Presidential Election of 2024

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      Why Ron DeSantis Isn’t Beating Donald Trump

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      As he flails to reverse a polling decline that is beginning to resemble a rockslide, Gov. Ron DeSantis must be feeling a little clueless about why his political fortunes are crumbling so quickly. Attacking wokeness and bullying transgender people seemed to work so well in Florida, so why aren’t national Republicans in awe of the divisions he’s deepened? Making repeated appearances with racial provocateurs never stopped him from getting elected as governor, so why did he have to fire a young aide who inserted Nazi imagery into his own video promoting Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign?But the political bubble inhabited by Mr. DeSantis is so thick — symbolized by the hugely expensive private-plane flights that are draining his campaign of cash, since he and his wife, Casey, won’t sit with regular people in a commercial cabin — that he has been unable or unwilling to understand the brushoff he has received from donors and potential voters and make the changes he needs to become competitive with Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.For years, Mr. DeSantis has created an entire political persona out of a singular crusade against wokeness, frightening teachers and professors away from classroom discussions of race, defending a school curriculum that said there were benefits to slavery, claiming (falsely) that his anti-vaccine crusade worked and engaging in a pointless battle with his state’s best-known private employer over school discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. He had the support of the Florida Legislature and state Republican officials in most of his efforts and presumably believed that an image of a more effective and engaged Trump would help him beat the real thing.But it’s not working. A Monmouth University poll published on Tuesday showed Mr. Trump with a 20-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in a head-to-head match, and the advantage grew to more than 30 points when all the other candidates were thrown in. Major donors have started to sour on him, and The Times reported on Thursday that they are disappointed with his performance and the management of his campaign, which he says he will somehow reboot.“DeSantis has not made any headway,” wrote the poll’s director, Patrick Murray. “The arguments that he’d be a stronger candidate and a more effective president than Trump have both fallen flat.”The most obvious fault in his strategy is that you can’t beat Donald Trump if you don’t even criticize him, and Mr. DeSantis has said little about the multiple indictments piling up against the former president or about his character. Granted, there are downsides to a full-frontal attack on Mr. Trump at this point, as other Republicans have become aware, and Mr. DeSantis still needs to establish some kind of identity first. But he can’t become an alt-Trump without drawing a sharp contrast and holding Mr. Trump to account for at least a few of his many flaws. There are graveyards in Iowa and New Hampshire full of candidates who tried to ignore the leader through sheer force of personality, and even if he had one of those, Mr. DeSantis hasn’t demonstrated the skills to use it. Both men will speak Friday night at the Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, and if Mr. DeSantis leaves his rival unscathed, it’s hard to imagine how he goes the distance.The deeper problem, though, is that Mr. DeSantis is peddling the wrong message. Only 1 percent of voters think that wokeness and transgender issues are the country’s top problem, according to an April Fox News poll — essentially a repudiation of the governor’s entire brand. Race issues and vaccines are also low on the list.Lakshya Jain, who helps lead the website Split Ticket, which is doing some really interesting political analysis and modeling, said Mr. DeSantis misinterpreted what Florida voters were saying when they re-elected him by a 19-point margin in 2022.“The economy was doing well in Florida, and Democrats didn’t put up a good candidate in Charlie Crist,” Mr. Jain told me. “I’m not sure the majority of Florida voters really cared what he was saying on wokeness. It’s not really an issue people vote on.”The economy, naturally, is what people care most about, but Mr. DeSantis hasn’t said much about his plans to fight inflation (which is already coming down) or create more jobs (which is happening every month without his help). Clearly aware of the problem, he announced on Thursday that he would unfurl a Declaration of Economic Independence in a major speech in New Hampshire on Monday (a phrase as trite and tone-deaf as the name of his Never Back Down super PAC).That appears to be the first fruit of his campaign reboot, but there are good reasons he doesn’t like to stray from his rigid agenda, as demonstrated by his occasionally disastrous footsteps into foreign policy. Bashing Bidenomics means he’ll immediately have to come up with an excuse for why inflation is so much higher in Florida than the nation as a whole. Though the national inflation rate in May was 4 percent compared with a year earlier, it was 9 percent in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area for the same period and 7.3 percent in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area.The primary reason for that is the state’s housing shortage, an issue that Mr. DeSantis largely ignored during his first term and has only belatedly taken a few small steps to address. When the issue inevitably comes up on the campaign trail, you can bet that Mr. DeSantis will find some way of blaming it on President Biden. That way he can quickly pivot to his preferred agenda of rewriting Black history, questioning science and encouraging gun ownership.He really can’t help himself; just this week he said he might hire the noted anti-vaccine nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to work at the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then he got into an online fight with Representative Byron Donalds, Florida’s only Black Republican member of Congress, over the state’s astonishingly wrong curriculum on slavery, and a DeSantis spokesman called Mr. Donalds a “supposed conservative.”Great way to expand your base. Remind me: When does the reboot start?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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      How Is Tim Scott Spending Millions in Campaign Money? It’s a Mystery.

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      Most of the money spent by the senator’s presidential campaign has gone to newly formed companies whose addresses are Staples stores in suburban strip malls.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has more political money than most of his Republican presidential rivals, and he has not been shy about spending it.Where that money is ultimately going, however, is a mystery.Mr. Scott entered the 2024 race with a war chest of $22 million, and his campaign raised $5.8 million from April through June. In that same time, he laid out about $6.6 million, a significant clip — but most of it cannot be traced to an actual vendor.Instead, roughly $5.3 million went to two shadowy entities: newly formed limited liability companies with no online presence and no record of other federal election work, whose addresses are Staples stores in suburban strip malls. Their minimal business records show they were set up by the same person in the months before Mr. Scott entered the race.Masking the companies, groups and people ultimately paid by campaigns — effectively obscuring large amounts of spending behind businesses and convoluted consulting arrangements — has become common, as political candidates and organizations test the limits of campaign finance law.Federal law requires campaigns to disclose their spending, including itemized details of their vendors, as a safeguard against corruption and in the interest of transparency. But as in many aspects of campaign finance law, campaigns have found workarounds, and the body that oversees such regulations, the Federal Election Commission, is perpetually hamstrung by partisan deadlock.Mr. Scott with voters in Iowa on Thursday. He is aiming to become the clear Republican alternative to Donald J. Trump in the party’s presidential primary race.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesCampaign finance experts said that among increasingly brazen moves by political candidates, Mr. Scott’s new financial disclosures stood out as exhibit A.“This practice completely undermines the federal campaign finance disclosure requirements,” said Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance expert. “The public has a right to know how political committees are spending donor dollars.”Matt Gorman, a senior communications adviser for the Scott campaign, said: “These are independent companies we contract with to provide services to the campaign including managing multiple consultants. Payments to those companies are disclosed like all others on our F.E.C. report.”The F.E.C. has allowed committees to not itemize subvendor payments when those payments are an extension of the original vendor’s work. But in recent years, this interpretation of the law has widened into a gaping loophole that campaigns are exploiting. Experts say it is illegal for campaigns to pay campaign staff members through limited liability companies, or for vendors to serve merely as conduits to hide the ultimate recipient of campaign money.In recent years, the F.E.C., whose six commissioners are deadlocked between the parties three to three, has essentially allowed campaigns to get away with minimal disclosures.A spokeswoman for the commission declined to comment.Indeed, while the use of limited liability companies by Mr. Scott’s campaign is striking in its scale, it is not unique among Republican presidential candidates.The campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made two payments last quarter, totaling more than $480,000, for “travel” to a company in Athens, Ga. The company was set up around the time he entered the race, and lists Paul Kilgore — a Republican political operative — as a manager.Neither Mr. Kilgore nor the DeSantis campaign responded to requests for comment.Former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 campaign was the subject of litigation over its use of limited liability companies run by campaign staff and family members that were allegedly conduits for hundreds of millions of dollars of spending. His campaign defended the practice, saying the intermediary companies were acting as the primary vendors.“The idea of disclosing payments in this way defeats the whole purpose of campaign finance disclosure law,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former F.E.C. lawyer and the director of federal campaign finance reform for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit campaign ethics group that sued the F.E.C. over the 2020 Trump campaign’s actions.He added, “It’s been a problem for a while, but like most that go on unaddressed, it has a tendency to get worse, and I think this one is getting worse.”According to F.E.C. filings last week, the Scott campaign made $4.3 million in payments from April 1 to June 30 to a company called Meeting Street Services L.L.C. The money included $2.8 million for “placed media” and more for digital fund-raising, strategy and video production.Meeting Street Services has no online presence, and has not been paid by any other campaign, records show. Its listed address, in North Charleston, S.C., is a Staples store. Records show that the company was set up in Delaware in August 2022, and its incorporation documents list only one name — Barry M. Benjamin — as an authorized representative.According to business records in South Carolina, the company is managed by AMZ Holdings L.L.C., a company set up in May 2021 and based at the same Staples store in North Charleston. AMZ’s Delaware incorporation documents were also signed by Mr. Benjamin.Mr. Scott’s campaign did not provide information about Mr. Benjamin or further details about the companies. Efforts to independently determine Mr. Benjamin’s identity were unsuccessful.There are several notable absences in the campaign’s second-quarter filing, including Targeted Victory, a major political fund-raising firm that has said it works for the campaign, and FP1 Strategies, a political advertising firm, which was also reportedly brought on by the campaign. Several people from the two firms who are working for the campaign also do not appear in the disclosure.Mr. Scott’s use of Meeting Street Services L.L.C. predates his entry into the presidential race. In the last four months of 2022, his Senate campaign paid the company more than $4.5 million, filings show, for television ads, digital fund-raising and other consulting.And his presidential campaign reported an additional $1 million spent with Meeting Street Services in the first quarter of this year, even though his campaign had not officially begun.The Scott campaign also made more than $940,000 in payments last quarter to Advanced Planning and Logistics, a limited liability company set up in December 2022 — again, by Mr. Benjamin — and whose listed address is a Staples store in Fairfax, Va. The company received multiple payments for air travel and event production. Again, Mr. Scott’s campaign was the only campaign that paid the company.In 2020, the Trump campaign reported paying hundreds of millions of dollars to two companies, one set up by a former campaign manager and the other by campaign officials. Neither the campaign nor the companies themselves reported specifically what the money was being spent on.The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint to the F.E.C., accusing the Trump campaign of using the companies as “conduits” to conceal other vendors. The commission’s general counsel recommended that the F.E.C. find that the campaign had broken the law by misreporting payments, and begin an investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationships with vendors and subvendors.But the commission deadlocked last year in a vote on the matter, which meant no action could be taken. The Campaign Legal Center sued the commission, but a federal judge — while expressing sympathy for the desire of transparency — dismissed the case late last year, saying that the commissioners had discretion.“It is a lot easier to follow the money when you have a paper trail,” the judge opened his opinion.The Campaign Legal Center has appealed.Kitty Bennett More

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      More Charges Against Trump

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      A revised indictment details his unusual handling of classified documents.Donald Trump is facing more criminal charges in a federal case accusing him of mishandling classified documents.The new allegations are in a revised indictment from the special counsel’s office released last night. It added three charges: attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; asking someone else to do so; and a new count under the Espionage Act.Today’s newsletter will explain the new charges and why they matter to the case.The chargesThe first two charges are connected. Prosecutors said that Trump asked the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, to have surveillance camera footage deleted. That video was important to the special counsel’s investigation into whether boxes of documents were moved to avoid complying with a federal subpoena.The property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, is now also charged in the case. He told a Mar-a-Lago information technology expert that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” according to the revised indictment. After the employee said he did not know how to delete the footage, or whether he had the right to do so, De Oliveira restated the request from “the boss” and asked, “What are we going to do?”The third charge, under the Espionage Act, concerns a memorable scene from the original indictment. An audio recording captured Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., showing visitors a classified document that detailed battle plans against Iran. Trump could be heard admitting to having the document and acknowledging that it was confidential.Now that at least one of the charges is linked to the Iran document, the recording could become more damning in court, by directly tying Trump’s own remarks to one of the crimes that he’s accused of.The indictment indicates that prosecutors have the document itself and details the dates that Trump possessed it, undermining his earlier claims that he never had it and was simply blustering.Trump’s campaign called the new accusations a “desperate and flailing attempt” by the Justice Department to undercut him.The bottom lineAs this newsletter has noted before, it is not unusual for federal officials to misplace or accidentally keep classified documents when they leave office. Such files were found in the homes of President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. What is unusual in Trump’s case is his attempts to keep the papers, even after federal officials asked him to return them.The new charges help demonstrate the exceptional nature of Trump’s actions. If the accusations are true, Trump not only tried to keep documents that he knew he was not supposed to have, but he also tried to cover up his attempts to hold onto the files by deleting video evidence.More on the indictmentSome legal experts think De Oliveira is likely to end up cooperating with prosecutors to avoid prison time. “This is a defendant who has almost no choice but to flip,” Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, said on MSNBC.But the new charges may slow the case, currently set to go to trial next May, and could even push it past the 2024 election. “For Trump, his best defense is delay,” Kim Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor, writes in The Bulwark.Trump’s lawyers met yesterday with the special counsel’s office, which is also investigating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Charges in that case — which appear likely soon — would add substantially to Trump’s legal peril. (Track all the Trump investigations here.)The Times’s Charlie Savage annotated the indictment.THE LATEST NEWSExtreme WeatherLiam Warner, 5, cooling off at a playground in Manhattan.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesJuly is on track to be the hottest month globally since record-keeping began in 1850.The Northeast faces another day of oppressive heat and humidity, with the heat index reaching as high as 110 in New York.Dangerous heat is expected to settle into the Southeast by the weekend. See the forecast.The Labor Department will increase heat-safety inspections in construction and agriculture and for other vulnerable workers.PoliticsThe Senate passed bipartisan military policy legislation, setting up a clash with the House, which added conservative mandates on abortion and gender to its version of the bill.After budget troubles and staff layoffs, Ron DeSantis began a slimmed-down reboot of his presidential campaign in Iowa.Mitch McConnell’s apparent medical episode has stirred talk about who could succeed him as the Senate Republican leader.War in UkraineUkrainian soldiers fire toward Russian positions on the front line.Efrem Lukatsky/Associated PressUkraine’s offensive made small gains, but the scope of the assaults and their toll remained unclear.Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, promised free grain to several African countries after his blockade on Ukrainian exports disrupted the global food supply.EconomyThe U.S. economy grew 2.4 percent in the second quarter, more than experts expected.Economists increasingly think that the U.S. can bring down inflation without causing a recession. But they’ve been wrong about that before.Other Big StoriesThe Justice Department will investigate allegations of violence and discrimination by the police in Memphis, months after the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols.Russian oligarchs in Britain have gotten permits to spend lavishly on perks like private chefs and chauffeurs, despite ostensibly having their bank accounts frozen.Google has begun plugging A.I. language models into robots, giving them the equivalent of artificial brains.A judge ordered the release of three of the “Newburgh Four,” who were convicted in 2010 of a plot to blow up synagogues. The judge suggested that the F.B.I. invented the conspiracy.“Everybody’s punching bag”: Former classmates said the suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial killings was an outcast with a mean streak.OpinionsThe pain of losing a loved one to an overdose is crushing. But prosecuting drug dealers as murderers does more harm than good, Maia Szalavitz says.Here are columns by Thomas Friedman on Saudi-Israeli relations, Paul Krugman on Twitter’s rebrand and Michelle Goldberg on Republicans’ push to impeach Biden.MORNING READSThe annual swan census on the River Thames in Britain.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe king’s swans: An annual bird count on the Thames found a worrisome drop.Titanium clouds: Astronomers have come across the shiniest planet ever found.“Phubbing”: Ignoring a partner in favor of your phone can breed distrust.Modern Love: Learning to hear “no,” in acting, friendship and romance.Lives Lived: Julian Barry’s scripts for a Broadway play and Hollywood movie about Lenny Bruce became definitive portraits of the comedian as a truth teller who drove himself mad in a righteous struggle against hypocrisy. Barry died at 92.WOMEN’S WORLD CUPA hip-check from a Dutch player sparked a flash of anger and the only U.S. goal in the teams’ tie.Nigeria upset Australia, the tournament’s co-host, which is in danger of failing to advance to the knockout rounds.OTHER SPORTS NEWSNew coach bluster: In an interview, Broncos coach Sean Payton said his predecessor Nathaniel Hackett’s performance last season was “one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the N.F.L.”Home safe: Bronny James, LeBron James’s son, was discharged from the hospital after a cardiac arrest during a practice.An unbelievable day: Shohei Ohtani spent the first half of a doubleheader throwing a shutout and the second hitting two home runs. He sounds energized for the Angels’ surprise playoff push.ARTS AND IDEAS Dani PendergastTricks for a better vacation: Traveling is wonderful but can be taxing, whether you’re planning for a group or coping with delays. The Times’s Travel desk has tips for managing. One expert noted that during a flight delay, it’s easier to get help if you leave the gate, where crowds gather, and find your airline’s service desk. And when traveling with a group, ease stress by having a different person take ownership of each day’s activities.More on cultureRandy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles, died at 77.“Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opens on Broadway next week, follows a story that will be familiar to fans of the film.Jim Gaffigan, a master of family-friendly comedy, goes darker in his new stand-up special.THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …James Ransom for The New York TimesStick with Fritos in this taco salad.Upgrade your ice cube trays.Cool off with this portable fan.Save your skin — check whether it’s time to toss products.Take our news quiz.GAMESHere is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was unlovely.And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle and Sudoku.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — GermanCorrection: A chart in yesterday’s newsletter misstated the change in gross domestic product for the first quarter of 2023. It grew 2 percent, not 2.6 percent.P.S. Simon Romero is joining The Times’s Mexico City bureau to cover migration, climate change and more.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at [email protected]. More

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      How Did We Do? A Review of 2022 Before Our First Poll of 2023.

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      Trying to learn from a strong midterm run as we start surveying the G.O.P. primary.It was a good year. Getty ImagesHere’s a list of survey results of the 2022 midterm elections, all from the same pollster. As you read them, think about whether you think this pollster’s results were good or bad or whatever adjective you’d like.Poll: D+6; result: D+2.4Poll: R+4; result R+1.5Poll: D+5, result D+4.9Poll: R+5; result R+7.5Poll: EVEN; result D+0.8Poll: D+3, result D+1All right, what did you think?I hope you thought they were at least good, because this is a sample of about half of our final New York Times/Siena College polls in 2022. On average, the final Times/Siena polls differed from the actual results by 1.9 percentage points — the most accurate our polls have ever been. Believe it or not, they’re the most accurate results by any pollster with at least 10 final survey results in the FiveThirtyEight database dating to 1998. We were already an A+ pollster by its measure, but now we’ve been deemed the best pollster in the country.My hope is that most of you thought those poll results were good, but I’d guess you didn’t think they were incredible. They’re not perfect, after all. And I can imagine many reasonable standards by which these polls might not be considered especially accurate. They certainly weren’t objective truth, which we might usually think of as the standard for Times journalism.Even so, this level of accuracy is about as good as it can get in political polling. We may never be this accurate again. There may be room to debate whether “great for political polling” is the same as “great,” but if you’re judging polls against perfection it may be worth scaling back your expectations. Even perfectly designed surveys will not yield perfect results.Nonetheless, we try to be perfect anyway. With the data from 2022 in and final, we’ve been poring over the data — including our experiment in Wisconsin — to identify opportunities for improvement. I must admit this has been a less urgent (and more pleasant!) experience than similar exercises after prior election cycles, which have felt more like an “autopsy” or “post-mortem” than a routine doctor’s visit.Still, I did make sure to get our polls in for their biennial checkup ahead of our first national survey of the cycle, which is in the field as I type. More on that later, but for today here’s the good news and some bad news from our dive into last year’s polling.Good newsOur polls were right for the right reasons. With one interesting exception (which we’ll discuss later), they nailed the composition of the electorate, the geographic breakdown of the results and the apparent results by subgroup.The raw data was quite a bit cleaner, for lack of a better word, than it was in 2020. Back then, the statistical adjustments we made to ensure a representative sample made a big difference; without them, our polls would have been far worse. This time, the final results were only about a point different from our raw data. It’s hard to tell whether that’s because of refinements to our sampling or because survey respondents have become more representative in the wake of the pandemic or with Donald J. Trump off the ballot, but it’s a nice change either way.The big Wisconsin mail experiment — where we paid voters up to $25 dollars to take a mail survey — didn’t reveal anything especially alarming about our typical Times/Siena polls. There was no evidence to support many of our deepest fears, like the idea that polls only reach voters who are high in social trust. There was no sign of the MAGA base abstaining from polling, either. On many measures — gun ownership, evangelical Christianity, vaccination status — the Times/Siena poll looked more conservative than the mail poll.OK, now the bad newsThe Wisconsin study didn’t offer easy answers to the problems in polling. Yes, it’s good news that the problems aren’t as bad as we feared, but we went to the doctor’s office for a reason — the state of polling isn’t completely healthy, and we’re looking to get better. We may have ruled out many worst-case diagnoses, but a clearer diagnosis and a prescription would have been nice.The Wisconsin study did offer ambiguous evidence that Times/Siena phone respondents lean a bit farther to the left than the respondents to the mail survey. I say ambiguous partly because the Times/Siena telephone survey isn’t large enough to be sure, and partly because it doesn’t show up in the top-line numbers. But if you account for the extra tools at the disposal of the Times/Siena survey (like ensuring the right number of absentee vs. mail voters), the mail data does lean more conservative — enough to feel justified in going to the doctor.This modest tilt toward the left appears mostly explained by two factors I’ve written about before. One: The less politically engaged voters lured by a financial incentive appear to be ever so slightly more conservative than highly engaged voters. Two: People who provide their telephone numbers when they register to vote are ever so slightly more Democratic than those who do not, and they respond to surveys at disproportionate rates as well. It’s not clear whether these issues would be so problematic in other states where there’s additional information on the partisanship of a voter compared with Wisconsin.We did get lucky in one big case: Kansas’ Third District. Our respondents there wound up being far too liberal, yet our overall result was mostly saved by grossly underestimating the vigor of the Democratic turnout. In a higher-turnout election in 2024 — when there’s far less room for turnout to surprise — we wouldn’t be so lucky.Mr. Trump wasn’t on the ballot. That’s not exactly bad news, but it might be in 2024 if his presence in some way increases the risk of survey error by energizing Democrats to take polls while dissuading the already less engaged and irregular conservatives who only turn out and vote for him.What we’ve changed/what we’re changingWe’ll make a number of fairly modest and arcane changes to our Wisconsin and state polls, reflecting a series of modest and arcane lessons from the Wisconsin study. But so far none of these insights have yielded fundamental changes to our surveys heading into 2024. That said, there are a few larger tweaks worth mentioning:When deciding whether someone is likely to vote, we will rely even less on whether voters say they’ll vote, and more on their demographics and whether they’ve actually voted in the past. This is the third cycle in four — with the exception being 2018 — when we would have been better off largely ignoring whether voters say they will vote in favor of estimates based on their demographics and voting record. We won’t ignore what voters tell us, but we will look at it that much more skeptically when estimating how likely someone is to vote.We’re reordering our questionnaires to let us look at and potentially use respondents who drop out of a survey early. This isn’t usually an issue for us — our state and district polls have never taken longer than eight minutes or so to complete — but about 15 percent of respondents who made it to the major political questions on our longer national polls and the Wisconsin study later decided to stop taking the survey. Not surprisingly, they’re the kind of low-interest voters we need the most.When it comes to Republican primary polling, we might adjust our sample — or weight it — using a new category: home value. In our two national polls with the Republican primary ballot last year, home value was an exceptionally strong predictor of support or opposition to Mr. Trump, even after controlling for education.Overall, Mr. Trump had a lead of 60 percent to 17 percent among people whose homes were worth less than $200,000, based on L2 data, while Ron DeSantis led, 47-24, among respondents whose homes were worth more than $500,000.I don’t think these changes will make very much of a difference, but we’re putting it to the test in the Republican primary now.There’s one last change to mention, one with no effect on the qualify of our polls: For candidates who receive less than 1 percent of the vote but over 0.5 percent, we will record them as less than 1 percent ( More

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      The Conditions Are Ripe for a Third Party in 2024. Is No Labels It?

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      A majority of Americans don’t want to see President Biden and former President Trump compete for the White House again in 2024. No Labels, a nonpartisan political group, is talking about running a third-party unity ticket next year if Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the nominees. The Opinion writer and editor Katherine Miller has been reporting on a potential third option, and attended the first No Labels town hall in New Hampshire. In this audio short, Miller argues the group has failed to make the case that it holds a viable solution to voter unease.The political organization No Labels was created to support centrism and bipartisanship in American politics.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Associated PressThe 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 Times Opinion piece was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      DeSantis Reboots Struggling 2024 Campaign With Iowa Bus Tour

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      On a bus tour in Iowa to start off a campaign reset, Ron DeSantis suggested that his top advisers had not followed his strategy.Gov. Ron DeSantis’s reboot of his struggling presidential campaign began in the spartan basement of a hotel in a rural Iowa town.No spacious event hall, as at previous campaign stops. No legion of security guards ushering crowds of voters through metal detectors. No lineup of local luminaries giving elaborate introductions. Even the audio equipment was basic, generating noisy feedback at the beginning of Mr. DeSantis’s remarks to a crowd of about 65 people and cutting out occasionally throughout the opening speech of his bus tour on Thursday.Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, has tried to downplay his campaign troubles — a fund-raising shortfall and staff layoffs — saying he was switching gears to focus on the early nominating states and suggesting that his top advisers had not followed his strategy.“At the end of the day, as an executive, you have a commander’s intent,” he said after his speech in a rare session with reporters. “If that commander’s intent is not followed, then you have to make sure it’s followed. So that’s what we’re doing.”But some things didn’t appear to change much, even as his campaign has promised a “reset.”Mr. DeSantis began his speech with his stalwart opening line: “We have a very simple task ahead of us as Americans, and that is to send Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware,” he said without irony from the hotel’s crowded basement, aptly called the Elbow Room.And while Mr. DeSantis’s stump speech in Chariton, Iowa, was shorter and more focused on what his priorities would be as president (the economy, immigration, challenging the federal government bureaucracy), he barely talked about the state or the town he was in.In response to its struggles, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has said it will change its approach by spending less, presenting itself as an “underdog” against the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, and sharpening its message, according to talking points distributed to supporters. The bus tour on Thursday through several counties south of Des Moines was Mr. DeSantis’s first appearance in an early voting state since the layoffs.By many measures, his presidential bid appears to be in crisis. His fund-raising did not meet internal expectations for the second quarter. He still trails Mr. Trump in national polls by more than 30 percentage points. And in the most alarming sign of all, his campaign confirmed this week that it had laid off more than a third of its staff just months after joining the race. With all of this bad news, the campaign has shifted to a more guerrilla-style approach.He made several more stops in Iowa on Thursday, including at a county fair, and he held a town hall at a distillery in the evening.By 4 p.m. Central, Mr. DeSantis had taken questions from the press not once but twice — once after the Chariton event and again after a tour of a small meat-processing facility in Lamoni, Iowa — a rare occurrence for a candidate who prefers to have more control over his media appearances. The interactions are a sign that, as part of his reboot, Mr. DeSantis plans to engage more with the press, potentially offering him greater exposure to voters.Mr. DeSantis signed autographs for supporters at the Wayne County fairgrounds in Corydon, Iowa.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s jam-packed day took him to four rural Iowa counties, with stops at a county fairground, a Casey’s gas station where he bought a crispy chicken sandwich and a Sunkist, and a small hotel where staff said he was scheduled to take a break and enjoy some “executive time,” ahead of his evening town hall.The bus tour on Thursday was organized by Never Back Down, the main super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis. As the governor’s campaign cuts costs, the super PAC, which has a war chest of $130 million, has signaled that it may take over more responsibilities traditionally reserved for campaigns, like organizing events.While groups like Never Back Down are supposed to be independent of political campaigns, the Federal Election Commission has ruled that candidates are generally allowed to appear at their events. Mr. DeSantis was billed as a special guest on the bus tour.Dale Rumple, 84, said at the Chariton event that he was still leaning toward supporting Mr. DeSantis, despite the apparent turmoil in his campaign.“You’ve got to be anti-woke, anti-transgender, anti-gay,” said Mr. Rumple, who is retired and described himself as an evangelical Christian. “DeSantis doesn’t like any of that stuff.”Other voters, including Kathy Harvey of Chariton, had not heard the news about the layoffs.Ms. Harvey, 66, said she was grateful that Mr. DeSantis had taken the time to visit her town of roughly 4,000 people.“We’re not real significant,” she said. “But yet he’s willing to reach out.”Mr. DeSantis, who has a reputation for appearing aloof, gamely engaged in small talk with Iowans during the day.“You look good, man,” he said to Ralph Alshouse, a World War II veteran in his 90s at the county fairgrounds in Corydon, Iowa. “I would not have guessed World War II.”But his attempts didn’t always seem to land, as when he told a young girl enjoying an Icee, “That’s probably a lot of sugar, huh?” before shaking hands with another small child and greeting her with a surprisingly formal “Good to see you.”And then, “4-H, Wayne County,” a bemused Mr. DeSantis said to himself before moving on.At his evening town hall, Mr. DeSantis stuck to a similar, if somewhat meandering, script that at points ventured into head-scratching territory, such as a disquisition on quantitative easing.But during the question-and-answer session, a voter, Scott McLin, asked Mr. DeSantis to provide two or three bullet points about what he would do as president to prevent the nation from enacting lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates in a future pandemic. Mr. DeSantis responded that he would hold leaders like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci accountable for their “wrongheaded policies” and eliminate the “revolving door” between the Food and Drug Administration and big pharmaceutical companies.The answer — which also touched on the “lab leak” theory of Covid, as well as Mr. DeSantis’s questions about the effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines, and a discussion of how the media had attacked him during the pandemic — may not have been particularly succinct, but it was effective.Mr. McLin, 56, of Osceola, Iowa, said that he had been leaning toward supporting Mr. DeSantis but that the governor’s answer had moved him firmly into Mr. DeSantis’s camp.“It’s a done deal,” Mr. McLin said in an interview outside the distillery. “I really believe that was a huge mistake by Donald Trump, how he handled the pandemic.” More

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      DeSantis’s Campaign Reboot Faces Donor Skepticism and Deepening Divisions

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      As the Florida governor reboots in Iowa, tensions still plague the highest levels of his operation and a supportive super PAC.On the day his presidential campaign said it had laid off more than a third of its staff to address worries about unsustainable spending, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida began his morning by boarding a private jet to Chattanooga, Tenn.The choice was a routine one — Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, haven’t regularly flown commercial for years — but also symbolic to close observers of his struggling presidential campaign. As Mr. DeSantis promises a reset, setting out on Thursday on a bus tour in Iowa to show off a leaner, hungrier operation, several donors and allies remained skeptical about whether the governor could right the ship.Their bleak outlook reflects a deep mistrust plaguing the highest levels of the DeSantis campaign, as well as its supporters and the well-funded super PAC, Never Back Down, bolstering his presidential ambitions.Publicly, the parties are projecting a stoic sunniness about Mr. DeSantis, even as he has sunk dangerously close to third place in some recent polls. They have said they are moving into an “insurgent” phase in which the candidate will be everywhere — on national and local media, and especially in Iowa.But privately, the situation is starkly different.Major Republican donors, including the hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, have remained on the sidelines because they are disappointed in his performance and his campaign, according to two people familiar with their thinking.DeSantis donors have specifically raised concerns about the campaign’s finances, which appear both troubling and persistently opaque. Some prominent vendors did not show up on the first Federal Election Commission report, raising questions about how much of the spending has been deferred and whether the campaign’s total reported cash on hand for the primary — $9.2 million — was even close to accurate.The campaign’s concerning financial situation prompted an all-hands review of the budget in recent weeks. This review extended to James Uthmeier, the chief of staff in the governor’s office and a longtime trusted aide. Mr. Uthmeier recently received a personal briefing on the campaign’s finances from an official, Ethan Eilon, with the blessing of campaign manager Generra Peck, and then delivered an assessment to the governor, according to two people briefed on the conversations.Asked about the briefing, Mr. Uthmeier responded by email to express strong confidence in Ms. Peck, who he said had “welcomed” him to help the campaign as a volunteer. He added that Mr. DeSantis “continues to receive support from tens of thousands” of donors and that he has “full confidence” in Mr. DeSantis’s “vision to beat Joe Biden and restore sanity.”In an attempt to assuage donors’ anxieties, Mr. DeSantis’s allies have promised a campaign pivot that includes a more open press strategy, humbler travel conditions and smaller events. Advisers say the governor will be promoting his vision for a “Great American Comeback” — a phrase they hope will also apply to his spiraling campaign. Mr. DeSantis, a big-state governor with little love for glad-handing, will have to prove he is up for the challenges.On Thursday, Mr. DeSantis began a two-day bus tour across central Iowa that is being organized almost entirely by the super PAC, Never Back Down. Announcements for the three meet-and-greet stops scheduled describe Mr. DeSantis as the “special guest.”In talking points provided to donors on the day of the layoffs, the campaign described the operation as “leaning into the reset.”“We will embrace being the underdog and use the media’s ongoing narrative about the campaign to fuel momentum on the ground with voters,” said the guidance.On Tuesday, the campaign confirmed it had fired 38 campaign officials this month in an attempt to shrink its payroll. It remains unclear how many of those are leaving the DeSantis orbit. Some have discussed joining nonprofit groups with close ties to Mr. DeSantis’s political operation, including one linked to Phil Cox, who was an adviser on the governor’s 2022 campaign.Among the known DeSantis vendors that did not show up on his first campaign filing are some companies — Ascent Media and Public Opinion Strategies — that are part of a consultancy umbrella group called GP3, in which Mr. Cox is a key financial partner. Mr. Cox, who has worked closely with some of the 2024 campaign leadership in the past and also spent a brief stint advising the super PAC, is now back informally involved with the DeSantis campaign and raising money.But Mr. DeSantis himself has yet to adopt his campaign’s newfound frugality. On Tuesday, he flew multiple trips on private planes to fund-raisers around Tennessee. The private flights help explain part of how the campaign has burned through cash in its first six weeks. His campaign’s first report showed that he had spent $179,000 in chartered plane costs, as well as $483,000 to a limited liability company for “travel.”On Thursday outside a small meat-processing facility in Lamoni, Iowa, Mr. DeSantis briefly addressed his use of private planes in response to a question from a reporter.“We do things based on R.O.I. and that’s on everything you do,” Mr. DeSantis said, using the acronym for “return on investment,” a business term. “If it’s not a good R.O.I., then we try something else.” He did not answer later when asked what return he was getting on flying private instead of commercial, as other candidates in the race are doing.Some of Mr. DeSantis’s rivals have been eager to point out their cost-saving measures. On Wednesday, Nikki Haley tweeted a photo with her flight attendant under the hashtag #WeFlyCommercial.What’s more, Mr. DeSantis and other parts of his operation showed little sign of a message shift.In an interview with the radio host Clay Travis that aired Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis said that he would consider picking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine candidate running as a Democrat, to work at the F.D.A. or the C.D.C. The stunning remark prompted criticism from some prominent conservative writers, including at The National Review, where staff had once sounded bullish on a DeSantis candidacy.Later in the day, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign aide Christina Pushaw, who is known for fighting with reporters online, attacked the popular Republican Florida Representative Byron Donalds, who is Black, for criticizing his state’s new required teachings on slavery. By night’s end, the feud over Mr. Donalds devolved to the point where another DeSantis aide, Jeremy Redfern, got into a fight with a random Twitter user and posted her photo prominently in a tweet.At a donor retreat over the weekend — at a luxury ski resort in Park City, Utah, hired out for $87,000 — donors and allies, including Representative Chip Roy of Texas, had tough conversations with both the governor and his wife, a close adviser, about the structure and management of the campaign, according to two people who attended the retreat.Asked whether the congressman voiced concerns to Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Roy issued a statement saying only, “It’s not the campaign that needs to change; it’s the direction of our country. Governor DeSantis and his whole team are committed to doing just that.” His spokesman did not respond to a follow-up question.Much of the rancor stems from the strained but increasingly intertwined relationship between Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and his super PAC. Having raised $130 million, the super PAC has vastly more money than the campaign and has taken over basic campaign functions, including its voter contact operation — a highly unusual extent of involvement.The two entities — essentially a traditional campaign and a shadow one — are prohibited from coordinating strategy in private, but the campaign has aired its differences through a leaked memo. Ms. Peck, the campaign manager who has a close relationship with the governor and his wife, recently sent a memo to donors that appeared to call into question the super PAC’s decision to save money by staying off the airwaves in New Hampshire. The super PAC has since reserved airtime in the state, with advertising set to begin next week.Ms. Peck also has harshly criticized Never Back Down in private, according to a person with direct knowledge of her remarks.In response to questions about the distrust across the DeSantis orbit, the campaign’s communications director, Andrew Romeo, dismissed “palace intrigue.”“Our campaign is laser-focused on electing Ron DeSantis president, and we are nothing but grateful for groups like Never Back Down that are also working to support this mission,” he said.Erin Perrine, a spokeswoman for Never Back Down, declined to comment.On Tuesday night, only hours after the announcement of the layoffs, Mr. DeSantis returned to Tallahassee on a private plane.Back at his campaign headquarters, some staff members who hadn’t been fired brought in cases of beer to rally spirits after yet another dispiriting day. One staffer sarcastically described the evening to a friend as “the survivors party.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Hunter Biden Plea Deal Put on Hold as Judge Questions Its Details

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      A federal judge on Wednesday put on hold a proposed plea deal between Hunter Biden and the Justice Department that would have settled tax and gun charges against the president’s son, stunning the courtroom and raising legal and constitutional questions about the agreement.After moments of high drama in which the deal appeared headed toward collapse, the judge, Maryellen Noreika of the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., sent the two sides back to try to work out modifications that would address her concerns and salvage the basic contours of the agreement.Under the proposed deal, Mr. Biden would have pleaded guilty to two tax misdemeanors and averted prosecution on a gun charge by enrolling in a two-year diversion program for nonviolent offenders.Prosecutors and Mr. Biden’s team had both started the day confident that the proceeding would go smoothly and the judge would sign off on the deal immediately. As he entered the courtroom, Mr. Biden drew a deep breath and plunged forward to greet the prosecutors who investigated him for five years with handshakes and a smile.But Judge Noreika had other ideas, telling the two sides repeatedly that she had no intention of being “a rubber stamp,” and spending three hours sharply questioning them over nearly every detail of the deal.“I cannot accept the plea agreement today,” said Judge Noreika, who was nominated to the bench by President Donald J. Trump in 2017 with the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators.An exhausted-looking Mr. Biden trudged out of the courthouse looking a bit stunned, as his lawyers puzzled over what to do next. At the end of the hearing, Mr. Biden entered a plea of not guilty on the tax charges, which he will reverse if the two sides revise their agreement to the judge’s satisfaction.The muddled outcome only underscored how Mr. Biden’s personal and legal troubles have become an entrenched political issue in Washington, where Republicans have long sought to show that his foreign business ventures were aided by, or benefited, President Biden.Those efforts have only intensified as Mr. Trump’s legal troubles have deepened and Republicans in Congress have sought to undercut the president heading into the 2024 election.Republicans have accused David C. Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware who was retained by the Biden administration to complete the investigation into Mr. Biden, of cutting a “sweetheart deal” intended to help Democrats.They have sought to cast the Biden family as corrupt and assailed the proposed deal as far too lenient, citing testimony from two I.R.S. investigators as evidence that the Justice Department had hamstrung the investigation and that President Biden played a role in his son’s business deals with companies and partners in Ukraine and China.Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures raised ethical concerns, especially while his father was vice president, and his personal problems — he has acknowledged being addicted to crack cocaine for a number of years — have given conservatives an endless stream of material to assail him. But Republicans have produced no compelling evidence that President Biden used his office to help his son in any substantive way.The White House declined to comment directly on Wednesday’s court proceeding while communicating the president’s support for his son’s efforts to put his problems behind him.“Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and this was a personal matter,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday. “As we have said, the president, the first lady, they love their son, and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life.”Judge Noreika’s concerns appeared to center on two elements of the proposed deal. One was a provision that would have offered Mr. Biden broad insulation against further prosecution on matters scrutinized by federal prosecutors during the five-year inquiry, providing him with some protection against the possibility that Mr. Trump, if re-elected, or another Republican president might seek to reopen the case. The other had to do with the diversion program on the gun charge, under which she would be called on to play a role in determining whether Mr. Biden was meeting the terms of the deal.Judge Noreika said she was not trying to sink the agreement, but to strengthen it by ironing out ambiguities and inconsistencies, a view held by some former department officials.“The judge appropriately wanted to make sure that the parties were clear on whether Hunter Biden could be prosecuted for additional crimes in the future,” said Barbara L. McQuade, who was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017.Judge Noreika kicked off the hearing by telling lawyers that they did not need to keep “popping” up and down every time she asked them a question.It was a signal that she was about to subject them to a relentless interrogation over elements of an agreement she described, variously, as “not standard, not what I normally see,” possibly “unconstitutional,” without legal precedent and potentially “not worth the paper it is printed on.”Judge Noreika quickly zeroed in on a paragraph offering Mr. Biden broad immunity from prosecution, in perpetuity, for a range of matters scrutinized by the Justice Department. The judge questioned why prosecutors had written it in a way that gave her no legal authority to reject it.Then, in 10 minutes of incisive questioning, she exposed serious differences between the two sides on what, exactly, that paragraph meant.Christopher Clark, Mr. Biden’s lead lawyer, said it indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals with companies in Ukraine, China and Romania.Prosecutors had a far narrower definition. They saw Mr. Biden’s immunity as limited to offenses uncovered during their investigation of his tax returns dating back to 2014, and his illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018, when he was a heavy drug user, they said.When the judge asked Leo Wise, a lead prosecutor in the case, if the investigation of Mr. Biden was continuing, he answered, “Yes.”When she asked him, hypothetically, if the deal would preclude an investigation into possible violation of laws regulating foreign lobbying by Mr. Biden connected with his consulting and legal work, he replied, “No.”Mr. Biden then told the judge he could not agree to any deal that did not offer him broad immunity, and Mr. Clark popped up angrily to declare the deal “null and void.”The disagreement over such a central element of the deal was remarkable, given the months of negotiations that went into reaching it.“Today was very unusual, but based on my experience, I think the deal will now get done,” said John P. Fishwick Jr., who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017. “Judges are reluctant to reject deals but do ask questions. These should have been cleared up before today’s hearing, but they were not, so she helped provide more clarity.”The 30 journalists in the gallery then witnessed a remarkable tableau of real-time, public deal-making. With the judge having called a recess, the defense and prosecution teams first separated into two packs, then merged into a circle to hash out a new compromise. An unsmiling Mr. Weiss paced back and forth, jaw tense and hands jammed into the pockets of his suit.After an official recess was declared, Mr. Clark agreed to the narrower terms on Mr. Biden’s behalf.But Judge Noreika still appeared to be unconvinced. She turned her attention to the fine print of the deal that had been struck on the gun offense, requiring Mr. Biden to avoid using drugs or owning a firearms during the two-year diversion program.She objected strenuously to how a violation of its terms would be handled.Typically, the Justice Department could independently verify any breach and bring charges. But Mr. Biden’s team, concerned that the department might abuse that authority if Mr. Trump is re-elected, successfully pushed to give that power to Judge Noreika, arguing that she would be a more neutral arbiter.Judge Noreika suggested that such an arrangement could be unconstitutional because it might give her prosecutorial powers, which were vested in the executive branch by the Constitution.“I’m not doing something that gets me outside my lane of my branch of government,” said the judge, adding, “Go back and work on that.”Erica L. Green More