Presidential Election of 2024

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      Today’s Top News: A New Role for Kamala Harris in the 2024 Campaign, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Democrats and officials in the White House say now is a critical moment for Vice President Kamala Harris as the 2024 presidential campaign ramps up.Aileen Perilla for The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:Kamala Harris Takes on a Forceful New Role in the 2024 Campaign, with Zolan Kanno-YoungsSigns of a Covid Uptick Across Much of the United States, with Apoorva MandavilliThe U.S. Is Eliminated From the Women’s World CupEli Cohen More

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      Kamala Harris Takes on Forceful New Role in Biden’s 2024 Campaign

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      The vice president is trying to reclaim the momentum that propelled her to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s side as a candidate and into the White House in 2020.In recent weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has dashed off to Florida on short notice. She sparred with the state’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, over how to teach slavery in schools. And she flew into Iowa to defend abortion rights while 13 Republican presidential candidates were having dinner a few miles away.Although her words were directed at Republicans, her message was also aimed at all her doubters.Once a rising star as a senator in California, Ms. Harris has for years been saddled by criticism of her performance as vice president. She has struggled with difficult assignments on issues such as the roots of illegal migration and the narrow path to enduring voting rights protections. Concerns about her future spread as Democrats pondered whether she would be a political liability for the ticket.Ms. Harris’s recent moves are her latest attempt to silence those concerns and reclaim the momentum that propelled her to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s side as a candidate and into the White House in 2020.“It’s good to have her out there,” said Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser for the Democratic National Committee, who added that the vice president’s decision to take on the Republican Party — assertively and in real time — was central to the campaign’s 2024 strategy.It also keeps President Biden above the fray.“He is still uniting the West against Russian aggression, and he’s tackling the economy and inflation,” Mr. Richmond said. “She can go highlight the accomplishments, and she can take on people like DeSantis.”In interviews, aides and advisers acknowledge that Ms. Harris has been affected by the years of criticism. She has often approached events defensively, focusing on not making mistakes, rather than looking for opportunities to attack.But now, galvanized by what she has described as rising extremism in the Republican Party, Ms. Harris is expanding her profile.Ms. Harris forged a reputation as a pragmatist during her early years as a prosecutor, district attorney and state attorney general, which has shaped her approach to the vice presidency.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe tussle with Mr. DeSantis, who is struggling to break through as he campaigns to be the Republican presidential nominee, provides a glimpse into Ms. Harris’s role as something of a one-woman rapid-response operation.When Florida last month approved an overhaul to its standards for teaching Black history, which now say middle schoolers should be taught that enslaved people developed skills that could be of personal benefit, Ms. Harris directed her staff to get her down immediately to Jacksonville, a White House official said.She was on the ground within 24 hours, speaking to a packed audience in a historically Black neighborhood, about “extremist so-called leaders” who want to sanitize history.“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris said, drawing a standing ovation from the crowd.Her appearance caught the eye of Mr. DeSantis.“You clearly have no trouble ducking down to Florida on short notice,” he said in an open letter last week, accusing her of trying to score political points and inviting her to discuss the new standards.Ms. Harris, who returned to Florida for her second trip in less than two weeks, had a swift reply.“Well, I’m here in Florida,” she said before pausing as the crowd at an African Methodist Episcopal Church event in Orlando erupted in applause. “And I will tell you, there is no round table, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”The vice president’s press secretary, Kirsten Allen, said Ms. Harris would “continue to call out extremist leaders as they attempt to pull our country backward with book bans, revisionist history and barriers that make it harder for Americans to participate in our democracy.”Despite her more public role, Ms. Harris’s approval ratings have remained stubbornly low. About 52 percent of Americans have a negative view of her, while 40 percent have a positive view, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. Mr. Biden has also had trouble with persistently low approval ratings.But Ms. Harris connects to sections of the electorate that are not always a natural fit for Mr. Biden, including women, minority groups and younger voters. At 58, Ms. Harris is decades younger than the 80-year-old president, who would be 86 at the end of a second term.As Ms. Harris fans out across the country, some of her longtime allies said she was showing the kind of swagger they remembered from much earlier in her career, dating back to her days as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California.“Seeing her in this role, understanding she has a president who she reports to, it’s kind of funny to me,” said Lateefah Simon, who was hired by Ms. Harris in 2005 to lead a new program aimed at keeping first-time drug offenders out of jail.She recalled a confident Ms. Harris walking through the office when she won re-election for district attorney in 2007, reminding each staffer that she would be the boss for another four years. Ms. Simon believes Ms. Harris is making an impact as vice president but wonders how she is adjusting to being second in command.“I’m like, ‘Kamala with a boss?’” she said.Ms. Harris often draws on her legal background on the campaign trail as a way to emphasize her expertise — a strategy that serves as a counterweight to Republican claims that she is incompetent.At a recent speech on gun reform, she said she had studied autopsy photographs and had “seen with my own eyes what a bullet does to the human body.”And in July, when she made a trip to Iowa for a discussion on reproductive rights, she said that she had investigated sex crimes, so she understood that denying a woman an abortion was an “immoral” approach to survivors of rape or incest.The timing of the trip to Iowa was no accident: As she spoke at Drake University, saying opponents of abortion in state legislatures around the country “don’t even know how women’s bodies work,” former President Donald J. Trump and a dozen of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination were in Des Moines for a G.O.P. dinner.Her appearance came just two weeks after the state’s Republican governor signed a strict new abortion ban into law, making it illegal to have the procedure past six weeks of pregnancy. (A judge has put the ban on hold.)Ms. Harris has made abortion rights a key part of her campaign message since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. v. Wade.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesMs. Harris’s decision to go on the offensive is a notable shift.For all of her boundary-breaking as the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American to serve as vice president, she has long been known for pragmatism and, to her critics, for a defense of the status quo.She has described herself in the past as a “pragmatic prosecutor” who owns a gun for personal safety and also believes in criminal justice reform. As vice president, she has had to appeal to broad constituencies; being seen as a moderate is a benefit at a time when conservative critics have tried to portray her as radical and out of step with the nation.But now, with the campaign in full swing, the White House is giving Ms. Harris room to make more assertive moves against Republican opponents.Ms. Harris is attempting to help Mr. Biden win a second term in office, a refocus after taking on assignments such as voting rights without a clear path for success. Kenny Holston for The New York TimesShe also has been freed up to travel more, something that has been in the works since the midterm elections when Democrats held off a widely expected red wave.Because the Senate was split evenly for the first two years of the Biden administration, Ms. Harris could never be more than 24 hours away from the Capitol when the Senate was in session in case her tiebreaking vote was needed.With Democrats now holding a 51-to-49 edge, at least in cases when Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent, votes with them, Ms. Harris has more flexibility to move. Some are hoping she continues to seize on the opportunity.Stefanie Brown James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, an organization that helps elect Black officials, has urged Ms. Harris’s staff to have her out in front on affirmative action and abortion issues, in particular. She said for the past two and a half years, Ms. Harris was “a little too much in the background and not seen enough or heard enough.”“She definitely is having a moment,” Ms. James said. But she added a note of caution, saying she hoped it would be “a sustainable moment.” More

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      DeSantis Takes His Iowa Push To a New Venue: Weddings

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      The Florida governor, who has struggled at times to connect with voters, is looking for every opportunity to show he is all-in with Iowa Republicans.Two great traditions converged in Des Moines on Saturday night when wedding crashing came to Iowa politics.Iowa State Representative Taylor Collins welcomed an unexpected guest to his wedding reception: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, strode just behind the newlyweds into the event, held at a Beaux-Arts-style building in the state’s capital, to cheers and a standing ovation, according to videos posted on social media and confirmed by an attendee. They then spent an hour mingling with roughly 150 guests.The last-minute table-grabbers had been invited by the bride, Savannah Collins, to the surprise of her husband, who had previously endorsed Mr. DeSantis’s presidential bid, according to two people familiar with the event. Several other state legislators who have endorsed Mr. DeSantis were also in attendance.For the governor, who is struggling to gain ground on former President Donald J. Trump, according to recent polls, the appearance was a clear attempt to demonstrate that he possessed the interpersonal touch that has sometimes seemed lacking in his presidential campaign.Mr. DeSantis’s allies said he saw a path to victory in Iowa’s January caucus through an aggressive plan to visit each of the state’s 99 counties, meet voters in person and win endorsements from local officials. As of Saturday, Mr. DeSantis had visited nearly 30 counties.After making fewer visits to the state than some of his lower-polling rivals for the Republican nomination, Mr. DeSantis recently started to step up his appearances in Iowa, where polling shows he is performing better than he is nationally. His campaign recently has focused on the state as he has worked to position himself as the Trump alternative after losing ground earlier this year.Before dropping in on the wedding, Mr. DeSantis had spent Friday and Saturday on a bus tour of northeast and central Iowa, where he made frequent stops to address voters in small groups, answer questions and engage in the retail politics that Iowa voters expect, such as scooping ice cream for locals at a dairy store.“You’ve got to show up in people’s communities and you’ve got to be able to make the case about why you should be the nominee of the party and the 47th president of the United States,” Mr. DeSantis told a group of several dozen voters at a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Grinnell, Iowa, on Saturday afternoon.The comments were a thinly veiled attack on Mr. Trump, who has skipped events hosted by prominent evangelical Christian leaders and who recently picked a fight with Iowa’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds. “I think anybody who’s not willing to do that is basically telling you that they don’t think they have to earn your vote,” he continued. “And I think that’s a mistake.”Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, as well as the rest of the presidential field, are set to attend the Iowa State Fair, a major event on the political calendar that begins this week.Polling shows that Mr. DeSantis’s efforts are playing better in Iowa than in other parts of the country. Iowa Republicans are more likely than voters nationwide to see Mr. DeSantis as “moral,” “likable” and “able to beat Joe Biden,” although he still lags Mr. Trump in the state by 24 percentage points overall, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.While Mr. DeSantis has had success attracting endorsements from state lawmakers like Mr. Collins, Mr. Trump has much more backing from members of Congress, in part because of the former president’s attention to personal relationships, which has included reaching out to lawmakers when they or their family members fall ill and hosting them for dinners.Mr. Trump is also known to drop in at weddings held at Mar-a-Lago, the exclusive Palm Beach social club that serves as his home, as well as at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey.This was not Mr. DeSantis’s first attempt at surprising Iowa voters.In May, after a busy day of campaigning around the state, he made an unscheduled evening stop at a barbecue restaurant in Des Moines, not far from where Mr. Trump had canceled an earlier rally (because of bad weather, according to Mr. Trump’s campaign).After Mr. DeSantis’s unexpected entrance to the wedding, Mr. Collins celebrated on social media, saying: “You never know who will crash your wedding reception during caucus season! An honor to be on #TeamDeSantis.”In response to an email seeking comment, he wrote: “It was great for our family and friends from across the country to experience firsthand what it’s like to be in Iowa during caucus season. I can’t think of a better way to end the night than seeing everyone spend time with the governor.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Campaign Anguishes His Storied Family

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      The presidential bid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tested the bonds of an iconic Democratic clan that does not want him to run and does not know what to do about it.Jack Schlossberg had enough. The only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Schlossberg had been watching the presidential campaign of his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with increasing dismay.To Mr. Schlossberg, the quixotic challenge to President Biden for the Democratic nomination was just a “vanity project” that was tarnishing the legacy of his grandfather and their storied family. Just days earlier last month, his conspiracy-minded cousin had suggested that the Covid-19 virus had been engineered to protect Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.Sitting in a van in Australia, where he was on vacation, Mr. Schlossberg sketched out a few bullet points, took out his mobile phone and recorded a harsh condemnation of his cousin on Instagram. “He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” Mr. Schlossberg said. “I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment.” Then he hit the post button.Mr. Schlossberg’s denunciation underscored the turmoil inside what remains of Camelot. Bobby, as the 69-year-old candidate is called, has become a source of deep anguish among his many siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, one that is testing the bonds of what was once known as the royal family of American politics. His relatives by and large do not want him to run, do not support his campaign, disdain his conspiratorial musings and almost universally admire Mr. Biden, a longtime friend of the family who keeps a bust of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. in the Oval Office.President Joe Biden keeps a bust of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. on display in the Oval Office. Pool photo by Al DragoYet even as some members of the candidate’s family feel compelled to speak out against his campaign, others find themselves profoundly pained by the airing of domestic discord. They do not share Bobby’s views on many issues, particularly his strident anti-vaccine stances, these Kennedys say, but they care for him, do not want to see him hurt and do not think it helps to publicly criticize him.“I love my brother deeply, and while I don’t agree with him on a number of issues, theories, I do not want to knock him,” said Courtney Kennedy Hill, one of the candidate’s sisters. “He has done a lot of good for many, many people,” she added, citing his work as an environmental lawyer who helped clean up the Hudson River and his advocacy for those struggling with drug addiction. “I just don’t want all that to get lost in the maelstrom around his more controversial statements and views.”Robert F. Kennedy Jr., known as Bobby, in the middle row on the right, appears in a portrait with his family in 1964.Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesNever before has the family faced a conundrum quite like this. Through all the tragedies and scandals and campaigns over the years, the traditional Kennedy rule has always been to pull together, to stand by one another no matter what. Family was the rock. Solidarity was the code. But as he polls at around 15 percent against Mr. Biden, Bobby has roiled a family that wants nothing to do with his campaign and telephone lines between Kennedy homes burn with what-to-do agonizing.At left, John F. Kennedy, and in the foreground, Edward M. Kennedy, known as Ted. In a family once considered American royalty, marked by political ambitions and public tragedy, solidarity was long the code.Kennedy Family Collection, Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, via Associated Press“It must be painful for them,” said Bob Shrum, who for years was one of the leading advisers to Edward M. Kennedy, the senator and patriarch known as Ted. “He’s been through some struggles himself,” Mr. Shrum added of Bobby, “and I think they want to love him. But at the same time, they can’t abide this. It’s very sad at every level.”Robert Kennedy Jr. opted against discussing his relations with his family. “It’s pretty clear that the Times is not going to treat me fairly honestly so I’m going to decline,” he said in a text message. In a statement to CNN in April shortly before kicking off his campaign, he acknowledged that some relatives do not support him. “I bear them no ill will,” he said. “Families can disagree and still love each other.”Still, privately he has reached out to some of his relatives to complain about their public comments and engaged in tense discussions about his campaign and platform. Some family members recall pressing him on why he was running and warning him that he was putting his life up for scrutiny in a way that might be personally devastating.Mr. Kennedy, who was 9 when his uncle was assassinated and 14 when his father was killed, struggled with addiction as a young man and was kicked out of private schools and arrested on marijuana and heroin charges more than once. After checking into a treatment facility in 1983, he says he has been clean ever since and has been an antidrug crusader. Amid reports of infidelity, he separated from his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who also battled addiction and died by suicide in 2012. He is now married to his third wife, the actress Cheryl Hines.Mr. Kennedy and his wife Cheryl Hines in Israel in 2019 as part of a trip with the Waterkeeper Alliance, of which he was board president in his environmental advocacy.Daniel Rolider for The New York TimesIn interviews in recent days, several members of the Kennedy family, some of whom did not want to be named, sounded tortured about the situation. They talked of a brother, cousin, uncle who flashed some of the raw political talent of his famed father, but who has undergone trauma and is headed down a path they do not fully understand.For years, Mr. Kennedy has made himself into a champion of the vaccine resistance movement, promoting spurious assertions about the dangers of inoculations and once calling the Covid-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” He has said Anne Frank had more freedom during the Holocaust than Americans pressured to take the vaccine, a comparison for which he later apologized, and wrote a book attacking Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.He has suggested that mass shootings at schools have increased because of heightened use of antidepressants. And in a particularly sensitive area for his family, he has maintained that the C.I.A. was involved in the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and possibly in the assassination of his father.Last month, he declared that the coronavirus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He later said he was misinterpreted, writing on Twitter that the disparate effect of the virus “serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons” but “I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”That proved too much for several family members. Kerry Kennedy, his sister and president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, issued a statement calling his remarks “deplorable and untruthful.” Joseph P. Kennedy II, his brother and a former congressman, called them “morally and factually wrong.” Joseph P. Kennedy III, his nephew and another former congressman now serving as Mr. Biden’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, posted his own response on Twitter: “I unequivocally condemn what he said.”Mr. Kennedy protesting a Covid-19 vaccine mandate in Washington in January 2022. Last month, he declared that the coronavirus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people.”Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesMr. Schlossberg filmed his video four days later. “I didn’t have a plan,” he said in an interview from Australia, where he traveled after passing the bar exam to visit his mother, Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador, and to tour the country before returning home to begin a legal career. “I just wanted to speak out and felt it was the right time.”Mr. Schlossberg, 30, said he did not consult family members first and added that posting the video was “not an easy thing to do.” But he stressed how much he admires Mr. Biden, who he said “sees America now much the same way as my grandfather did” and in his view is “probably the greatest president of my lifetime.”While the statements were not coordinated, according to family members, the display of disagreement struck close observers of the Kennedys as a pivotal moment. “The Kennedy family has always tried to keep things within the family,” said Jim Manley, a longtime aide to Edward Kennedy. “The fact that some of the members, some of his cousins, are beginning to speak up publicly, it to me indicates how upset they are with what he’s saying and what he’s doing.”Vaccines are not the only source of dispute. The candidate has also spoken out against aid for Ukraine, accused the Biden administration of lying to the public about the war and suggested that American leaders pushed Ukraine into conflict with Russia “as part of their strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion.”“I do not agree with Bobby on Ukraine, and I’ve had many conversations with him about it and I’m disappointed that he is not more supportive,” Douglas Kennedy, another brother and a Fox News correspondent, said in an interview.Still, he expressed understanding for his brother’s propensity to question conventional wisdom. “Bobby has views that I would say most of the members of my family disagree with,” he said. “But I also believe that particularly our family, our siblings, we were brought up to be skeptical of authority in general.”Mr. Kennedy appeared at a House Judiciary Committee hearing last month organized by Republicans, on the weaponization of the federal government.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesPatrick J. Kennedy, another former congressman and son of Edward Kennedy, said he regrets that the campaign has distracted from priorities the family has long promoted. “It would be nice for the general public who is associating the legacy of my family with my cousin (esp bc he invokes them so much) to know that my family’s historic legacy of fighting for social justice was on display today,” he said by text on the day the Biden administration advanced new rules aimed at increasing access to mental health and substance abuse services.It has not been lost on the family that Robert Kennedy Jr. has drawn support from Republicans affiliated with former President Donald J. Trump. Roughly half of the $10.5 million raised by two super PACs supporting Mr. Kennedy came from a single donor who previously backed Mr. Trump and has contributed $53 million in stock to build a wall on the border with Mexico.Nor is Mr. Kennedy’s target immaterial. Mr. Biden has been close to the Kennedys for half a century, since the days when Edward Kennedy showed up at the Delaware hospital where his sons were recovering from the car accident that killed the future president’s first wife and baby daughter.To this day, Mr. Biden calls the candidate’s mother, Ethel Kennedy, every year on her birthday and for decades, according to Douglas Kennedy, has shown up for family events two or three times a year. The president has dispensed appointments to multiple members of the family, including Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the ambassador to Austria; Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a senior Labor Department official; Caroline Kennedy and Joseph Kennedy III.Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Edward M. Kennedy during a Senate hearing with Attorney General Edwin Meese in 1987. The ties between the Biden and Kennedy families go back to the 1970s.Jose R. Lopez/The New York Times“Everybody in our family loves Joe Biden, and Joe Biden has been very good to my mother and I think genuinely loved my father probably as much as anybody who has held that office in the past 50 years,” Douglas Kennedy said. “That’s certainly a factor in everybody’s individual feeling about Bobby running.”Courtney Kennedy Hill recalled how “exceptionally kind, thoughtful and valuable” Mr. Biden was when her daughter, Saoirse Kennedy Hill, died of an overdose in 2019. But so too was Bobby, she noted. He had a close relationship with his niece. “He was special to and for her and I will love him forever for that,” she said.One way or the other, she predicted, the family would get through this. “If you came to the Cape on Thanksgiving, you would see a family full of fun, energy, laughter and, of course, healthy competition,” she said. “A lot of it anyway.” More

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      Republican Attacks on ‘Woke’ Ideology Falling Flat With G.O.P. Voters

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      New polling shows national Republicans and Iowa Republican caucusgoers were more interested in “law and order” than battling “woke” schools, media and corporations.When it comes to the Republican primaries, attacks on “wokeness” may be losing their punch.For Republican candidates, no word has hijacked political discourse quite like “woke,” a term few can define but many have used to capture what they see as left-wing views on race, gender and sexuality that have strayed far beyond the norms of American society.Gov. Ron DeSantis last year used the word five times in 19 seconds, substituting “woke” for Nazis as he cribbed from Winston Churchill’s famous vow to battle a threatened German invasion in 1940. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”The term has become quick a way for candidates to flash their conservative credentials, but battling “woke” may have less political potency than they think. Though conservative voters might be irked at modern liberalism, successive New York Times/Siena College polls of Republican voters nationally and then in Iowa found that candidates were unlikely to win votes by narrowly focusing on rooting out left-wing ideology in schools, media, culture and business.Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hand’s off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.The findings hint why Mr. DeSantis, who has made his battles with “woke” schools and corporations central to his campaign, is struggling and again show off Mr. Trump’s keen understanding of part of the Republican electorate. Campaigning in Iowa in June, Mr. Trump was blunt: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”It was clearly a jab at Mr. DeSantis, but the Times’s polls suggest Mr. Trump may be right. Social issues like gay rights and once-obscure jargon like “woke” may not be having the effect many Republicans had hoped“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” explained Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md., who retired from a successful career in Hollywood where he said he saw his share of political correctness and liberal group think. Mr. Boyer said he didn’t like holding his tongue about his views on transgender athletes, but, he added, he does not want politicians to intervene. “I am a laissez-faire capitalist: Let the pocketbook decide,” he said.“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” said Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesWhen presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for a “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”Around 65 percent said they would choose the law and order candidate.Among those 65 and older, often the most likely age bracket to vote, only 17 percent signed on to the “anti-woke” crusade. Those numbers were nearly identical in Iowa, where the first ballots for the Republican nominee will be cast on Jan. 15.Mr. DeSantis’s famous fight against the Walt Disney Company over what he saw as the corporation’s liberal agenda exemplified the kind of economic warfare that seems to fare only modestly better. About 38 percent of Republican voters said they would back a candidate who promised to fight corporations that promote “woke” left ideology, versus the 52 percent who preferred “a candidate who says that the government should stay out of deciding what corporations should support.”Christy Boyd, 55, in Ligonier, Pa., made it clear she was no fan of the culture of tolerance that she said pervaded her region around Pittsburgh. As the perfect distillation of “woke” ideology, she mentioned “time blindness,” a phrase she views as simply an excuse for perpetual tardiness.But such aggravations do not drive her political desires.“If you don’t like what Bud Light did, don’t buy it,” she added, referring to the brand’s hiring of a transgender influencer, which contributed to a sharp drop in sales. “If you don’t like what Disney is doing, don’t go. That’s not the government’s responsibility.”Indeed, some Republican voters seemed to feel pandered to by candidates like Mr. DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, whose book “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” launched his political career.Lynda Croft, 82, said she was watching a rise in murders in her hometown Winston-Salem, N.C., and that has her scared. Overly liberal policies in culture and schools will course-correct on their own, she said.“If anyone actually believes in woke ideology, they are not in tune with the rest of society,” she said, “and parents will step in to deal with that.”In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said the evolving views of the electorate were important, and he had adapted to them. “Woke” corporate governance and school systems are a symptom of what he calls “a deeper void” in a society that needs a religious and nationalist renewal. The stickers that read “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek” are gone from his campaign stops, he said, replaced by hats that read “Truth.”“At the time I came to be focused on this issue, no one knew what the word was,” he said. “Now that they have caught up, the puck has moved. It’s in my rearview mirror as well.”Law and order and border security have become stand-ins for “fortitude,” he said, and that is clearly what Republican voters are craving.(The day after the interview, the Ramaswamy campaign blasted out a fund-raising appeal entitled “Wokeness killing the American Dream.”)DeSantis campaign officials emphasized that the governor in recent days had laid out policies on border security, the military and the economy. Foreign policy is coming, they say. But they also pointed to an interview on Fox News in which Mr. DeSantis did not back away from his social-policy focus.Along with several other Republican-led states, Florida passed a string of laws restricting what G.O.P. lawmakers considered evidence of “wokeness,” such as gender transition care for minors and diversity initiatives. Mr. DeSantis handily won re-election in November.“I totally reject, being in Iowa, New Hampshire, that people don’t think those are important,” he said of his social policy fights. “These families with children are thanking me for taking stands in Florida.”For candidates trying to break Mr. Trump’s hold on a Republican electorate that sees the former president as the embodiment of strength, the problem may be broader than ditching the term “woke.”As it turns out, social issues like gender, race and sexuality are politically complicated and may be less dominant than Mr. Trump’s rivals thought. The fact that Mr. Trump has been indicted three times and found legally liable for sexual abuse has not hurt him. Only 37 percent of Republican voters nationally described Mr. Trump as more moral than Mr. DeSantis (45 percent sided with Mr. DeSantis on the personality trait), yet in a head-to-head matchup between the two candidates, national Republican voters backed Mr. Trump by 31 percentage points, 62 percent to 31 percent.The Times/Siena poll did find real reluctance among Republican voters to accept transgender people. Only 30 percent said society should accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, compared with 58 percent who said society should not accept such identities.But half of Republican voters still support the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, against the 41 percent who oppose same-sex marriage. Fifty-one percent of Republican voters said they would choose a candidate promising to protect individual freedom over one guarding “traditional values.” The “traditional values” candidate would be the choice of 40 percent of Republicans.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, responded simply: “Americans want to return to a prosperous nation, and there’s only one person who can do that — President Trump.”Mr. Boyer, who played Robert E. Lee in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” bristled at having to make a choice: “It’s hardly an either-or: Why wouldn’t I want someone to fight for law and order and against this corrupt infiltration in our school systems?” he asked.But given a choice, he said, “the primary job of government is the protection of our country and there’s a tangible failure of that at our border.” More

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      Republicans Chose Their Fate When They Chose to Shield Trump

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      It’s not too much to say that the 2024 Republican presidential primary is effectively over. In fact, it’s been over. The earliest you could say it was over was Jan. 7, 2021, when most Republican politicians closed ranks around Donald Trump in the wake of the insurrection. The next earliest date was Feb. 13 of the same year, when the majority of Senate Republicans voted to acquit Trump of all charges in his second impeachment trial, leaving him free to run for office.With Trump now shielded from the immediate political consequences of trying to seize power, it was only a matter of time before he made his third attempt for the Republican presidential nomination. And now, a year out from the next Republican convention, he is the likely nominee — the consensus choice of most Republican voters. No other candidate comes close.According to the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, 54 percent of Republicans nationwide support Trump for the 2024 nomination. The next most popular candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, gets 17 percent support. The next five candidates have either 2 percent or 3 percent support.You might think that Trump’s overwhelming lead is the product of a fragmented field, but that’s not true. If every candidate other than DeSantis left the race, and their votes went to DeSantis, Trump would still win by a nearly two-to-one margin.You can’t even blame the poor performance of DeSantis’s campaign. Has he burned through campaign cash with little to show for it? Yes. Is he tangled up in multiple scandals and controversies, including one in which a (now former) staffer created and shared a video with Nazi imagery? Yes. But even a flawless campaign would flounder against the fact that Trump remains the virtually uncontested leader of the Republican Party.And make no mistake: Trump’s leadership has not been seriously contested by either his rivals or the broader Republican establishment. How else would you describe the decision to defend Trump against any investigation or legal scrutiny that comes his way? Republican elites and conservative media have successfully persuaded enough Republican voters that Trump is the victim of a conspiracy of perfidious liberals and their “deep state” allies.They have done a good job convincing those voters that Trump deserves to be back in office. And sure enough, they are poised to give him yet another chance to win the White House.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on Congress’s power to regulate, and discipline, the Supreme Court.Setting aside both the legislature’s power to impeach judges and its power of the purse over the judiciary — there’s nothing in the rules that says the court must have clerks, assistants or even a place from which to work — there are at least two provisions of the Constitution that authorize Congress to, in Alito’s words, “regulate the Supreme Court.”My Friday column was on the federal indictment of President Donald Trump on charges related to his effort to overturn the presidential election.The criminal-legal system is now moving, however slowly, to hold Trump accountable. This is a good thing. But as we mark this development, we should also remember that the former president’s attempt to overthrow our institutions would not have been possible without those institutions themselves.Now ReadingDavid Waldstreicher on writing history for the public for Boston Review.A.S. Hamrah on the “Mission: Impossible” franchise for The New York Review of Books.Brianna Di Monda on the film “Women Talking” for Dissent.The New Republic on the 100 most significant political films of all time.Richard Hasen on the federal case against Donald Trump for Slate.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieThis is the remnant of a downtown storefront in Quincy, Fla. I took this earlier in the summer during a trip to visit family in the area.Now Eating: Red Curry Lentils With Sweet Potatoes and SpinachThis is a wonderfully comforting vegetarian meal that is very easy to put together, especially if you have staples like lentils and coconut milk already on hand. If you don’t have vegetable stock, just use water. Or if you’re not a strict vegetarian and prefer chicken stock, you can go with that instead. Although this is Thai-inspired, I think it goes very well with a warm piece of cornbread. Recipe from New York Times Cooking.Ingredients3 tablespoons olive oil1 pound sweet potatoes (about 2 medium sweet potatoes), peeled and cut into ¾-inch cubes1 medium yellow onion, chopped3 tablespoons Thai red curry paste3 garlic cloves, minced (about 1 tablespoon)1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated (about 1 tablespoon)1 red chile, such as Fresno or serrano, halved, seeds and ribs removed, then minced1 teaspoon ground turmeric1 cup red lentils, rinsed4 cups low-sodium vegetable stock2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste1 (13-ounce) can full-fat coconut milk1 (4-to-5-ounce) bag baby spinach½ lime, juicedFresh cilantro leaves, for servingDirectionsIn a Dutch oven or pot, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium-high. Add the sweet potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned all over, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer the browned sweet potatoes to a plate and set aside.Add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil to the pot and set the heat to medium-low. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until translucent, 4 to 6 minutes. Add the curry paste, garlic, ginger, chile and turmeric, and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute.Add the lentils, stock, salt and browned sweet potatoes to the pot and bring to a boil over high. Lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are just tender, 20 to 25 minutes.Add the coconut milk and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has reduced and the lentils are creamy and falling apart, 15 to 20 minutes.Add the spinach and stir until just wilted, 2 to 3 minutes. Off the heat, stir in the lime juice and season with salt to taste.Divide among shallow bowls and top with cilantro. More

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      The Normal Paths to Beating Trump Are Closing

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      In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.But it’s true that Biden did a fair bit of abnormalizing in his campaign rhetoric, and you could argue that the establishment panic was successful at keeping Trump’s support confined to a version of his 2016 coalition, closing off avenues to expand his popular appeal.Whatever your narrative, the events of Jan. 6 understandably gave abnormalizers the upper hand, while inflation and other issues took the wind out of the more normal style of Democratic politics — leading to a 2022 midterm campaign in which Biden and the Democrats leaned more heavily on democracy-in-peril arguments than policy.But when this abnormalizing effort was successful (certainly more successful than I expected), it seemed to open an opportunity for normalizers within the Republican Party, letting a figure like Ron DeSantis attack Trump on pragmatic grounds, as a proven vote loser whose populist mission could be better fulfilled by someone else.Now, though, that potential dynamic seems to be evaporating, unraveled by the interaction between the multiplying indictments of Trump and DeSantis’s weak performance so far on the national stage. One way or another, 2024 increasingly looks like a full-abnormalization campaign.Post-indictments, for DeSantis or some other Republican to rally past Trump, an important faction of G.O.P. voters would have to grow fatigued with Trump the public enemy and outlaw politician — effectively conceding to the American establishment’s this-is-not-normal crusade.In the more likely event of a Biden-Trump rematch, the remarkable possibility of a campaign run from prison will dominate everything. The normal side of things won’t cease to matter, the condition of the economy will still play its crucial role, but the sense of abnormality will warp every aspect of normal partisan debate.Despite all my doubts about the abnormalization strategy, despite Trump’s decent poll numbers against Biden at the moment, my guess is that this will work out for the Democrats. The Stormy Daniels indictment still feels like a partisan put-up job. But in the classified documents case, Trump’s guilt seems clear-cut. And while the Jan. 6 indictment seems more legally uncertain, it will focus constant national attention on the same gross abuses of office that cost Trumpist Republicans so dearly in 2022.The fact that the indictments are making it tougher to unseat Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is just tough luck for anti-Trump conservatives. Trump asked for this, his supporters are choosing this, and his Democratic opponents may get both the moral satisfaction of a conviction and the political benefits of beating a convict-candidate at the polls.But my guesses about Trump’s political prospects have certainly been wrong before. And there is precedent for an abnormalization strategy going all the way to prosecution without actually pushing the demagogue offstage. A precedent like Berlusconi, in fact, who faced 35 separate criminal court cases after he entered politics, received just one clear conviction — and was finally removed from politics only by the most normal of all endings: his old age and death.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