Presidential Election of 2024

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      Why Trump and the Rest of the G.O.P. Won’t Stop Bashing Electric Vehicles

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      Fresh off a walking tour of blighted Flint, Mich., on Wednesday, Vivek Ramaswamy spoke excitedly about a comeback for the “forgotten America” that he has made a part of his long-shot bid for the presidency.He wasn’t promising that the automakers that had largely abandoned Flint would return. “We have opportunities, though, to look to the future of a lot that we need to bring to this country,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur, said, ticking through the industries that he’d like to see help drive a revival: semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, defense production.The industry he doesn’t want involved is the one already pouring money into the state: electric vehicles. He attributes the investments and the rising popularity of the cars to tax credits and favorable regulations that he would reverse as president.“That’s not only a market distortion, but a market distortion that is decidedly a step in an anti-American direction that I think is frankly dangerous to the future of the country,” he told reporters just outside Flint.Mr. Ramaswamy’s enmity toward electric cars, extolled in the ancestral home of the American automobile, does not exactly set him apart in the presidential field. The front-runner for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump, was in Michigan last week, reeling off a rambling bill of particulars against E.V.s, complaining falsely that they run out of power in 15 minutes, are bad for the environment, and would destroy the domestic auto industry within a few short years.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a distant second to Mr. Trump in national polls, recently railed against electric vehicles when he unveiled an energy policy platform that promised to roll back E.V. subsidies to “support Americans’ right to drive the cars they want.” Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president-turned-competitor, agrees with Mr. Ramaswamy and others that the transition to electric vehicles would send American auto manufacturing to China.Opposing electric cars — and the industry’s ongoing shift away from internal-combustion engines to battery power — allows Republican candidates to criticize China, the dominant economic force in the battery industry. It also pleases G.O.P. voters still hostile to the notion of climate change — what Mr. Ramaswamy disparaged Wednesday night as “that God-forsaken religion, the climate cult” and “the E.V. subsidy cult” — and to all things environmental and “woke.” And it evokes a nostalgic halcyon past, the same one that Mr. Trump conjured when he promised in 2016 to bring back coal mines, steel mills and basic manufacturing.But the steel mills and coal mines failed to roar back to their glory days, and the internal-combustion engine is unlikely to as well. In fact, the electric vehicle transition is well underway.That transition is driven in part by President Biden’s policies, which subsidize the manufacturing and purchasing of E.V.s and their components and impose strict fuel economy standards on automakers that can be met with zero-emission electric cars. But it’s also motivated by Detroit executives who have vowed to convert their corporations to all electric, by consumers reacting to environmental concerns and gas prices, and by aggressive policies from governments like those of California, Britain and Europe that are beyond the reach of a Republican White House.Those forces have prompted hundreds of billions of dollars to pour into states like Michigan and Ohio, but also to Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee, to assemble electric vehicles and build batteries and other parts with the warm embrace of Republican governors.“The free market and consumer demand should drive the automobile manufacturing industry like it has here in Georgia, creating thousands of high-paying E.V. jobs across our state because of Georgia’s first-class business environment, unmatched work force and strong logistics network,” Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, said in a statement this week. “The path to America leading industrial innovation in the 21st century is through Republican-led states.”But Republican presidential candidates say that, if elected, they will eliminate Mr. Biden’s tax incentives to build and buy electric cars and trucks, and roll back his fuel efficiency standards aimed at sharply reducing climate-warming greenhouse gases.“I support letting people choose the cars that they want without those perverse incentives and the tax code that suggests that buying an electric vehicle is somehow in the owner’s best interest,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said, though such incentives have helped prompt BMW, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz to expand E.V. operations in his state.The Republican Party’s attacks on E.V.s. stem in part from real concerns shared by the auto industry and foreign policymakers. China does dominate battery-making, and as lithium-ion battery imports soar — they were up 99 percent last year from 2021 — a weakening Chinese domestic economy is bolstered abroad.In Green Charter Township, Mich., where Gotion, a Chinese subsidiary, plans to build a battery plant, Mr. Ramaswamy showed up Wednesday evening at a horse farm dotted with signs reading “No Go on Gotion.” Alongside promises to “make sure that God-forsaken plant never gets built,” he criticized the “electric vehicle subsidy cult,” which, he said to cheers, “will end on my watch as your next president.”“If you want to buy an E.V., I’m fine with that — we don’t need to use our taxpayer dollars to subsidize it,” Mr. Ramaswamy said, declaring that subsidies involve “subsidizing the C.C.P. because those E.V.s require batteries made in China — now made by China across the street from here,” a reference to the Chinese Communist Party.And some attendees agreed.“I don’t have a problem with electric vehicles — if you want one, OK, cool, buy one. But don’t force me, because I got a Dodge Ram with a Hemi and I love it,” Randy Guppy, from Howard City, Mich., said, referring to a type of V-8 engine.John Bozzella, president of the auto industry’s Alliance for Automotive Innovation, also fretted that the Biden administration’s aggressive push for electrification was driving the auto industry faster than suppliers could ramp up battery production, strengthening China’s hand — and possibly opening the domestic market to cheap Chinese electric cars.And electric vehicles do take fewer workers to assemble than internal-combustion vehicles, driving labor unrest and Democratic political worries.But the notion that electric vehicles are economically out of reach, technically infeasible and will somehow cripple domestic auto production and shift manufacturing to China appears belied by what is actually happening. This spring, fully electric vehicle sales reached 7.2 percent of all car and light-truck sales, a 48.4 percent increase over the year before and on a trajectory that analysts believe will only accelerate, according to Cox Automotive. U.S. consumers chose from 103 different models of cars, pickup trucks, S.U.V.s and vans.The automotive industry said the average cost of an E.V. fell this year by $10,700, to $54,300 — $5,800 more than the overall average cost of cars and light trucks in the country.Some 77 percent of all E.V.s sold in the United States were produced in North America — almost 60 percent from Tesla, owned by Republican-friendly Elon Musk. The rest were from Japan, Europe and South Korea. More than 660,000 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids were sold in the United States in the first half of this year, by the industry’s count; only a few thousand were from China, and that number actually declined, according to automotive analysts.Money is pouring in. Around $115 billion has been pledged to build vehicles, batteries and components in the United States, much of that in Michigan and the Southeast. Georgia, a key swing state in 2024, has seen $25.1 billion in pledged investment alone, said Garrison Douglas, a spokesman for Governor Kemp.The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in the industry will rise by more than 8.3 million by 2031, and while employment for basic assembly-line workers will decline by 96,000, higher wage jobs in engineering, software development and electronic assembly will shoot upward.Earlier this year, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, blocked Ford from considering his state for a new battery factory, saying he was worried that the automaker was being used “as a front for China,” which would have controlled much of the plant’s technology. Ford then moved its $3.5 billion investment to Marshall, Mich.Stacey LaRouche, a spokeswoman for Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, talked up such investment on Wednesday, as Toyota and LG Energy Systems were announcing a $3 billion expansion of LG’s battery plant in Holland, Mich., to power Toyota E.V.s built in Kentucky.Electric vehicle and battery deals, she said, “are creating thousands of good paying jobs right here in Michigan, not overseas.” More

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      Trump Asks Again to Delay Documents Trial Until After Election

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      The former president’s lawyers said his trial on charges of mishandling classified information should be delayed from its planned start in May because of problems gaining access to all the evidence.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have again asked a federal judge to postpone until after the 2024 election his trial on charges of mishandling classified documents.In a court filing on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump’s legal team proposed moving the start of the trial to mid-November from May 20, the date set by Judge Aileen M. Cannon.It was not the first time Mr. Trump has sought to push back the trial, in which he stands accused of illegally holding onto dozens of classified documents after leaving office and conspiring with two aides to obstruct the government’s repeated effort to retrieve them. In July, his lawyers asked Judge Cannon to put off the trial indefinitely as they grappled with the complexities of the case.But after a flurry of court filings and a contentious hearing this summer in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon decided that the case should go in front of a jury well before the presidential race ended.In their initial request to delay the trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers claimed that he could not get a fair trial while he was running for office. But arguments like that were missing from his new proposal to push back the proceeding, which did not specifically mention the election. Still, the push to reschedule for mid-November 2024 was a de facto attempt to delay it until after the race was decided.Were that to happen, it would give Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, enormous sway over the case. If the trial were delayed and Mr. Trump were to win the election, he could simply order his attorney general to drop the charges. And even if he were convicted before becoming president, he could in theory seek to pardon himself.In their recent attempt to delay the documents case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, of failing to meet their obligations to turn over evidence as part of the discovery process. The lawyers complained in particular that they lacked sufficient access to nine of the 32 classified documents that Mr. Trump has been charged with holding onto after he left office in violation of the Espionage Act.Those documents, prosecutors said last week, are so sensitive that they cannot be stored even in the highly secure facility in Miami that Mr. Trump and his legal team have been using. They said the materials would need to be reviewed under strict supervision in Washington.Mr. Trump’s lawyers also argued the delay was needed because the secure facility that was supposed to have been built for Judge Cannon to review classified materials in Fort Pierce was running at least three months behind schedule. Moreover, the lawyers claimed, Judge Cannon still lacked the necessary “electronic facilities” to write opinions and orders about the classified materials as well as “the physical space” to conduct hearings about it.The lawyers also cited Mr. Trump’s crowded courtroom calendar as another reason to delay the documents trial, claiming that neither they nor their client could “be in two places at once.”Mr. Trump is currently on trial in New York, facing civil charges of fraudulently inflating the value of several of his properties. One of his lawyers in that case, Christopher M. Kise, is also representing him in the documents case.His other federal trial, in which he stands accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election, is also on the horizon. The judge in that case, Tanya S. Chutkan, has scheduled the proceeding to start on March 4. But if it is delayed in any way, that trial could easily drag into the proposed start date for the documents trial.The appeal to Judge Cannon to delay the documents trial came a week after Mr. Trump’s legal team sought to delay the election case in Washington. They asked to push back until December their deadline — now set for next week — to file pretrial motions, saying they were still researching the “numerous novel and complex legal issues” in the case.Federal prosecutors in Mr. Smith’s office have reacted with frustration to Mr. Trump’s attempts to delay both of the proceedings.Last week, they filed court papers to Judge Cannon accusing Mr. Trump’s lawyers of seeking to “intentionally derail” the timing of the documents case. They made similar accusations on Monday to Judge Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case in Federal District Court in Washington. By asking for more time to file their motions, the prosecutors said, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were merely dragging their feet.The former president has acknowledged in private conversations with his aides that winning the election is likely to be his best bet for emerging unscathed from the four criminal cases he is confronting. Beyond the two federal cases, Mr. Trump has been charged in state indictments of falsifying business records in New York in connection with payments to a porn actress and of tampering with the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. More

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      Turnover of Election Officials in Swing States Adds Strain for 2024, Report Says

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      A tide of resignations and retirements by election officials in battleground states, who have increasingly faced threats, harassment and interference, could further strain the election system in 2024, a national voting rights group warned in a report released on Thursday.The group, the Voting Rights Lab, said that the departures of election officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania and other swing states had the potential to undermine the independence of those positions.The 28-page report reveals the scope of challenges to the election system and underscores the hostile climate facing election officials across the nation. Resignations have swept through election offices in Texas and Virginia, while Republicans in Wisconsin have voted to remove the state’s nonpartisan head of elections, sowing further distrust about voting integrity.In Pennsylvania, more than 50 top election officials at the county level have departed since the 2020 election, according to the report, which said that the loss of their expertise was particularly concerning.In Arizona, the top election officials in 13 of 15 counties left their posts during the same period, the report said. Some of the defections have taken place in counties where former President Donald J. Trump’s allies have sought to require the hand-counting of ballots and have spread misinformation about electronic voting equipment.“They are leaving primarily due to citing harassment and security concerns that are stemming from disproven conspiracy theories in the state,” said Liz Avore, a senior adviser for the Voting Rights Lab.The Justice Department has charged at least 14 people with trying to intimidate election officials since it created a task force in 2021 to focus on such threats, according to the agency. It has secured nine convictions, including two on Aug. 31 in Georgia and Arizona, both battleground states.“A functioning democracy requires that the public servants who administer our elections are able to do their jobs without fearing for their lives,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement at the time.Along with the departures, the Voting Rights Lab report examined a series of issues that it said could create obstacles for the 2024 election, including the approval of new rules in Georgia and North Carolina since 2020 that are likely to increase the number of voter eligibility challenges and stiffen identification requirements.In another area of concern for the group, it drew attention to the expiration of emergency rules for absentee voting in New Hampshire that were enacted during the pandemic.At the same time, some other battleground states have expanded voting access. Michigan will offer at least nine days of early voting in 2024, accept more forms of identification and allow voters to opt in to a permanent mail voting list, while Nevada made permanent the distribution of mail ballots to all voters, the report said. More

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      Now Is the Time to Pay Attention to Trump’s Violent Language

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      Donald Trump has never been shy with his language but recently, the editor Alex Kingsbury argues, his violent speech has escalated. In the last few weeks alone, Trump suggested his own former general was treasonous, said that shoplifters should be shot and exhorted his followers to “go after” New York’s attorney general. Kingsbury says he understands why voters tune Trump out, but stresses the need to pay attention and take action for the sake of American democracy.Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe 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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.This Opinion short was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Trump Announces $45.5 Million Fund-Raising Haul, Tripling DeSantis

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign announced on Wednesday that it had raised $45.5 million from July through September, an enormous sum that tripled what his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, had revealed raising earlier in the day.The Trump haul, which was built in part by an outpouring of money after his mug shot in Georgia became public following his fourth indictment, gives the former president a critical financial edge at the most important juncture of the campaign.Mr. Trump’s campaign said that he entered October with $37.5 million on hand, $36 million of which was eligible to be spent on the 2024 primary race. Top aides to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign had said earlier on Wednesday that his operation had raised $15 million in the quarter and entered October with only $5 million on hand that could be spent in the primary.The Trump campaign said in a statement that the figures were “a grave indication that Ron’s candidacy may not live to see the Iowa caucuses in January, or even the end of this month.”No other campaigns have announced their fund-raising for July, August and September; any numbers released by the campaigns cannot be independently verified until the filing of public reports, which are due on Oct. 15.The Trump campaign’s fund-raising has risen each quarter this year. Mr. DeSantis raised less in the most recent quarter than in the previous one, as his campaign has slipped in the polls and faced a barrage of coverage of its shortcomings and struggles, including two rounds of staff layoffs over the summer.The DeSantis team told staff members on Wednesday that about a third of them would be relocating from the current Tallahassee headquarters in Florida to Iowa, the kickoff state where he is increasingly trying to make a stand against Mr. Trump.In some polls, Mr. DeSantis has fallen behind a third rival, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, in two of the other early states, New Hampshire and South Carolina.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said the $45.5 million haul did not include any refunds that the former president’s political action committee might have received from an allied super PAC.Mr. Trump’s PAC, which has covered his legal fees as he fends off his four indictments, requested a refund of a $60 million transfer it had given the super PAC last year. It gave back more than $12 million in the first half of the year. More

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      Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy and the Ripples of Republican Chaos

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      This week, Donald Trump delivered his version of a sad tiny desk performance, hunched over the defendant’s table in a New York courtroom, diminished and watching the illusion of power and grandeur he has sold voters thin and run like oil in a hot pan.He insisted on appearing in person at his civil fraud trial, apparently believing that he would continue to perform his perverse magic of converting that which would have ended other political careers into a political win for himself.His hubris seemed to consume him, persuading him that in matters of optics, he’s not only invincible but unmatched.He has done it before: In August, he scowled in his mug shot — a precursor to his Fulton County, Ga., criminal trial — summoning the allure of an outlaw, using the photo to raise millions of dollars, according to his campaign.But I think his attempts at cosplaying some sort of roguish flintiness will wind up being missteps. Courtrooms don’t allow for political-rally stagecraft. There’s no place to plant primed supporters behind him to ensure that every camera angle captures excited admirers. He’s not the center of attention, the impresario of the event; no, he must sit silently in lighting not intended to flatter and in chairs not intended to impress.Courtrooms humble the people in them. They equalize. They democratize. In the courtroom, Trump is just another defendant — and in it, he looks small. The phantasm of indomitability, the idea of him being wily and slick, surrenders to the flame like tissues in a campfire.The image was not of a defiant would-be king, but of a man stewing and defeated.The judge in the case even issued a limited gag order after Trump posted a picture of and a comment about the judge’s clerk on Truth Social.Meanwhile, there’s the historic ouster of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, by members of his own party for the unforgivable sin of seeking a bipartisan solution to keep the government open.In Greek mythology exists the story of the Gigantomachy, a battle between the Olympian gods and giants. According to prophesy, the gods could emerge victorious only if assisted by a mortal. Hercules came to the rescue.But in Republicans’ version of this drama, McCarthy could have emerged victorious over his party’s anarchists only if Democrats had come to his aid. None did.He was felled by a revolt led not by a giant, but by the smallest of men, not in stature but in principles: the charmless Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.Anyone who thought that Democrats were going to save McCarthy should have thought again. Ultimately, McCarthy succumbed to the result of his own craven pursuit of power: The rule that Gaetz used to initiate the vote to strip McCarthy of the speaker’s gavel was the rule McCarthy agreed to in order to get his hands on the gavel in the first place.Republicans are engaged in an intense session of self-flagellation. Does it also hurt the country? Yes. But in one way it might help: America needs to clearly see who the culprits are in today’s political chaos, and the damage they cause, so that voters can correct course.And the events of this week should give voters pause. The tableau that emerges from the troubles of Trump and McCarthy is one in which the G.O.P.’s leaders are chastened and cowed, one in which their power is stripped and their efforts rebuked.This is just one week among many leading up to the 2024 elections, but it is weeks like this that leave a mark, because the images that emerge from them are indelible.All the inflamed consternation about Joe Biden’s age and Hunter Biden’s legal troubles will, in the end, have to be weighed against something far more consequential: Republicans — obsessed with blind obeisance, a lust for vengeance and a contempt for accountability — who no longer have the desire or capacity to actually lead.Their impulses to disrupt and destroy keep winning out, foreshadowing even more of a national disaster if their power grows as a result.How Republican primary voters respond to this Republican maelstrom of incompetence is one thing. How general election voters will respond to it is quite another.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      DeSantis Gets a $15 Million Cash Infusion and Moves Staff Into Iowa

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is relocating a significant portion of his presidential campaign staff from Tallahassee to Des Moines, according to his top deputies, redeploying his team to the leadoff state after a $15 million fund-raising haul that advisers said had helped stabilize his campaign.The push into Iowa highlights the state’s make-or-break status for Mr. DeSantis’s long-shot effort to defeat former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. DeSantis hopes a surprise victory in Iowa’s caucuses, the first voting state of the Republican nominating contest, will make enough voters see that Mr. Trump is beatable — motivating them to quickly rally around Mr. DeSantis as the only candidate able to stop him.About a third of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign staff, including senior political and communications advisers, were informed on Wednesday morning that they would be expected to move into short-term housing in Iowa and work from offices in the state. His campaign now employs 56 people, including four Iowa staffers — a number that will soon grow to nearly two dozen, making Iowa a de facto second headquarters.The relocation completes a monthslong retooling of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign, which was in dire financial straits this summer — with delayed bills and unpaid invoices piling up — and had to do two rounds of mass firings in order to remain solvent.Top campaign officials said they had stabilized the situation, thanks to the $15 million infusion from donors that came in the third quarter, from July through September. That money was raised across the three committees associated with Mr. DeSantis: his main presidential campaign account, a political action committee and a fund-raising committee that feeds into those two other accounts. His campaign entered October with $13.5 million in available cash, according to top aides, although some of those funds had not yet been transferred to the campaign account.James Uthmeier, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, said in a statement that the third-quarter haul “shuts down the doubters who counted out Ron DeSantis for far too long.”Aides acknowledged that only $5 million of those funds were eligible to spend in the primary season, meaning that money remains tight for a campaign that has yet to air any television ads. The strapped campaign has left advertising, and most other campaign operations, to a well-funded outside group.Mr. DeSantis has a mountainous task ahead. Even in his chosen state of Iowa — where he is campaigning relentlessly, having already visited more than half of the state’s 99 counties — he remains some 30 points behind Mr. Trump in polling. The $15 million sum is less than the $20 million Mr. DeSantis brought in during the previous quarter, and some of this quarter’s haul is earmarked for his new PAC.Still, the DeSantis team believes it is planting the seeds of a comeback, and that by moving his campaign’s center of gravity to Iowa it can better compete in the increasingly do-or-die state where organizing more than 1,600 independent caucus locations is essential and labor-intensive. Mr. Trump seems to have recognized the threat and has begun traveling to Iowa more frequently.“We are redeploying many of our assets so we can further take the fight directly to Donald Trump in Iowa,” said David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager.Mr. DeSantis’s all-in investment in an early state aims to repeat the comeback effort of former Senator John McCain of Arizona, who in 2008 revived his collapsing presidential campaign by slashing his staff and pouring what remained of his resources into touring New Hampshire town by town.But the comparison ends there. Unlike Mr. DeSantis, who has alienated moderate voters with his hard-line socially conservative positions, Mr. McCain hadn’t narrowed himself ideologically. And Mr. McCain faced nothing like the challenge Mr. DeSantis confronts in running against such an overwhelming front-runner as Mr. Trump, who has been dominating polling and news media coverage. The Republican electorate appears to be treating Mr. Trump as almost an incumbent president.The DeSantis campaign’s public financial paperwork will be released by the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 15, allowing for a more detailed picture of its books. The last report, in July, resulted in a series of cost-cutting measures. Those cuts, which helped keep the campaign afloat, included turning over key functions, such as organizing events, to a pro-DeSantis super PAC and giving up on the idea of running a national race against Mr. Trump.Heading into the fall, the DeSantis campaign has re-emerged as a leaner operation focused on prevailing in Iowa while also drawing a more aggressive contrast with Mr. Trump and gaining attention by giving frequent interviews to the mainstream press. Mr. DeSantis’s efforts have been buoyed by two solid performances in the Republican presidential debates, which reassured donors. His campaign said he raised roughly $1 million in the 24 hours after the first debate in Milwaukee and a similar figure in the 24 hours after the second one.The DeSantis campaign probably would not have survived without its super PAC, Never Back Down, which was financed chiefly by a $82.5 million cash transfer from Mr. DeSantis’s state committee. Never Back Down — which is barred by campaign finance laws from coordinating strategy with either Mr. DeSantis or his campaign team — has been running the DeSantis campaign’s bus tours and has even been handling outreach to voters, including calls and door knocking.The campaign is now being helmed by two new leaders: Mr. Uthmeier, who was Mr. DeSantis’s chief of staff in the governor’s office and is now the campaign manager, and Mr. Polyanksy, a former official at Never Back Down. The hiring of Mr. Polyanksy revealed much about the new direction of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign: He is a veteran of the Iowa caucuses and played an important role in two victorious Republican campaigns there — Ted Cruz’s in 2016 and Mike Huckabee’s in 2008.Among the new Iowa staff’s duties will be organizing caucus sites and setting up events and appearances by surrogates who can drive news media coverage and attention.The daunting nature of running against Mr. Trump, who skipped the debates, is that his online fund-raising apparatus continues to bring in contributions from small donors almost as if on autopilot.In the first six months of the year, he reported more than $250,000 raised, on average, every day — a pace that is roughly the equivalent of $22.5 million in a quarter. And while that average was boosted heavily by indictment-fueled surges, his median day still brought in $153,000 online, according to federal records.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign declined this week to say how much of his fund-raising came from the small donors who fuel campaigns with repeated contributions. But his online haul is nowhere close to Mr. Trump’s.The DeSantis team is banking on the notion that an upset victory in Iowa would shatter the former president’s aura of inevitability and that Republicans would suddenly rush behind Mr. DeSantis as the only viable alternative. The problem with that theory is that former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina is increasingly competitive with Mr. DeSantis and has no apparent incentive to drop out of the race. And Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is also likely to have enough cash to stay in the race and divide up the anti-Trump vote.Still, Mr. Trump has responded to the Florida governor’s efforts in Iowa. The former president has made several appearances in the state and his super PAC purchased more television time there this week. In Mr. DeSantis’s view, that is an early sign that his strategy is working.The former president “is currently spending money against me in Iowa,” Mr. DeSantis said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. “He is campaigning in Iowa. And that’s an indication — you can tell campaigns by what they do.”Over the past few months, Mr. DeSantis has also changed his style of campaigning. Until the summer, he took pride in refusing to engage with the mainstream media that he derisively called the “corporate media.”But as Mr. Trump widened his lead in national polls, the governor threw out that strategy. He began talking to the press almost constantly and sitting for interviews with all the major television networks — unimaginable venues for the Fox-centric early-2023 version of Mr. DeSantis, who was still riding high off his 20-point re-election win in Florida and enjoying the luxury of picking and choosing between fawning conservative media interviews.“Let’s face it, Ron — if this campaign was going well you wouldn’t be on this show,” Bill Maher told Mr. DeSantis in an interview last week.“Oh, that’s not true,” Mr. DeSantis replied halfheartedly.Maggie Haberman More

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      ‘Republicans Own These Issues, and They Can Hurt Democrats’

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      To advance his relentless political ambition, Donald Trump has ridden a promise, a commitment and a pledge.A promise to end the illegal flow of migrants, drugs, cash and guns “across our border.”A commitment to stop other countries seeking “to suck more blood out of the United States.”A pledge to impose law-and-order solutions on cities “where there is a true breakdown in the rule of law,” describing a majority-Black city like Baltimore as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and warning gangs of shoplifters just last week that if he is elected again, “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”How relevant are those themes going to be heading into the 2024 election? Will they work to attract enough voters for him to win? Do they address the sources of voter anxiety?Here are some sources of voter angst that have Trump relishing his rematch with President Biden. Crime — urban and rural — has become more unsettling and threatening. Carjacking, for example, is on the rise of (growing in Washington, D.C., from 152 in 2019 to 485 in 2022). Murder in major cities is up 33.7 percent from 2019 to 2022; gun assaults are up 43.2 percent. Shoplifting in Trump’s telling creates an image of urban lawlessness reinforced by liberal prosecutors’ adoption of policies like no cash bail and the non-prosecution of misdemeanors. The southern border has become increasingly porous, with the number of migrants crossing into the United States in August breaking all records as the U.S. Border Patrol arrested over 91,000 migrants. Southern Republicans, in turn, have shipped migrants by bus to New York, Washington, Chicago and other municipalities.The incumbent president, Joe Biden — fairly or unfairly — does not convey the image of a leader in control of events.The damage inflicted on students in public schools by the Covid lockdown, by school shootings and by conflicts over race, gender and sexual identity — particularly over what can and cannot be discussed or taught — is broadly undermining confidence in American education.And then there is the problem of inflation, which for many Americans is eating away at their sense of security and their standard of living.The reality is that Trump has plenty to capitalize on, but the question remains: With his venomous and often incoherent rants, with 91 felony charges against him, with his White House record of chaos and mismanagement, has Trump worn out his welcome with all but his hard-core MAGA loyalists?I posed these questions to a cross-section of scholars and political operatives. Their responses suggest that Trump might well be a competitive nominee in 2024, with the potential to win a second term in the White House.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, captured in an email the conflicting forces at work as the next election approaches: “Americans see the collapse of safety in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco and blame the entire Democratic Party for the policies of a fringe extreme.”Westwood cited data in a Pew Research study showing that “a majority of Republicans and Independents and a near majority of Democrats (49 percent) reported that violent crime was important to their 2022 vote (including 81 percent of Blacks).”While “Trump is successfully branding Democrats as weak on crime and immigration,” Westwood continued, it remains uncertain whether he can persuade voters that he is the better choice: “It is hard for Trump to convince Americans that he is the tough-on-crime candidate while simultaneously demanding the destruction of the Department of Justice and railing against the integrity of the judicial system.”In the case of immigration, Westwood argued, “Democrats don’t seem to have a coherent policy they can sell to Americans.”“As with crime and immigration, the state of the economy should be wind behind a Republican’s sails,” he added.Trump, however, in Westwood’s view, remains an albatross strangling Republican ambitions:By sticking with Trump the party is potentially sacrificing huge advantages to support an elderly man who could spend the rest of his life in prison. This is a Republican election to lose, but Trump might just help the Democrats survive their own policy failures.In an April Brookings essay, “The Geography of Crime in Four U.S. Cities: Perceptions and Reality,” Hanna Love and Tracy Hadden Loh argue:While stoking fears of crime is an age-old election tactic, something feels different about its salience in the pandemic-era landscape. Faced with slow-recovering urban cores and predictions of an “urban doom loop,” many pundits and urban observers are returning to a playbook not fully deployed since the 1990s — pointing to public safety as the primary cause of a host of complex and interconnected issues, from office closures to public transit budget shortfalls to the broader decline of cities.Love and Loh interviewed nearly 100 business leaders, public officials and residents of New York, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago. Their primary finding:Respondents overwhelmingly pointed to crime — not the desire for flexible work arrangements — as the top barrier to preventing workers’ return to office. Across all four cities, the vast majority of resident, major employers, property owners, small business owners and other stakeholders reporting rising rates of violent crime and property crime downtown and indicators of “disorder” (such as public drug use) as the top barriers to stopping workers from coming back to the office — and thus impeding downtown recovery.Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Duke, wrote by email that both immigration and crime pose difficult political choices for Democrats, especially those with progressive ideals: “First for the migrant question, any large uptick in marginalized populations that is visible to native populations have the potential both to create unease among those populations and to be blamed for any increases in the risk of victimization that folks feel.”How much does this hurt the Democrats?“I would say a whole heck of a lot potentially unless they are willing to adopt the sort of stance to crime and punishment that President Bill Clinton took in his 1992 campaign and presidency.”The result?This rise in visible criminal activity and social unrest leaves Democrats where they essentially either give up their values in terms of crime and punishment and keep voters in the middle or hold the line in terms of crime and punishment (continuing to argue for more progressive policies) and risk losing some votes. It’s not a great spot.Wildeman is not alone in his belief that these issues are quite likely to work to the detriment of Biden and the Democratic Party generally.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, emailed his view thatthe themes that are to the Democrats’ disadvantage are more relevant than they were in 2016. The burden posed by migrants is a greater issue, and the increase in the crime rate and murder rate, along with the inability of law enforcement to control rampant shoplifting in some cities, can even make the Democrats’ base among minority voters and college educated voters uneasy, and also women — varying geographically.“Republicans own these issues,” Shapiro pointed out, “and they can hurt Democrats. These issues along with education, race and gender identity will help Republicans running for Congress and state offices, even if they benefit Trump less due to his other serious baggage.”Roland Neil, a social scientist at the RAND Corporation, also pointed to the dangers facing Biden and his fellow Democrats:Two things we can be certain of: first, violent crime increased dramatically in many cities, especially when the pandemic hit; and second, this coincided with various progressive criminal justice reform efforts, such as bail reform, more lenient prosecution in some jurisdictions and calls to defund the police.While the incidence of violent crime has subsided in recent months, Neil noted:Focusing on that misses the point, since the issues drawing attention are all real problems facing cities and the public has taken notice. They should not be dismissed as trivial, as they genuinely impact safety and quality of life.There is no consistent and reliable data, Neil wrote, “for crimes and disorder that have been drawing much attention, like carjacking, retail theft by flash mobs, open air drug markets and the changing nature of encounters with homeless people.”That said, he added, “there is evidence that carjackings are up in several cities since the pandemic. Also, drug overdose deaths are at historical highs, and motor vehicle theft is up sharply in many cities.”Philadelphia, according to Neil, “presents an interesting case: shootings and murder are down by about a quarter this year (from a very high level), but flash mob retail thefts likely create the sense of a city that is losing control.”Phillip Atiba Solomon, a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale, stressed the racial implications of Trump’s strategy in his emailed reply to my inquiry, arguing that these have the strong potential to sway white voters:Broadly, I think the themes you outline can be simplified to, “We’re the victims, and the victimizers are getting away with murder.” And, yes, I think they’ll apply this year as well as in any year when the “we” includes a coalition of elites and paycheck-to-paycheck working folks, each of whom reasonably see themselves as losing ground they once felt confident belonged to them (however ill-gotten that ground was in the first place).According to Solomon:This is a country that generally makes life hard for working people and is busily shifting symbols around that are meaningful to people who identify as white. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to manipulate feelings that life is not fair into feelings that “we” are being persecuted by “those people” who are stealing what “rightfully belongs to us” — literally, figuratively and with all appropriate scare quotes.The current political environment entails both conflict between the parties and disputes within each of the parties. Neil Malhotra, a political scientist at Stanford, described this ambiguity in an email:The conventional wisdom is that any Republican candidate for president, not just Trump, should focus on three issues: inflation, immigration and crime. Trump may be uniquely positioned to take advantage of these three issues, particularly since he has a more moderate image than his competitors on issues where Republicans are disadvantaged: abortion and entitlements — Social Security and Medicare.The flip side, Malhotra wrote, “is that the Democratic candidate for president should be focusing the campaign around abortion rights, climate change, health care and economic inequality.”Malhotra cited a Pew Research survey from June, “Inflation, Health Costs, Partisan Cooperation Among the Nation’s Top Problems,” that broke down the issues on which voters agree more with Republicans than Democrats and vice versa.Republicans had the edge on economic policy (42-30), immigration (41-31) and crime (40-30). Democrats led on climate change policy (41-27), abortion (43-31) and health care (39-27). The smallest gaps were on foreign policy, favoring Republicans (37-33), gun policy (statistically even) and education, favoring Democrats (37-33).Crime, in Malhotra’s view,is a particularly interesting topic because it’s always been more about perception than reality. Violent crime statistics have been declining during the Biden administration from the Covid peak, but there is a general image of lawlessness mainly around property crime, which I believe is a real and persistent problem in many areas.In the case of crime, Malhotra wrote, “You don’t actually need to be a victim or even in danger for it to affect your political worldview. I suspect a lot of Americans’ reaction to property crime is a sense of helplessness and a world they are not used to.”Malhotra made the case that Trump loyalists are a more complicated constituency than they are often described as being:There is a lot of talk of MAGA voters as wanting to go back to a 1950s America characterized by racism and sexism. I’m sure people like that exist, but there is another type of MAGA voter that I’ll call “end-of-history MAGA.”Many of these people are members of Gen X (born between 1961 and 1981), which is a generation that slightly leans Republican. “End-of-history-MAGA” people look back to the 1990s as a peak period of American greatness characterized by economic strength, declining crime, etc. I don’t think these people can be easily dismissed as racist or sexist. But they may believe that America has been in decline on many dimensions.The entry of growing numbers of younger voters into the electorate, Malhotra noted, will work to Biden’s advantage, as they “generally see immigration and crime as less important issues than older voters.”But, Malhotra cautioned, “a potential threat for Biden is that younger voters are being crushed by high rent, high interest rates and low housing supply, and they see little optimism for experiencing the American dream of homeownership.”Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, makes the point that in 2024 Trump will have been the nominee, if all goes as expected, three times in a row, and Biden twice. When combined with the increasing immovability of polarized Democrats and Republicans determined to support their own parties, “2024 will likely look much like 2020 and 2016.”“There simply won’t be much movement in the aggregate,” he added. “This means that even small things on the margin could end up mattering a lot.”Levendusky, in contrast to some others I have quoted here, suggests that despite a difficult set of issues, Biden may be stronger than expected:In a normal year, Biden would be in real trouble. But Trump brings his own unique issues as well, especially this year. He’s a uniquely mobilizing factor for Democrats — they view him as an existential threat, and his indictments may well drag down support among key groups he needs to win back in order to secure the White House.In the case of Trump’s indictments, Levendusky argues that “the core of Trump’s base is unlikely to be moved, but more marginal voters are a different story.” If these “wavering Republicans or independent voters are in key states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, etc., that will be extremely damaging to Trump.”Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton who has written extensively about crime, argued in an email that Biden can make the case that he has a better record on fighting gun violence and crime than is widely recognized:Candidate Trump will undoubtedly paint a portrait of urban America as lawless, dangerous, and disorderly, just as he did in 2016. That said, President Biden has a strong case to make that he has done more than any recent president to address gun violence.Gun violence, Sharkey wrote,began to skyrocket in the summer of 2020, when former President Trump was in office. Since that point, the level of violence has plateaued, and so far in 2023 the vast majority of U.S. cities have seen sharp declines in homicides and shootings.While the Republican Party, Sharkey continued,has railed against the Department of Justice and largely ignored the Jan. 6 assault on U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department officers, the Biden administration has invested additional federal funding in law enforcement while also using federal funds to support Community Violence Intervention programs, which, even if the funding was nowhere near sufficient, represents a historic expansion of the federal government’s approach to addressing violent crime. The passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is the first major federal legislation to address guns in decades.A potential problem with Sharkey’s analysis is that in contemporary campaigns, especially those involving Donald Trump, it’s not at all clear that substance matters.Few, if any, have put it better than retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, who on Oct. 2 expressed to CNN his frustration over seeing his ex-boss far ahead in the competition for the nomination:What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.’”A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.Kelly continued:A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. … A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More