Presidential Election of 2024

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      Discontent With Party Politics Reaches New Heights

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      Americans tend to agree on what is wrong with the political system, and majorities of voters from both parties are unhappy with the quality of the candidates. But there also seems to be little appetite for third-party candidates.Close to one year away from the 2024 presidential election, most Americans say they are discontent with their candidate choices, and 28 percent of Americans say they do not like either political party, quadruple the share that said the same thing 30 years ago.But the question remains whether voters will hold their noses and vote for a candidate they dislike or sit out this election.Americans are less satisfied than they were even five years ago with the quality of candidates running for office, according to a new study by Pew Research Center that attempts to understand the breadth and depth of political dissatisfaction in the country. Just 26 percent of Americans said candidates for office had been good in the last several years, with no split between Republicans and Democrats. That’s down from 47 percent in 2018 and 34 percent in 2021, when voters who aligned with the party in power were more likely to be satisfied.When it comes to the quality of candidates running for the presidency, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they are not satisfied, but majorities of voters from both parties are unhappy.“The two-party system just doesn’t work — there aren’t only two types of people,” said Madison Lane, a mother of two and political independent from Jacksonville, Fla. “I believe in global warming, gay rights and trans rights. I can’t really vote Republican and believe in those things. But at the same time, Democrats are just fueled by big corporations and money. So I feel like I’m left with no good candidates to choose from.”As more ideologically extreme voters decide primary elections, parties are also pushed to the extremes, which leaves a vast majority of the people in the middle feeling alienated, said Professor Ian Shapiro, a political science professor at Yale University and author of “Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself.”“I expect this number who feel alienated by the parties to continue to grow,” he said.Across the partisan spectrum, Americans tend to agree on what is wrong with the political system, citing political fighting, polarization, money in politics and lobbying influence. And when asked specifically to list any strengths of the political system, more than half of Americans either skipped the question entirely or said the system had no strengths. Respondents who did not list a strength tended to be younger and less educated.In an era where many delight in hate watching television shows, engagement in politics may be a part of the problem. Highly politically engaged Americans are more likely than those who are more tuned out to say they always or often feel exhausted and angry when they think about politics.Discontent with political options is not new, and nearly every presidential election features a quest to float a moderate, if often quixotic, alternative to the major parties. According to the Pew study, sizable shares of Americans say they wish there were more political parties from which to choose, and this sentiment is stronger among Democrats than Republicans.But only about a quarter of Americans actually think having more political parties would solve the nation’s problems. And most Republicans and Democrats think their own party governs in an honest and ethical way and is respectful and tolerant of different types of people.“Politicians are not focusing on the priorities of the public,” Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, said. “They’re primarily focused on niche issues.” Even so, he said, “most Americans will hold their nose and pick from the available two parties.”Despite the rhetoric from many Republican elected officials focused on questioning the integrity of elections and vote counting, Americans — including sizable shares of Republicans — still see voting as the single best way to change the country for the better.Even so, only a quarter of Americans think who the president is makes a big difference in their lives. More

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      It’s Not a Race, Yet, in the Republican Primary

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      Donald Trump is polling about as well as any candidate in the modern history of contested presidential primaries.Reba Saldanha/ReutersDonald J. Trump’s lead in the Republican primary just keeps growing.He breached 60 percent of the vote in Fox News and Quinnipiac polls last week, including 60-13 and 62-12 leads over his nearest rival, the not-so-near Ron DeSantis.Even more notable: His gains follow what would be considered a disastrous 50-day stretch for any other campaign. Since early August, he has faced new federal and state criminal indictments for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. He skipped the first presidential debate, which was nonetheless watched by over 10 million people. Not only did it not hurt him, but he came out stronger.With these latest gains, Mr. Trump is inching into rarefied territory. The latest surveys show him polling about as well as any candidate in the history of modern contested presidential primaries. He’s approaching the position of George W. Bush, who led John McCain by a similar margin at this stage of the 2000 race. And in the two aforementioned polls, he’s matching Mr. Bush’s position.The 2000 election is a helpful reminder that the race might still become more competitive. Mr. Bush skipped the first two debates, but Mr. McCain ultimately won New Hampshire, cleared the field of significant opponents, and ultimately won six more contests. He didn’t win, of course. He didn’t come close. But it was at least a race. That’s more than can be said right now for Mr. Trump’s competition, which would probably go 0 for 50 if states voted today.On paper, Mr. Trump faces greater risks than Mr. Bush did — including the risk of imprisonment. On the trail, he’s relatively weak in Iowa, where his recent comments about abortion — he called a six-week ban a “terrible thing” — might raise additional skepticism from the state’s religious conservatives. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in Iowa (roughly 45-15) is quite similar to where Mr. Bush stood in New Hampshire at this time 24 years ago.Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Trump hasn’t consolidated the support of Republican elites. Unlike Mr. McCain, Mr. DeSantis is not a mere factional candidate. There remains a chance, unlikely though it may seem today, that Mr. Trump’s skeptics could consolidate against him, perhaps fueled by an unprecedented criminal trial in the heart of the primary season.But to this point, the theoretical risks to Mr. Trump haven’t materialized. More than anything, this probably reflects his unique strengths. He’s a former president, not the son of a former president. Perhaps this race is more like a president seeking re-election than a typical open, contested primary. At the very least, his resilience in the face of electoral defeat and criminal indictment is a powerful indication of his unusual standing.And in contrast with Mr. McCain at this stage in the 2000 race, Mr. Trump’s opposition is well known. It’s probably fair to say that Mr. DeSantis has faded more than he has been outright defeated, so there’s room for a resurgence — something like Mr. McCain’s comeback in 2008. But the easiest path to surge in a primary is usually to be discovered by voters for the first time, and that path will not be available to the likes of Mr. DeSantis, Mike Pence and Chris Christie.The winner of the first debate might have been Nikki Haley, but she represents something of a best case for Mr. Trump: moderate and strong enough to peel away anti-Trump votes from Mr. DeSantis; far too moderate to pose a serious threat to Mr. DeSantis or to win the nomination.So while history and today’s circumstances suggest a path toward a tighter race, it’s worth being frank about what we’re watching today. This race currently has many of the features of a noncompetitive contest, like an overwhelming polling lead, a leading candidate who doesn’t need to debate and party leadership that’s unwilling to attack the front-runner, despite major reservations. It’s a lot like what we see in the Democratic race, which is not considered competitive. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in the latest polls is getting about as large as President Biden’s recent leads over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Of course, there are several ways in which the Republican contest is different from the Democratic one. Unlike Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has mainstream challengers. The G.O.P. race is closer in the early states, where Mr. Trump is beneath 50 percent. If Mr. DeSantis beat Mr. Trump in Iowa, perhaps Republicans could rapidly coalesce around him, much as moderates did for Mr. Biden against Bernie Sanders in 2020. And there is the extraordinary prospect of a federal trial in March. Together, it’s easy to imagine how this becomes a competitive race again.But while the race might become hotly competitive in the future, it isn’t exactly a competitive one today. More

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      The Borking of Joe Biden

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      If there was any doubt that the Republican House was no more sophisticated than a preschool playground, last week’s opening of an impeachment inquiry into President Biden settled it with a nasty kick of sand in Democrats’ face.How else can you describe the pretext for this fishing expedition other than “You started it”? If our guy got embroiled in impeachment and protracted legal proceedings during election season, well then, damn it, so will yours.Whereas Democrats began the first Trump impeachment inquiry after it was revealed that he tried to extort a political favor from the president of Ukraine in exchange for military aid, and the second impeachment after an insurrection, the Biden inquiry is proceeding with no clear evidence of any misdeeds by the president.This is just the latest asymmetric tit-for-tat by Republicans.Even many Republicans in Congress don’t buy into this kind of baloney, as we’ve learned from a series of Washington confessionals and from several Republicans who have questioned whether their side has the goods or if this is the best use of their time. As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.But this isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed this kind of sorry perversion of Democratic precedent. What Democrats do first in good faith, Republicans repeat in bad faith. Time and again, partisan steps that Democrats take with caution are transmogrified into extraordinary retaliation by Republicans.And so, Al Gore’s challenge of the 2000 election results, ending in his decorous acceptance of the results after a bitter court ruling, is reincarnated as an unhinged insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.In exchange for the brief moment after the 2004 election when some Democrats claimed irregularities with the Ohio ballot process, we get Republicans taking baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020 to thermonuclear level.In June 1992, Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on President George H.W. Bush not to nominate any candidate for the Supreme Court until after the fall election, saying it was “fair” and “essential” to keep what could be a sharp political conflict out of the campaign’s final days — as well as the nomination process itself. Of course, with no vacancy at hand, the stakes in that instance were nonexistent. But just after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Mitch McConnell took the extraordinary position that he would not submit any Supreme Court nominee from President Barack Obama for Senate consideration in an election year. By ignoring that nominee, Merrick Garland, Republicans maintained a conservative majority on the court. McConnell, of course, disingenuously cited the “Biden rule” in his decision.It is a bitter paradox that Biden, long a careful moderate, has suffered the brunt of this vindictive one-upmanship. The trouble with being around for so long, as Biden has been, is that there is always someone who remembers “the time when you” and holds a grudge.And while there’s no direct connection between the 1987 defeat of Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court and the current impeachment inquiry, I can’t help thinking that the rage that set off among conservative Republicans helped ignite the flames of animosity that have only intensified over the years, yet another instance of a Democratic precedent being grossly misinterpreted as a political ploy rather than as a principled stand.It was Biden, who as chair of the Judiciary Committee and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was compelled to lead the fight against Bork. There was plenty of reason to block Bork: He had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the principle of one-person, one-vote; the judicial protection of gay rights; and the idea of a constitutional right to privacy as the foundation of not only Roe v. Wade, but also the right to contraception.But the fight made even some Democrats nervous. “Will Democrats Self-Destruct on Bork?” the liberal columnist Mark Shields asked.At that time, for one party to lead the fight to reject a Supreme Court nominee on ideological grounds was extraordinary. The vehemence with which some senators, like Ted Kennedy, approached it exacerbated the rancor. This sort of process became known as “Borking,” which, for Republicans, meant using someone’s record to destroy their character. To their minds, even though six Republicans voted against Bork, Democrats had politicized and poisoned the nomination process.It’s hard not to see the unhinged attempt to take down Biden now as some kind of warped reincarnation of “Borking,” yet another twisted abuse of Democratic precedent.The misdeeds Trump committed in office clearly warranted an unprecedented double impeachment. They certainly did not warrant this inquiry into Biden.We are left to hope that the effort will now blow up in the G.O.P.’s face. Considering the shameless stuntathon of today’s House Republicans, this may be the closest we get to what’s fair.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

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      DeSantis Slams Biden Climate Policy: ‘An Agenda to Control You’

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      The Florida governor delivered an address in Texas that favored oil and gas development over climate agreements and electric vehicles.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Wednesday unveiled an energy plan in the heart of oil country, criticizing electric vehicles and global climate agreements, promising lower fuel prices and pushing for more oil and gas development.In a policy rollout at an oil rig site in Midland — a West Texas city that derives much of its economy from oil production — Mr. DeSantis seemed to make a general-election argument, promising to roll back several of the Biden administration’s climate initiatives, calling them “part of an agenda to control you and to control our behavior.”“They’re trying to circumscribe your ambitions. They are even telling our younger generations to have fewer children, or not to even have children, on the grounds that somehow children are going to make our climate and planet unlivable — and that’s wrong to say,” he told a crowd of a few dozen rig workers and reporters.Mr. DeSantis mentioned his chief rival in the Republican primary, former President Donald J. Trump — whom he trails by a wide margin in the polls — only once.That didn’t stop Mr. Trump’s campaign from taking a shot at the governor for his remarks. Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, used expletives in calling Mr. DeSantis a “candidate that just steals from President Trump’s policy book” in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, during the governor’s remarks.In a lengthy, six-pronged policy outline, Mr. DeSantis promised to remove subsidies for electric vehicles, take the U.S. out of global climate agreements — including the Paris accords — and cancel net-zero emission promises. He also vowed to increase American oil and natural gas production and “replace the phrase climate change with energy dominance” in policy guidance.Mr. DeSantis spoke from behind a lectern that read “$2 in 2025,” a nod to his campaign’s promise to lower gas to $2 in the first year of his administration (a number not seen consistently since the George W. Bush administration). His remarks — delivered above the sounds of heavy machinery — paired standard Republican energy policy, blasting foreign energy dependence and blue state regulations, with criticism of the Biden administration’s focus on reducing carbon emissions and incentivizing clean energy.The Biden campaign criticized Mr. DeSantis’s plan.“This is a deeply unserious and impractical plan that won’t actually lower gas prices to $2 per gallon and is chock-full of the climate denialism that defines the MAGA Republican Party,” Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement. “Voters need look no further than DeSantis’s own state — where his agenda is leading to skyrocketing energy costs for his constituents and natural disasters are causing tens of billions of dollars in damages — to know what DeSantis’s plan would mean for the country.”Mr. DeSantis calls his plan “Freedom to Fuel,” and it includes a segment on automobiles, an industry segment that has also put Mr. Biden under scrutiny by Republicans, with autoworkers on strike. The United Auto Workers began targeted strikes last week over contract talks. In a recent op-ed piece in The Des Moines Register, Mr. DeSantis promised to “stand with our farmers” by opposing electric vehicles and supporting biofuel usage, a nod to the state’s large agricultural industry.But asked Wednesday if he believed that fossil fuels contributed to climate change, Mr. DeSantis deflected — which he has done repeatedly, most notably on the Republican debate stage last month.“The climate clearly has changed — you can judge that, I think, objectively. I think the question is, is what policy posture are we going to take from that?” he said, pointing to his own proposal as the “most practical way to reduce global emissions.”During his visit to Texas, Mr. DeSantis is also attending several high-dollar fund-raising events across the state over the next few days. But while he has had fund-raising success among Texas donors in the oil and real estate industries, some large donors nationally have expressed hesitation. And his fund-raising in the state has not necessarily translated to grass-roots support: The Oil and Gas Workers Association, based out of nearby Odessa, Texas, announced Wednesday that it would endorse Mr. Trump.Jimmy Gray, a Midland oil rig worker since 1979 who supported Mr. Trump in the last election, said after the event that he was impressed by Mr. DeSantis but remained undecided in the Republican presidential contest. “I’ve seen a lot of policies in a lot of administrations, and a lot of things change throughout that time, but one thing that hasn’t really changed is that in order for us to decrease costs across the country, energy — in whatever form that is — has to be done right,” he said.“Ron DeSantis made some good points — he’s got me interested,” he added. “I just would like to see a different direction than what we’ve got now.” More

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      Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson May Not Make the Next GOP Debate

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      Low poll numbers could keep the long-shot Republicans off the stage next Wednesday in the second presidential primary debate.After eking their way into the first Republican presidential debate last month, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, long-shot candidates, appear to be in jeopardy of failing to qualify for the party’s second debate next week.Both have been registering support in the low single digits in national polls and in the polls from early nominating states that the Republican National Committee uses to determine eligibility.The threshold is higher for this debate, happening on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Several better-known G.O.P. rivals are expected to make the cut — but the candidate who is perhaps best known, former President Donald J. Trump, is again planning to skip the debate.Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming front-runner for the party’s nomination despite a maelstrom of indictments against him, will instead give a speech to striking union autoworkers in Michigan.Who Has Qualified for the Second Republican Presidential Debate?Six candidates appear to have made the cut for the next debate. Donald J. Trump is not expected to attend.Some of Mr. Trump’s harshest critics in the G.O.P. have stepped up calls for the party’s bottom-tier candidates to leave the crowded race, consolidating support for a more viable alternative to the former president.Lance Trover, a spokesman for the Burgum campaign, contended in an email on Wednesday that Mr. Burgum was still positioned to qualify for the debate. Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said in an email on Wednesday that candidates have until 48 hours before the debate to qualify. She declined to comment further about which ones had already done so.Before the first debate on Aug. 23, the R.N.C. announced it was raising its polling and fund-raising thresholds to qualify for the second debate, which will be televised by Fox Business. Candidates must now register at least 3 percent support in a minimum of two national polls accepted by the R.N.C. The threshold for the first debate was 1 percent.Debate organizers will also recognize a combination of one national poll and polls from at least two of the following early nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.“While debate stages are nice, we know there is no such thing as a national primary,” Mr. Trover said in a statement, adding, “Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are the real people that narrow the field.”Mr. Burgum’s campaign has a plan to give him a boost just before the debate, Mr. Trover added, targeting certain Republicans and conservative-leaning independents through video text messages. A super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running a distant second to Mr. Trump in Republican polls, has used a similar text messaging strategy.Mr. Burgum, a former software executive, is also harnessing his wealth to introduce himself to Republicans through television — and at considerable expense. Since the first debate, a super PAC aligned with him has booked about $8 million in national broadcast, live sports and radio advertising, including a $2 million infusion last week, according to Mr. Burgum’s campaign, which is a separate entity. His TV ads appeared during Monday Night Football on ESPN.As of Wednesday, there were six Republicans who appeared to be meeting the national polling requirement, according to FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregation site.That list was led by Mr. Trump, who is ahead of Mr. DeSantis by an average of more than 40 percentage points. The list also includes the multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador; former Vice President Mike Pence; and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was averaging only 2.4 percent support nationally as of Wednesday, he is also expected to make the debate stage by relying on a combination of national and early nominating state polls to qualify.Mr. Scott has performed better in places like Iowa and his home state than in national polls, and his campaign has pressed the R.N.C. to place more emphasis on early nominating states.The R.N.C. also lifted its fund-raising benchmarks for the second debate. Only candidates who have received financial support from 50,000 donors will make the debate stage — 10,000 more than they needed for the first debate. They must also have at least 200 donors in 20 or more states or territories.While Mr. Burgum’s campaign said that it had reached the fund-raising threshold, it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Hutchinson had.Both candidates resorted to some unusual tactics to qualify for the first debate.Mr. Burgum offered $20 gift cards to anyone who gave at least $1 to his campaign, while Politico reported that Mr. Hutchinson had paid college students for each person they could persuade to contribute to his campaign.Candidates will still be required to sign a loyalty pledge promising to support the eventual Republican nominee, something that Mr. Trump refused to do before skipping the first debate.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Young Voters Are Frustrated. They’re Staying Engaged ‘Out of Sheer Self-Defense.’

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      A Pew Research Center report released this week called Americans’ views of our politics “dismal.”That might be too kind a word.On metric after metric, the report ticked through markers of our persistent pessimism. In 1994, it says, “just 6 percent” of Americans viewed both political parties negatively. That number has now more than quadrupled to 28 percent. The percentage who believe our political system is working “extremely or very well”: just 4 percent.And on many measures, younger people are the most frustrated, and supportive of disruptive change as a remedy.Younger voters recognize that our political system is broken, and they have little nostalgia about a less broken time. They have almost no memory of an era when government was less partisan and less gridlocked. Their instincts are to fix the system they’ve inherited, not to wind back the clock to a yesteryear.According to Pew, among American adults under 30, 70 percent favor having a national popular vote for president, 58 percent favor expansion of the Supreme Court, 44 percent favor expansion of the House of Representatives, and 45 percent favor amending the Constitution to change the way representation in the Senate is apportioned — numbers higher than their older counterparts, particularly those over 50.But the American political system wasn’t built to make radical change easy. Yes, our political system needs a major overhaul, but such an overhaul is almost inconceivable given current political constraints.This can be a bracing reality when youthful idealism crashes into it.The knot that the country finds itself in may be one reason Pew found that younger voters are the least likely to believe that voting can have at least some effect on the country’s future direction.And yet, according to a poll this spring of 18- to 29-year-olds by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, they’re still engaged. As John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the institute and the author of “Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America,” put it, “From the midterms through the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election, we are seeing young Americans increasingly motivated to engage in politics out of sheer self-defense and a responsibility to fight for those even more vulnerable than themselves.”This defensive posture is understandable when you think about the political era in which these younger voters came of age: a dizzying period of dysfunction, calamity and activism.Among voters 30 to 49, the oldest were in their 20s on Sept. 11, 2001. The events of that day would roll into America’s longest war — 20 years in Afghanistan. Those voters would see the hopefulness around the election of Barack Obama as president, but also the extreme backlash to his election that would culminate in the election of Donald Trump, Obama’s intellectual and moral antithesis.Voters 18 to 29 ranged from their preteen years to their early 20s when Trump was elected in 2016. Only the oldest of them were eligible to vote at the time. The Trump years saw a president who has been accused of sexual assault, was openly hostile to minorities and disdainful of civil rights protests, and lied incessantly as those supporting him repeatedly excused or covered for him.The oldest of this group were in their late teens when Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, so they lived the birth and rise of Black Lives Matter and are now living the backlash to it.The Trump years exposed the inability — the ineptitude — of our system to hold leaders accountable and ended with an attempt to overturn an election and a storming of the Capitol.Those years also saw a surge in mass shootings and warnings about the effects of climate change growing more dire, two issues that have become important to young voters. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was the clincher.It’s no wonder that younger voters are so frustrated and so thirsty for change, and they spare no one in pursuing it.While younger voters are more likely to have a favorable view of Democrats than of Republicans, they’re also more likely than older generations to have unfavorable views of both parties. More than half of Americans under 30 said it is usually the case that none of candidates running for political office in recent years represent their views well.This all hints at a profound frustration with a lack of results, the professionalization of politics, and incrementalism and intransigence.And yet this frustrated army of voters could still have a major impact in 2024. The Brookings Institution did the math on how important this voting bloc will be:According to our projections, based on U.S. Census Bureau estimates, if Americans under 45 (plurals and millennials) vote at the same rate as they did in the 2020 presidential election, they will represent more than one-third (37 percent) of the 2024 electorate. If that generational cohort’s contribution to the electorate in next year’s presidential general election is the same as its contribution to the U.S. voting age population, it will comprise nearly half (49 percent) of the vote on Nov. 5, 2024.In recent elections, younger voters have been voting nearly two to one for Democrats. And the Republican Party may be pushing more of that group in that direction as the party digs in its heels on social positions unpopular with them.But it’s a sad state of affairs that our current political system starves young people of hope and optimism, and instead forces them to cast their ballots as if under existential threat, regardless of which party benefits.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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      Will Hurd Releases A.I. Plan, a First in the Republican Presidential Field

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      The former Texas congressman’s plan takes an expansive view of both the potential and the risks of artificial intelligence, calling for it to be used more widely but also tightly regulated.The policy plan on artificial intelligence released by former Representative Will Hurd of Texas on Wednesday makes him the first candidate in the Republican presidential field to formally propose a way to navigate the uses and dangers of a technology so thorny he likened it to nuclear fission.“Nuclear fission controlled gives you nuclear power — clean, cheap, limitless power,” Mr. Hurd said in an interview with The New York Times. “Nuclear fission uncontrolled gives you nuclear weapons that can destroy the world. And I think A.I. is equivalent.”The plan, first reported by Axios, takes an expansive view of both the potential and the risks of artificial intelligence. He calls for A.I. to be used much more widely than it currently is — both in administrative tasks within the federal government and in highly sensitive areas like national defense — but also supports regulating the industry more tightly than is typical of many Republicans’ approach to private industries.Among his proposals are calls to ensure compensation when people’s intellectual property is used in A.I.-generated content, as well as name, image and likeness protections against so-called deepfakes. He would also seek to require permits for companies that want to build A.I. models and to impose “strict regulations” on exports of A.I. technology, and would reject any exemptions for developers from liability under existing laws.Artificial intelligence has already begun to change political campaigns themselves, with some operatives using it to write first drafts of fund-raising messages and automate tedious tasks — and to spread disinformation, including fake images of opponents.Mr. Hurd has struggled to gain traction in the Republican primary field. He did not qualify for the first debate in August because he failed to reach 1 percent support in enough polls, and he remains at risk of failing to meet the even higher thresholds to qualify for the second debate next week.But that he would be the first candidate to release a formal plan on artificial intelligence tracks with his professional background.He once worked as a senior adviser at a cybersecurity firm called FusionX, and made cybersecurity one of his main focuses as a legislator. He also led the House Oversight Subcommittee on Information Technology, where he organized hearings on artificial intelligence in 2018, long before it entered the mainstream. After leaving Congress in 2021, he joined the board of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence laboratory that developed ChatGPT.“Artificial intelligence is a technology that transcends borders,” Mr. Hurd said at the first congressional A.I. hearing in 2018. “We have allies and adversaries, both nation-states and individual hackers, who are pursuing artificial intelligence with all they have because dominance in artificial intelligence is a guaranteed leg up in the realm of geopolitics and economics.”His plan suggests employing A.I. tools within military, intelligence and border security agencies and using those tools to make the government “more responsive to the needs of everyday Americans.” He said in the interview that this could include using A.I. to issue passports and visas, summarize publicly available information for intelligence agencies, predict what federal support individual communities will need as a hurricane approaches and identify the cause of backlogs at poorly performing Veterans Affairs centers.Current A.I. models have a well-documented tendency to “hallucinate” and provide inaccurate or fabricated information. Mr. Hurd’s plan does not address that problem. He said he envisioned A.I. helping migrants learn English and helping students with math, and was “not as concerned” with hallucination in those contexts.“I think we can achieve the promise of A.I. while minimizing the risk,” he said. More

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      Pro-Choice? Pro-Union? Donald Trump Has a Deal for You.

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      As Ron DeSantis’s challenge to Donald Trump has seemed to wither on the vine, a piece of conventional wisdom has hardened: That DeSantis has been offering Republican voters Trumpism without the drama, but now we know Republicans love the drama, indeed they can’t live without the drama, and mere substance simply leaves them cold.In one sense, that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the way that Trump’s multiplying indictments seemed to solidify his front-runner’s position, the way that he’s sucked up media oxygen and built his primary lead on the basis of what would be, for any normal politician, terrible publicity.But it elides the fact that DeSantis, like many of his rivals in the current battle for second place, hasn’t actually offered voters an equivalent of Trumpism, and certainly not the Trumpism that won the 2016 Republican primary fight and then upset Hillary Clinton.He has offered part of that package, certainly: the promise to wage war on liberalism by all available means, the harsh words for self-appointed experts and elites, the hostility to the establishment press. But he hasn’t really tried to channel another crucial element of Trumpism — the marriage of rhetorical extremism with ideological flexibility, the ability to drop a vicious insult one moment and promise to make a big, beautiful bipartisan deal the next.That was what Trump offered throughout 2016. While his rivals in the primaries impotently accused him of being unconservative, he cheerfully embraced various heterodoxies on health care and trade and taxes, selling himself as an economic moderate with the same gusto that he promised to build the wall and ban Muslim visitors from the United States.These heterodoxies were often more a salesman’s patter than a sincere policy agenda, which helps explain why his presidency was more conventionally conservative than his campaign.But now candidate Trump is back at the salesman’s game. In the last week, the man whose judicial appointees overturned Roe v. Wade and whose administration was reliably hostile to unions has condemned the six-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis, promised to magically bring the country together on abortion and indicated he’s going to counterprogram next week’s Republican presidential debate by showing up on the U.A.W. picket line.You can see these forays as proof that Trump thinks he’s got the nomination in the bag, that the pro-life movement especially has no choice but to support him and that he can start presenting himself as a general-election candidate early.But I suspect it’s a little more complicated than that, and that Trump’s willingness to show ideological flexibility — or, to be a bit harsher, to pander emptily to any audience he faces — has its uses in the primary campaign as well. Because what it showcases, even to primary voters who disagree with him, is an eagerness to win even at the expense of ideological consistency, an eagerness that much of American conservatism lacks.And showcasing electability is arguably even more important for Trump in 2024 than in 2016, because he was at his weakest after the 2022 midterms, which seemed to expose his election fraud obsessions as a political disaster for the G.O.P. So by moving to the center early, while DeSantis and others try to run against him from the right, he’s counteracting that narrative, trying to prove that he’s committed to victory and not just vanity. (And on the evidence of national polls, in which he now does slightly better than DeSantis against Biden, it’s working.)Does Trump actually have a labor-friendly solution to the U.A.W. strike or a coherent pro-worker agenda? The answers are no and not really. But if showing public sympathy for workers and promising a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods are respectively an empty gesture and a dubious gambit, they are still a better political message than, say, what we got from Tim Scott, the candidate of pre-Trump conservatism, who suggested that the U.A.W. workers should be fired the way Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. (This kind of nonsense position, invoking Reagan’s firing of federal employees in the completely different context of a private-sector fight where employers can’t fire strikers, is exactly what the term “zombie Reaganism” was invented to describe.)Likewise, can Trump actually mediate a national compromise on abortion by stiff-arming the pro-life movement? I wouldn’t bet on it; for better or worse, I expect his transactional relationship with anti-abortion organizations to survive in a potential second term.But his sudden pro-choice outreach is a cynical response to a real political problem for Republicans. If you aspire to restrict abortion beyond the reddest states in a politically sustainable way, you need at the very least a rhetorical modulation, a form of outreach to the wavering and conflicted. And better still would be some kind of alternative offer to Americans who are pro-choice but with reservations — with the obvious form being some new suite of family policies, some enhanced support for women who find themselves pregnant and in difficulty.But most Republicans clearly don’t want to make that kind of offer, beyond a few pro forma gestures and very modest state-level initiatives. DeSantis was quick (well, by his standards) to attack Trump for selling out the pro-life cause, and any abortion opponent should want to see Trump punished politically for that attempted sellout. But nothing in the DeSantis response was directed at the outreach problem, the political problem, the general-election problem that Trump in his unprincipled way was clearly trying to address.And so it has been throughout the primary season thus far. Trump makes big bold promises; his rivals check ideological boxes. Trump talks like a general-election candidate; his rivals bid against one another for narrower constituencies. Scott and Nikki Haley rerun the Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio campaigns; DeSantis aims to improve on Ted Cruz’s Iowa-first strategy … but the only candidate really promising the Trumpism of 2016 is, once again, Donald Trump himself.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