trial Begins in Colorado

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      While some prominent constitutional experts argue that a clause in the amendment applies to former President Donald J. Trump after Jan. 6, that view is far from universal among legal scholars.A courtroom in Denver will host, starting Monday morning, something the nation has never seen: a trial to determine whether a major party’s likely presidential nominee is eligible to be president at all.The lawsuit, filed in September by six Colorado voters with the help of a watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argues that former President Donald J. Trump is ineligible to hold office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That section disqualifies anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it.The plaintiffs say that Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — including his actions before and while his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory — meet the disqualification criteria.Sarah B. Wallace, the state district court judge presiding over the case, rejected multiple requests from Mr. Trump and from the Colorado Republican State Central Committee in recent weeks to dismiss the case without a trial.Judge Wallace has laid out nine topics to be addressed at the trial, which is scheduled to last all week. They include whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to presidents; what “engaged” and “insurrection” mean under that section; whether Mr. Trump’s actions fit those definitions; and whether the amendment is “self-executing” — in other words, whether it can be applied without specific action by Congress identifying whom to apply it to.These questions have been debated since the Jan. 6 attack, especially since Mr. Trump announced that he was running for president again, but there is little precedent to help answer them. The 14th Amendment was ratified shortly after the Civil War, and the disqualification clause was originally applied to people who had fought for the Confederacy. The courts have rarely had occasion to assess its modern application, and never in a case of this magnitude.Some prominent constitutional experts — including the conservative law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in an academic article, and the conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law professor Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic — have argued that the clause applies to Mr. Trump.But that view is far from universal among legal scholars, and several have told The New York Times over the past few months that the questions are complicated.The court’s list of topics also calls for discussion of Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, which governs what happens if a new president and vice president have not “qualified” by the time they are supposed to take office.The section says, in part, that “Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice President-elect shall have qualified.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers say this means that only Congress can enforce constitutional qualifications for the presidency. Lawyers for the plaintiffs rejected that argument in a brief last week, saying the “plain language” of the amendment — which refers to the “president-elect” — applies only to a person whom has already been elected and has nothing to do with states’ ability to adjudicate candidates’ qualifications.The Colorado lawsuit is one of several efforts around the country to remove Mr. Trump from ballots under the 14th Amendment. Oral arguments in a case in Minnesota are scheduled to begin Thursday, and lawsuits have also been filed in New Hampshire and Michigan. Separately, Democratic legislators in California asked their state’s attorney general last month to seek a court opinion on Mr. Trump’s eligibility.Whatever verdicts come in these cases will not be final. They will almost certainly be appealed by the losing side, and the Supreme Court — which has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Mr. Trump — is likely to have the final say. More

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      Trump’s Verbal Slips Could Weaken His Attacks on Biden’s Age

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      Donald Trump, 77, has relentlessly attacked President Biden, 80, as too old for office. But the former president himself has had a series of gaffes that go beyond his usual freewheeling style.One of Donald J. Trump’s new comedic bits at his rallies features him impersonating the current commander in chief with an over-the-top caricature mocking President Biden’s age.With droopy eyelids and mouth agape, Mr. Trump stammers and mumbles. He squints. His arms flap. He shuffles his feet and wanders laggardly across the stage. A burst of laughter and applause erupts from the crowd as he feigns confusion by turning and pointing to invisible supporters, as if he does not realize his back is to them.But his recent campaign events have also featured less deliberate stumbles. Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.“This is a different Donald Trump than 2015 and ’16 — lost the zip on his fastball,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida told reporters last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.“In 2016, he was freewheeling, he’s out there barnstorming the country,” Mr. DeSantis added. “Now, it’s just a different guy. And it’s sad to see.”It is unclear if Mr. Trump’s recent slips are connected to his age. He has long relied on an unorthodox speaking style that has served as one of his chief political assets, establishing him, improbably, among the most effective communicators in American politics.But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of his onstage pantomime: the argument that Mr. Biden is too old to be president.Mr. Biden, a grandfather of seven, is 80. Mr. Trump, who has 10 grandchildren, is 77.Even though only a few years separate the two men in their golden years, voters view their vigor differently. Recent polls have found that roughly two out of three voters say Mr. Biden is too old to serve another four-year term, while only about half say the same about Mr. Trump.If that gap starts to narrow, it’s Mr. Trump who has far more to lose in a general-election matchup.Mr. Trump and President Biden are the front-runners for each party’s nomination, setting up the likelihood of a 2020 rematch. Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesAccording to a previously unreported finding in an August survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 43 percent of U.S. voters said both men were “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” Among those voters, 61 percent said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden, compared with 13 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.Last week, similar findings emerged in a Franklin & Marshall College poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania, one of the most closely watched 2024 battlegrounds.According to the poll, 43 percent of Pennsylvanians said both men were “too old to serve another term.” An analysis of that data for The New York Times showed that Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump among those voters by 66 percent to 11 percent. Among all voters in the state, the two men were in a statistical tie.Berwood Yost, the director of the Franklin & Marshall poll, said that Mr. Biden’s wide lead among voters who were worried about both candidates’ ages could be explained partly by the fact that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify age as a problem for their party’s leader. “The age issue is one that if Trump gets tarred with the same brush as Biden, it really hurts him,” Mr. Yost said.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, noted that the former president maintained a commanding lead in Republican primary polls and that in the general election, several recent polls had shown Mr. Trump with slight leads over Mr. Biden.“None of these false narratives has changed the dynamics of the race at all — President Trump still dominates, because people know he’s the strongest candidate,” Mr. Cheung said. “The contrast is that Biden is falling onstage, mumbling his way through a speech, being confused on where to walk, and tripping on the steps of Air Force One. There’s no correcting that, and that will be seared into voter’s minds.”Mr. Trump’s rhetorical skills have long relied on a mix of brute force and a seemingly preternatural instinct for the imprecise. That beguiling combination — honed from a lifetime of real estate negotiations, New York tabloid backbiting and prime-time reality TV stardom — often means that voters hear what they want to hear from him.Mr. Trump’s speaking style has often meant that his supporters, or voters who are open to backing him, hear what they want to hear from him. Jordan Gale for The New York TimesTrump supporters leave his speeches energized. Undecided voters who are open to his message can find what they’re looking for in his pitch. Opponents are riled, and when they furiously accuse him of something they heard but that he didn’t quite precisely say, Mr. Trump turns the criticism into a data point that he’s unfairly persecuted — and the entire cycle begins anew.But Mr. Trump’s latest missteps aren’t easily classified as calculated vagueness.During a Sept. 15 speech in Washington, a moment after declaring Mr. Biden “cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead,” the former president warned that America was on the verge of World War II, which ended in 1945.In the same speech, he boasted about presidential polls showing him leading Mr. Obama, who is not, in fact, running for an illegal third term in office. He erroneously referred to Mr. Obama again during an anecdote about winning the 2016 presidential race.“We did it with Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “We won an election that everybody said couldn’t be won, we beat …” He paused for a beat as he seemed to realize his mistake. “Hillary Clinton.”At a Florida rally on Oct. 11, days after a brutal terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israelis, Mr. Trump criticized the country for being unprepared, lashing out at its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump appears to have soured on Mr. Netanyahu, once a close ally, after the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden for winning the 2020 election.In the same speech, Mr. Trump relied on an inaccurate timeline of events in the Middle East to criticize Mr. Biden’s handling of foreign affairs and, in the process, drew headlines for praising Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.Last week, while speaking to supporters at a rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump praised Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister of Hungary, but referred to him as “the leader of Turkey,” a country hundreds of miles away. He quickly corrected himself.At another point in the same speech, Mr. Trump jumped into a confusing riff that ended with him telling supporters, “You don’t have to vote — don’t worry about voting,” adding, “We’ve got plenty of votes.”Mr. Cheung, the Trump campaign spokesman, said the former president was “clearly talking about election integrity and making sure only legal votes are counted.”Under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party has been dealt a series of electoral defeats since 2016. Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn a speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump sounded as if he were talking about hummus when he mispronounced Hamas (huh-maas), the Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip and carried out one of the largest attacks on Israel in decades on Oct. 7.The former president’s pronunciation drew the attention of the Biden campaign, which posted the video clip on social media, noting that Mr. Trump sounded “confused.”But even Republican rivals have sensed an opening on the age issue against Mr. Trump, who has maintained an unshakable hold on the party despite a political record that would in years past have compelled conservatives to consider another standard-bearer. Mr. Trump lost control of Congress as president; was voted out of the White House; failed to help deliver a “red wave” of victories in the midterm elections last year; and, this year, drew 91 felony charges over four criminal cases.Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old former governor of South Carolina, opened her presidential bid this year by calling for candidates 75 or older to pass mental competency tests, a push she has renewed in recent weeks.On Saturday, Ms. Haley attacked Mr. Trump over his comments about Mr. Netanyahu and Hezbollah, suggesting in a speech to Jewish donors in Las Vegas that the former president did not have the faculties to return to the White House.“Let me remind you,” she added with a small smile. “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.”Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Trump Is Still Far Ahead in Iowa Poll, With Haley Matching DeSantis for 2nd

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      Former President Donald J. Trump leads his closest competitors by 27 percentage points in a new Des Moines Register poll, but Nikki Haley has surged to tie Ron DeSantis.Former President Donald J. Trump still has a huge lead in Iowa, according to a poll released Monday, but Nikki Haley has surged to tie Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for a distant second place.Mr. Trump has the support of 43 percent of voters likely to participate in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation Republican caucuses in January, the new Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll found — about the same as the 42 percent he had in the same poll in August.Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, are tied at 16 percent. That is a decline of three percentage points for Mr. DeSantis and an increase of 10 points for Ms. Haley, driven in part by increasing support for Ms. Haley among independent voters.The poll was conducted by J. Ann Selzer and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.Behind Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina at 7 percent, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey at 4 percent, and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota at 3 percent. None of those candidates have moved significantly since the August poll.The new survey was conducted before former Vice President Mike Pence dropped out of the race on Saturday. He had only 2 percent support — down from 6 percent in August — and his supporters were redistributed to their second-choice candidates in the final results. More

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      The Run-Up Returns, Every Week Through Election Day

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWe’re just about a year away from Election Day 2024.In a race in which the incumbent Democratic president is running for re-election and the leading Republican candidate is a former president himself, it can be easy to write off this presidential election as one we’ve seen before.It does seem likely that the country is heading toward the same matchup voters faced in 2020. That’s exactly what makes 2024 so different. And why it demands a different kind of political reporting.“The Run-Up” and its host, Astead W. Herndon, will be covering this election from the usual early voting states and candidate events. But the show is also going places you wouldn’t typically see on a political calendar, like a country music concert in Iowa and a remote corner of a reliably blue state.Our first episode drops Thursday, and after that, we’ll be coming to you every single week until Election Day.The Run-Up host Astead Herndon interviewing Clallam County residents at the Fairmount Diner in Port Angeles, Wash., last week.Grant Hindsley for The New York Times More

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      Why Less Engaged Voters Are Biden’s Biggest Problem

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      His weakness is concentrated among those who stayed home in the midterms but who may show up in 2024.Higher turnout is not necessarily positive for Democrats. Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesIf you’re looking to reconcile the surprisingly strong Democratic showing in the midterm elections with President Biden’s weakness in the polls today, consider the political attitudes of two groups of respondents from New York Times/Siena College polls over the last year.First, let’s consider the 2,775 respondents from Group A:It’s relatively old: 31 percent are 65 or older; 9 percent are under 30.It’s split politically: 33 percent identify as Republicans compared with 31 percent who consider themselves Democrats. About 72 percent are white. Black and Hispanic respondents are at 9 percent each.It’s relatively well educated: 41 percent have a college degree. Next, let’s look at the 1,534 respondents from Group B:It’s relatively young: 26 percent are 18 to 29; 17 percent are 65 or older.It’s relatively Democratic: 26 percent identify as Democrats, compared with 19 percent who identify as Republicans. Only 54 percent are white; 13 percent are Black and 19 percent are Hispanic.Just 28 percent have a college degree.Mr. Biden probably won Group B by a comfortable margin in the 2020 presidential election, whether based on fancy statistical models or based on what those respondents told us themselves.But it’s actually Group B that backs Donald J. Trump in Times/Siena polling over the last year. Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden, 41-39, among Group B respondents, while Group A backs Mr. Biden, 47-43.OK, now the reveal:“Group A” is people who voted in the 2022 midterm elections.“Group B” is people who did not vote in the 2022 midterms.Is this a surprising finding? Yes. But it also makes sense of a lot of what’s going on in the polling today.Mr. Biden may be weak among young, Black and Hispanic voters today, but that weakness is almost entirely concentrated among the voters who stayed home last November. As a consequence, Democrats paid little to no price for it in the midterms, even as polls of all registered voters or adults show Mr. Biden struggling mightily among these same groups against Mr. Trump.These less engaged voters might just be the single biggest problem facing Mr. Biden in his pursuit of re-election, the Times/Siena data suggests. If there’s any good news for Mr. Biden, it’s that his challenge is concentrated among voters who still consider themselves Democrats — a group that, in theory, ought to be open to returning to the president’s side.Whom Voters Say They’ll Support in 2024 More

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      Book Review: ‘Blowback,’ by Miles Taylor; ‘Renegade,’ by Adam Kinzinger; ‘Losing Our Religion,’ by Russell Moore

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      Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and the author of the new book BLOWBACK: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump (Atria, 335 pp., $30), made his dramatic entrance in 2018 with an anonymous essay for The New York Times entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” In it, he heralded the “unsung heroes” who were “working diligently from within” to impede Trump’s “worst inclinations.” The following year, having resigned from the D.H.S., Taylor published “A Warning,” also under the moniker “Anonymous.” Finally, in 2020, Taylor criticized Trump under his own name, endorsed Joe Biden and identified himself as “Anonymous.”Taylor now provides a more detailed accounting of the chaos inside the White House. Some of his allegations — that the Trump aide Stephen Miller wanted to blow up migrants with a predator drone; that the former White House chief of staff John Kelly described the president as a “very, very evil man” in response to Trump’s sexual comments about his daughter Ivanka — have made headlines and prompted some denials.The reference to “the next Trump” in the subtitle is already moot (we’re still dealing with the original one), but “Blowback” is bedeviled by a bigger problem: The more we learn of the outrageous behavior behind closed doors, the more enraging it is that Taylor — and his allies among the “axis of adults” — failed to speak out sooner. In 2018, after a particularly deranged set of phone calls about the so-called migrant caravan, Taylor told Kelly that things were getting really messed up. I wanted to shake him. Yes, Miles, it was getting pretty messed up.To Taylor’s credit, “Blowback” is full of regret. The 2018 opinion piece, while gutsy, was a sly justification for silence. By book’s end, Taylor has decided that anonymity itself, the mask he wore for years, “symbolizes the greatest threat to democracy.” The most moving passages in the book are those in which Taylor wrestles not with political monsters, but with his own demons. The mask of anonymity is entwined with his alcoholism; his recovery only arrived when he spoke truthfully in his own name. Taylor describes how falsity gnaws at the soul. Courage doesn’t always come on time, but as many an addict has ruefully remarked, it’s better late than never.The former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger — one of 10 Republicans to vote for Trump’s second impeachment and one of two to serve on the House’s Jan. 6 committee — is a late-breaking hero of the anti-Trump cause. RENEGADE: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country (The Open Field, 295 pp., $30) tracks Kinzinger’s childhood in the 1980s, his Air Force career, his six terms in Congress and his disillusionment with Trump’s Republican Party.Alas, it has none of “Blowback”’s redeeming anguish. Even Kinzinger’s sporadic insights about the roots of Trumpism (e.g. in the Tea Party) serve less to implicate the pre-Trump G.O.P. than to flatter Adam Kinzinger, who always appears presciently distressed by the intransigent drift of his own party.“Renegade” has applause lines for Kinzinger’s new liberal fans — he describes the senator and presidential aspirant Ted Cruz as an “oily, sneering manipulator” with a “punchable face” — and he adds some (unrevelatory) texture to the cowardice and bullying displayed by his colleagues. Kevin McCarthy, Kinzinger writes, behaved “like an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line” when he was minority leader. Twice after Kinzinger turned on Trump, he reports, McCarthy shoulder-checked him in the House chamber. (A spokesman for McCarthy has dismissed such criticism from Kinzinger as “unhinged tirades.”)What “Renegade” resembles most of all — down to its professional co-authoring by the award-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio — is a campaign book in search of a campaign. When Kinzinger announced his retirement in 2021, he said, “This isn’t the end of my political future, but the beginning.” Still, it’s difficult to imagine what sort of future that might be — unless Kinzinger gets much better at persuading other Republicans to join him out in the cold. “Renegade,” a book primarily about how much nobler Kinzinger is than his former colleagues, is unlikely to do the trick.Russell Moore’s LOSING OUR RELIGION: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Sentinel, 256 pp., $29) is another book about a conservative suffering exile from his tribe for turning on Donald Trump.It is far more interesting, however, because Moore — the editor in chief of Christianity Today and a former bigwig in the 13-million-member Southern Baptist Convention — remains a dedicated evangelical. His “altar call” is addressed to fellow believers; to leaders of congregations riven by conflict; to pastors, like himself, whose theology is orthodox but whose politics, by Trump-era standards, are liberal; to churchgoers who’ve lost faith in their church but not in Jesus Christ. It is a startlingly open, honest and humble book, a soulful, fraternal entreaty for integrity, repair and renewal.Taylor and Kinzinger, putatively trying to convince readers to take the danger of Trump seriously, adopt a tone that is only tolerable if you already agree with them. Their books, in other words, are most likely to appeal to liberals eager for apostates from conservatism to flatter their anti-Trump indignation. By literally “preaching to the choir,” Moore, on the other hand, ironically avoids preaching to it figuratively.He is better equipped to lovingly cajole, carefully critique and persuade his readers, because he speaks to his audience in their own idiom, relying on theological concepts that hold particular potency for his fellow congregants, especially those who find themselves called to decry an evil they fear they have abetted.He is also sympathetic to the ways in which belligerent Trumpism can seduce Christian conservatives; it satisfies many of the same longings that religion does. “There is more than one way for you to secularize,” Moore writes. “All it takes is substituting adrenaline for the Holy Spirit, political ‘awakening’ for rebirth, quarrelsomeness for sanctification and a visible tribal identity for the kingdom of God.”Most of all, Moore resists the impulse to try to beat Trump at his own game. So many prophets of Trumpian doom respond to the former president’s howling narcissism with a narcissism of their own, implicitly ratifying Trump’s most noxious conceit: that he alone can fix it. But our moment calls for less heroism than humility; fewer grand self-portraits and more intimate self-searching. More