Presidential Election of 2024

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      Mike Pence Is Running for President Against Trump. Here’s What to Know.

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      Mr. Pence is a once-loyal vice president who became a target of Trump supporters, and an evangelical Christian whose faith drives his hard-line opposition to abortion.Over the past eight years, Mike Pence has gone from being a skeptic of Donald J. Trump to his doggedly loyal vice president to the target of his strongest supporters during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Now he is one of a growing number of Mr. Trump’s opponents in the Republican presidential primary.Mr. Pence was elected the governor of Indiana in 2012 after six terms in the House of Representatives, where he became the chairman of the Republican conference, the third-highest position in House Republican leadership. He dropped his campaign for re-election as governor when Mr. Trump named him as his running mate in 2016.Here are five things to know about Mr. Pence.He was perhaps the most loyal Trump loyalist.Before Mr. Trump was nominated in 2016, Mr. Pence — like many Republicans — was critical of him. Among other things, in 2015, he called Mr. Trump’s suggestion to bar Muslims from entering the United States “offensive and unconstitutional.”But once Mr. Pence agreed to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, he went all in. Though he said in 2016 that he would not be Mr. Trump’s “cleanup crew,” he eventually became Mr. Trump’s most reliable defender, regularly called on to explain or spin controversies, advise cabinet secretaries and lawmakers and provide a more traditional and religious conservative veneer to the candidate and president.He stayed on the ticket in October 2016 after the release of the “Access Hollywood” recording in which Mr. Trump bragged about assaulting women. He stood by Mr. Trump through the Robert S. Mueller investigation and Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. He was so loyal that the vice-presidential historian Joel K. Goldstein called him the “sycophant in chief.”At points, the commitment was reluctant — most strikingly in the case of the “Access Hollywood” tape. A Politico report in 2019 described Mr. Pence’s reaction: He told advisers he wasn’t sure he could stay on the ticket, and then cut off contact with the campaign while he deliberated, even failing to show up to a rally he had been scheduled to attend. His wife, Karen Pence, told him she wouldn’t appear in public if he stuck with Mr. Trump.He did. And in doing so, he put himself in position for his own presidential run.“They’re thinking about running in 2020 in their own right because they don’t expect that Donald Trump is going to win,” Tom LoBianco, a reporter who wrote a biography of Mr. Pence, told NPR, describing the Pence team’s calculations in 2016.But Mr. Trump did win in 2016, so the focus turned to 2024. Never wanting to alienate the leader of the party whose nomination he coveted, or the Republican voters whose allegiance was clear, Mr. Pence studiously ignored policies and behaviors that he could not defend.Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi presided over a joint session of Congress to certify Electoral College votes from the 2020 presidential election.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBut he reached his limit on Jan. 6.More than four years of subservience ended on Jan. 6, 2021, when Mr. Pence fulfilled his constitutional obligation to certify the Electoral College votes from the 2020 presidential election.In doing so, he defied weeks of pressure from Mr. Trump to overturn the election results himself, or send the electoral slates back to state legislatures so they could overturn them, based on false claims of election fraud. He also made a permanent enemy of a large portion of the Republican base.He later condemned Mr. Trump’s incitement of the attack on the Capitol, which was led by a mob that tried to stop the certification and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”“The president’s words that day at the rally endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol building,” he told ABC News in November. It is a sentiment he has repeated multiple times since then — including at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in March, where he declared that “history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”At the same time, Mr. Pence sought to avoid testifying in investigations of Mr. Trump’s actions. In early April, after a protracted legal battle, he said he would not appeal a ruling forcing him to testify to a grand jury. He testified on April 27.He underwent two major conversions early on.Mr. Pence was raised in a Roman Catholic and Democratic family, and voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980. But he broke from both affiliations, becoming an evangelical Christian in college and then a conservative Republican. He has said his religious conversion was driven by a longing for a more personal relationship with God.He has described his religion as informing every aspect of his life — he refuses to eat alone with women other than his wife and, when he was in Congress, allowed only male aides to work late with him — and his politics, especially his opposition to abortion.Mr. Pence also opposes gay marriage and has suggested that Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized it nationally, conflicts with religious freedom. In Congress, he voted against employment nondiscrimination protections for gay people, and, like many other Republicans, has described the affirmation of transgender students as “radical gender ideology.”In 2015, as the governor of Indiana, he drew national attention for signing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prompted outrage at the possibility that business owners would be empowered to refuse service to L.G.B.T.Q. people. Taken aback by the strength of the backlash, Mr. Pence and Republican legislators amended the law to say it did not authorize such discrimination, a retreat some Christian conservatives saw as a setback.He favors a federal abortion ban and would grant fetuses legal “personhood.”As a congressman, Mr. Pence led the first major federal effort to defund Planned Parenthood. As the governor of Indiana, he signed every anti-abortion bill that reached his desk, including one in 2016 that banned abortions based on the fetus’s race, gender or disability and required fetal remains to be cremated or buried. (A judge blocked it, and the Supreme Court declined to reinstate the ban but upheld the cremation or burial mandate.)And today, Mr. Pence is one of the few prominent Republicans maintaining a hard public line on abortion after the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling made that a clear liability in general elections.He has said abortion opponents “must not rest” until it is banned nationwide, and criticized a suggestion from Mr. Trump that abortion policy should be left to states. His political organization, Advancing American Freedom, has endorsed federal bills to ban abortion after about six weeks — before many people know they are pregnant — and to establish fetal personhood, which would confer legal rights starting at fertilization and make abortion illegal with no, or almost no, exceptions.He was also among the only presidential candidates to praise a Texas judge’s ruling (temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court) invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. “I fully support efforts to take the abortion pill off the market,” he told a local Fox station in California.Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, held a news conference after meeting with local officials about an H.I.V. outbreak in 2015.Darron Cummings/Associated PressHis responses to public health crises have been scrutinized.In 2015, Mr. Pence faced a crisis in Scott County, Ind., where H.I.V. was spreading explosively among intravenous drug users. For weeks, he resisted health officials’ calls for a program that would supply clean needles, a policy he opposed on the basis that it would enable drug abuse.The New York Times reported in 2016 that Mr. Pence’s staff was initially unwilling to discuss a needle exchange program, or to engage with scientific evidence that such programs reduce the risk of infections without increasing drug use.After extensive pressure, Mr. Pence changed course. (“I’m going to go home and pray on it,” he told his health commissioner shortly before relenting.) Once authorized, the needle program quickly brought the outbreak under control. Around 200 people had been infected, a number that could have been lower with an earlier response.This episode drew renewed scrutiny in 2020, when Mr. Trump put Mr. Pence in charge of the government’s handling of the coronavirus. The job — leading a pandemic response for an administration that was actively trying to avoid leading a pandemic response — was unenviable. Mr. Pence’s task was often to clean up after Mr. Trump’s misinformation, and he provided some inaccurate information of his own.He argued in his memoir “So Help Me God” that the response had been successful. “I know we saved millions of lives,” he wrote, though the United States had a higher death rate from Covid than most other developed countries — a bleak distinction that continued under President Biden. More

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      Ron DeSantis Defends Migrant Flights While Taking Shot at Gavin Newsom

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida criticized immigration policies in his first visit to the border since beginning his presidential bid.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Wednesday defended his state’s sending three dozen Latin American migrants to Sacramento on recent charter flights from the border, saying California had “incentivized” illegal immigration and ought to pay the costs.“These sanctuary jurisdictions are part of the reason we have this problem, because they have endorsed and agitated for these types of open-border policies,” Mr. DeSantis said during his first visit to the southern border since starting his presidential campaign. “They have bragged that they are sanctuary jurisdictions. They attacked the previous administration’s efforts to try to have border security.”Democratic officials in California, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have said Florida’s taxpayer-funded operation to move migrants to Sacramento could merit criminal or civil charges. They said the migrants, who arrived on Monday and last Friday, were misled into boarding the planes with false promises of jobs before being left outside a church building. In criticizing the flights, Mr. Newsom resorted to unusually personal terms, calling Mr. DeSantis a “small, pathetic man.”On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis took a shot back at Mr. Newsom, comparing California’s budget deficit to his own state’s fiscal surplus. “We have a good managed state,” he said at a round-table discussion in Sierra Vista, Ariz., that included law enforcement officials from Florida, Arizona and Texas. Mr. DeSantis was appearing in his official capacity as governor.Mr. DeSantis has staked out a hard-line position on immigration in the Republican primary, criticizing the policies of both President Biden and, to a lesser extent, former president Donald J. Trump, his main rival for the nomination.“The border just needs to be shut down,” said Mr. DeSantis, who is making a fund-raising trip to Texas this week. He also reiterated his support for a border wall, adding: “Mass migration just doesn’t work.”Last month, Mr. DeSantis authorized sending more than 1,100 Florida National Guard members and law enforcement personnel to Texas to serve at the southern border. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, had requested the assistance. Mr. DeSantis led a similar effort in 2021, when he also made a public appearance at the border.While border apprehensions have hit record highs in recent years, illegal crossings between ports of entry along the southern border have decreased more than 70 percent since May 11, when Title 42, the pandemic-era health measure, was lifted, according to statistics from Customs and Border Protection.After Mr. DeSantis’s comments in Arizona, sheriffs took turns describing crimes that they said had been committed by undocumented immigrants.At times, the conversation felt like a campaign event, as the assembled officials, mainly Republicans, praised Mr. DeSantis.“I’ve worked for a lot of governors,” said Grady Judd, sheriff of Polk County in Central Florida. “Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake about it: This is simply the best governor that the state of Florida has had in the last 50 years.”Miriam Jordan More

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      Pence Delivers Strong Rebuke to Trump in Campaign Announcement

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      The former vice president — and now rival — to Donald Trump gave his most aggressive criticism of his former boss, portraying him as unfit to be president.Former Vice President Mike Pence announced his presidential campaign in Iowa on Wednesday with a repudiation of Donald J. Trump, portraying his former boss — and now rival — as unfit for the presidency and going further than ever before in condemning the character and values of the man he loyally served for four years.Before a crowd of several hundred on the campus of the Des Moines Area Community College, Mr. Pence focused on something that many in his party have tried to desperately avoid: Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.“Jan. 6 was a tragic day in the life of our nation,” Mr. Pence said. “But thanks to the courage of law enforcement, the violence was quelled, we reconvened the Congress. The very same day, President Trump’s reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol.”He added: “But the American people deserve to know on that fateful day, President Trump also demanded I choose between him and our Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice. I chose the Constitution, and I always will.”No other major Republican candidate for president has even mentioned the attack on the Capitol in an announcement speech. Most elected Republicans have contorted themselves to avoid ever talking about that day — believing it only alienates their voters. A growing number of Republicans are going even further, trying to falsely reframe the attack on the Capitol as an inside job by the F.B.I. or by leftist groups pretending to be Trump supporters.Instead, Mr. Pence described his own actions that day in certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as a decisive moment that proved his mettle, and Mr. Trump’s actions that day as disqualifying.“The Republican Party must be the party of the Constitution of the United States,” Mr. Pence said to applause.At his campaign announcement in Des Moines, Mr. Pence pitched himself as a candidate who would uphold the Constitution as president.Jordan Gale for The New York Times“Anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” he said. “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president again.”Mr. Pence’s use of the word “never” took him across a line he had not breached until now, even as he has criticized Mr. Trump since Jan. 6. His announcement speech put him closer to more outspoken Republicans such as former Representative Liz Cheney, who have described Mr. Trump as morally unfit to occupy the Oval Office.With his remarks, Mr. Pence raised an immediate question for his campaign: As one of the criteria for participating in the G.O.P. primary debates, the Republican National Committee requires each candidate to sign a pledge that they will support the party’s eventual nominee.Mr. Pence has put himself in the potential position of having to support a candidate in Mr. Trump, the front-runner in the Republican Party, who he said should “never” be president.Despite that, only minutes after his speech, Mr. Pence promised in an interview with Fox News that he would support the Republican nominee for president, “especially if it’s me.”The former vice president addressed a thorny issue of his long-shot candidacy: how to account for his years of supporting a candidate whose character and positions were well known in 2016, and whose presidency was consistent with some of those expectations. In Mr. Pence’s telling, the Mr. Trump with whom he shared a ticket has, in fact, changed.Mr. Pence spoke to a crowd of several hundred on the campus of Des Moines Area Community College on Wednesday, drawing a contrast between himself and his former boss, who is their party’s current front-runner.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Pence homed in on three issues to draw an ideological contrast with Mr. Trump: abortion, fiscal conservatism and foreign policy.“When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. And together we did just that,” Mr. Pence said, leaving unmentioned the inconvenient fact that the Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt.“Today he makes no such promise,” he added. “After leading the most pro-life administration in American history, Donald Trump and others in this race are retreating from the cause of the unborn.”While Mr. Pence went after Mr. Trump in his speech, he used an announcement video earlier in the day to attack President Biden. “Our country’s in a lot of trouble,” Mr. Pence said in his nearly three-minute-long announcement video, accusing Mr. Biden and the “radical left” of weakening America “at home and abroad.”Citing “runaway inflation,” a looming recession, a southern border “under siege,” unchecked “enemies of freedom” in Russia, China “on the march,” and what he calls an unprecedented assault on “timeless American values,” he promised to deliver what he said the nation sorely needed.“We’re better than this,” Mr. Pence says. “We can turn this country around. But different times call for different leadership. Today our party and our country need a leader that’ll appeal, as Lincoln said, to the better angels of our nature.”In his speech, Mr. Pence went on to make clear that unlike other Republican candidates he wouldn’t be afraid to cut spending on Social Security and Medicare in order to confront the nation’s debt crisis.Then he turned to foreign policy. He said Mr. Trump had walked away from America’s traditional role on the world stage. He described the United States as “the leader of the free world” and an “arsenal of democracy.” He criticized Mr. Trump for describing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a “genius” and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for describing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” More

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      Biden’s Age, and His Achievements

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      More from our inbox:The PGA-LIV Golf MergerSelf-Policing in Brooklyn Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Spry Diplomat With a Stiff Gait: Aging Leader’s Complex Reality” (front page, June 4):Joe Biden on a bad day is better than 99 percent of Americans on a good one. He adroitly defeated the greatest human threat to U.S. democracy since Benedict Arnold, spearheaded a largely successful first-term legislative agenda, managed to avoid World War III with the Russians while materially supporting Ukraine’s war effort, and has kept an increasingly hegemonic China at bay.President Biden just oversaw the first truly bipartisan legislative effort in years, thus averting a world economic meltdown. He is a good and decent man who has spent the majority of his life in public service and has weathered an inordinate number of personal tragedies with a grace and dignity few could muster.While he has lost a step or two over the decades, in the crucible of real life where facts matter and outcomes are measurable, he burns as incandescently bright as any president before him.If the measure of the man is his gait, speech and memory for trivialities, then we are lost. Otherwise, let his achievements and character speak to his fitness to serve again as our president.Lawson BernsteinNew YorkTo the Editor:As an octogenarian myself who still works some and speaks in public, I know that my memory is not what it used to be, and I believe that it is crazy for President Biden to insist on asking for another term as president.At minimum, a new running mate needs to be found who is more electable on his or her own than the current vice president. For example, the governor of Michigan or the senator from Minnesota, and there are others who leap to mind. In any event, Mr. Biden should at least name someone as his running mate who could win the presidency on his or her own.Democratic leaders should speak up at this point on this issue before it’s too late.Isebill V. GruhnSanta Cruz, Calif.The writer is emerita professor of politics at the University of California Santa Cruz.To the Editor:I was an executive in several high-profile organizations and had two published novels. I am also a loyal Democrat.That was then.Now, I am 85. I am healthy and active, but I also note the minor aches and pains of old age, forgetfulness and lack of focus. I’m slower in gait, hearing and reacting.I do not worry about the regular presidential work President Biden will continue to confront. I am concerned about the emergency moment with which he may be faced. Can we really afford to take a chance that at his age, Mr. Biden can reasonably react perfectly to a crisis that may be both unexpected and disastrous?There may be no second chance!Sheila LevinNew YorkTo the Editor:While questions about President Biden’s age should not be automatically dismissed, I am far more concerned about the cognitive functions of a candidate who has spoken of Revolutionary War airports and Andrew Jackson’s Civil War presidency.I question the acuity of a candidate who thinks Frederick Douglass is still alive and suggests that ingesting bleach may be an efficacious way to treat certain serious illnesses. Additionally, declaring that it takes 10 or 15 tries to flush an average toilet suggests deficient mental capabilities.I find it even more alarming, though, that this same candidate regularly praises Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and brags about receiving “love letters” from Kim Jong-un, but lacks respect for Volodymyr Zelensky. Given a choice between the two, I shall vote for an octogenarian President Biden.Steven FantinaPhillipsburg, N.J.To the Editor:Re “President Tripped and Fell During Air Force Graduation” (news article, June 2):I was present at this year’s Air Force Academy graduation. I ask anyone to contemplate standing onstage midday delivering a 30-minute graduation speech, followed by standing onstage another 90 minutes saluting 921 times, each salute followed by a verbal greeting and a firm handshake from an energized 20-something cadet. That is an impressive feat of stamina for a person of any age, let alone an octogenarian.The media’s focus on the nine-second “fall” video completely distorts the reality of the event as perceived by those in attendance, who were present with President Biden during those hours of midday sun, who were actually impressed with the remarkable stamina he demonstrated.The president’s fall was due to a regrettable onstage tripping hazard, a dark sandbag placed on an equally dark floor, intended to stabilize a teleprompter, but unfortunately placed right on the path Mr. Biden was directed to traverse.Both as a physician and an Air Force Academy graduate with some experience saluting, I posit that a person could not accomplish 921 salutes and 921 handshakes without considerable arm and shoulder pain. Yet Mr. Biden did not complain or boast of this feat, as he made it his priority to personally address every graduating cadet. Mr. President, for your remarkable performance at this graduation, I salute you.Stanley SaulnyAustin, TexasThe writer is the father of a member of this year’s Air Force Academy graduating class.To the Editor:Re “11 Skeptical Biden Voters on His Re-election Bid” (“America in Focus” series, Opinion, June 4):It was so dismaying to read the responses of this group. I too have some misgivings about President Biden’s age, but no misgivings about his competence, even when I disagree with him.Mr. Biden’s style is what undercuts the perception of his strength. He’s not flashy. He’s not putting on a show. He’s not a great speaker. He doesn’t have charisma.But he has stood firm with Volodymyr Zelensky and united NATO. He got infrastructure legislation through. He took the first baby steps on negotiating drug prices with Medicare. He kept most of us afloat during a terrible pandemic. He tried to address the problem of the high cost of college.I’ll vote for him gladly. Do I worry about his age? Yes. But I’ll take my chances anytime with him over any of the MAGA party candidates.P.S.: I got much better than what I was expecting when I voted for Joe in the last election.Nancy GersonSouth Dennis, Mass.The PGA-LIV Golf MergerProfessional golfers on both the PGA and LIV tours are unlikely to see changes in their schedules this year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Golf Gets Jolt as Rival Tours Form Alliance” (front page, June 7):When you sell your soul to the devil, you end up with a match made in hell. Dirty Saudi money wins; principle loses.This is an unfortunate huge double bogey for American golf enthusiasts who have admired the decency and integrity of the golfers who have eschewed preposterous payouts in favor of respecting the tradition of the game and the PGA Tour.In any situation where the Saudis and their favorite former president gloat, and the head of the PGA Tour abruptly changes course where billions are involved, you know it’s time to watch curling instead of golf.Ed LaFreniereGig Harbor, Wash.To the Editor:At first, I was just irritated beyond belief with the golfers who bent over and stuffed their back pockets with money from a bunch of murderers and misogynists. Now that the PGA Tour has married those people, I can just ignore professional golf for the rest of my life.David M. BehrmanHoustonSelf-Policing in Brooklyn Amir Hamja for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How One Neighborhood in Brooklyn Policed Itself for Five Days” (front page, June 4):Self-policing is a spectacularly bad idea. Despite the failings of many professional police officers, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, they have two things that civilians do not: a core of training and discipline, and recognizable authority. Without these two elements, self-policing is the equivalent of one person trying to stop a fight between two other people.Though the list of things that could go wrong in that scenario is limitless, it definitely includes the injury or death of all three principals, as well as a threat to onlookers.We are all looking for a path to more disciplined, more compassionate and more accountable policing. This is not the way.Bart BravermanIndio, Calif. More

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      Who Is Doug Burgum? 5 Things to Know

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      Elected governor of North Dakota in 2016 in a major upset, Mr. Burgum is seeking an even bigger one in the Republican presidential race. Doug Burgum has at least a couple of things going for him: He is a sitting governor, which is the most common steppingstone to the United States presidency, and he has deep pockets.But Mr. Burgum, the two-term Republican governor of North Dakota, nonetheless entered the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday with a notable disadvantage: The 99.8 percent of Americans who don’t live in North Dakota are unlikely to know much about him.Here are five things to know about Mr. Burgum.His election as governor was a major upset.When Mr. Burgum began running for governor in January 2016, few people in North Dakota knew who he was either.A poll conducted the next month found him running 49 percentage points behind the state attorney general Wayne Stenehjem, who was the chosen candidate of the North Dakota Republican Party, the departing governor Jack Dalrymple and Senator John Hoeven.He ended up beating Mr. Stenehjem in the Republican primary by more than 20 points.“Stand up if you saw this coming,” Mike McFeely, a columnist for The Forum, a newspaper in Fargo, wrote after the primary. “OK, now sit down. Because no you didn’t.”Mr. Burgum, who had never held elected office, benefited from an anti-establishment campaign message — this was, after all, the year that Donald J. Trump showed Republican voters’ appetite for perceived outsiders — and from Democrats who crossed over to vote in the Republican primary, as state law allows.He also benefited from millions of dollars of his own money, which allowed him to significantly outspend Mr. Stenehjem despite only slightly surpassing him in fund-raising.He is a wealthy software entrepreneur.Mr. Burgum was raised in Arthur, N.D., a tiny town about northwest of Fargo, and went on to earn a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford.He then returned to North Dakota and bought a stake in a fledgling financial software company by mortgaging $250,000 of farmland that he had inherited. (His grandparents founded an agribusiness company that is still in his family.)In the mid-1980s, he and his relatives bought out the founders of the company, Great Plains Software, and assumed full ownership. Over the ensuing years, it became a major supplier of accounting and record-keeping software for small and midsize businesses and grew to employ more than 2,000 people.Mr. Burgum took the company public in 1997, and in 2001, Microsoft bought it for about $1.1 billion.Since selling Great Plains Software, Mr. Burgum has founded two more businesses: Kilbourne Group, a real estate development firm, and Arthur Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in software companies.He supports fossil fuels and carbon capture.In 2021, shortly after beginning his second term as governor, Mr. Burgum announced an unusual goal for a Republican: to get North Dakota to carbon neutrality by 2030.However, he rejected transitioning to renewable energy, a central step that climate scientists say is needed to accomplish that goal. North Dakota is a major user of wind energy, but it is also heavily reliant on oil, natural gas and coal, and Mr. Burgum does not want to fundamentally change that. He argues instead that, by using new technology to capture carbon emissions, North Dakota can become carbon neutral while continuing to rely in large part on fossil fuels.That is a politically appealing position in a place like North Dakota. Thanks to the Bakken oil field in the western part of the state, North Dakota is one of the biggest oil producers in the country. It is also one of the largest coal producers, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.But experts say that, while carbon capture may be a useful tool for combating climate change, it is unlikely to be sufficient on its own — in part because high costs have made it hard for the technology to gain traction.Mr. Burgum has taken a number of steps to promote carbon capture, including signing a bill in 2019 that created a tax incentive for a particular form of it. More recently, local leaders and landowners have been fighting over a proposed pipeline that would funnel carbon from other states into underground storage in North Dakota.He has signed eight anti-transgender laws this year.North Dakota legislators have passed, and Mr. Burgum has signed into law, at least eight bills targeting transgender or gender-nonconforming people in recent months. That is more than almost any other state in what has been a record-breaking year for anti-transgender legislation.Mr. Burgum signed a ban on transition care for minors, as more than a dozen other states have done this year. The ban — which runs counter to the consensus of major medical organizations — makes it a misdemeanor to provide puberty blockers or hormones to minors for gender transition, and a felony to provide surgery.He signed one law defining sex as being determined by “sex organs, chromosomes and endogenous hormone profiles at birth”; one defining “male” and “female”; and another prohibiting most sex changes on transgender people’s birth certificates.He signed a measure restricting transgender people’s use of bathrooms and showers in state facilities, and another one allowing public school personnel to misgender students and requiring schools to inform parents of students’ “transgender status.” (He vetoed a bill that would have gone further by mandating that schools misgender many trans students.)He also signed two measures restricting transgender girls’ and women’s participation in sports — one applying to public schools and to private schools that compete against them, and the second applying to colleges with the same public/private criteria.He signed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans.In April, Mr. Burgum signed a law banning almost all abortions. Exceptions for rape or incest are allowed only in the first six weeks of pregnancy, when many people do not yet know they are pregnant. After six weeks, the only exception is to prevent “death or a serious health risk.”Previously, abortion had been legal in North Dakota through 22 weeks of pregnancy.Like many other states, North Dakota had a “trigger ban” that was set to take effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. But that law — under which doctors could have faced felony charges for performing an abortion even to save a woman’s life, and the burden would have been on them to prove an “affirmative defense” that the abortion was medically necessary — was struck down by the North Dakota Supreme Court.The new ban that Mr. Burgum signed, which state legislators passed in response to the court’s rejection of the trigger ban, allows abortions in medical emergencies without the need for an “affirmative defense” — though in practice, fear of prosecution has stopped many doctors from providing abortions for medical reasons even in states whose laws have such exceptions. More

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      Mike Pence Hasn’t Grown Less Conservative, but Republicans Have Shifted

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      The polls say the former vice president, who announced his 2024 candidacy in a video on Wednesday, has little chance. But he is driven by his faith.Mike Pence is the most conservative candidate competing for the presidency. The former vice president wants abortion banned from the point of conception. He’s the only major candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And he has the most hawkish foreign policy, especially on confronting Russia.Being the most conservative used to matter in Republican presidential primaries.Not anymore.The president Mr. Pence served under, Donald J. Trump, transformed the G.O.P. electorate, making the path to a Pence presidency visible only to the truest of true believers. Mr. Pence has not really changed all that much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different G.O.P., and it’s a different G.O.P. because of his former boss.The Republican Party’s intense focus on character and morality during the Bill Clinton years has been replaced by a different credo — articulated by a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey B. Clark, during a recent Twitter squabble over Mr. Trump’s fitness for office.“We’re not a congregation voting for a new pastor,” argued Mr. Clark, the one senior Justice Department official who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. “We’re voting for a leader of the nation.”By this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter that Mr. Pence has been married only once and is so determined to honor his vows that he doesn’t allow himself to dine alone with a woman who is not his wife. Nor does it matter how many affairs Mr. Trump has had or whether he paid hush money to a porn star. Mr. Trump silences all of that, in a way, with one blunt social media post: “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”Mr. Pence, who announced his candidacy in a video early Wednesday, hours before a planned rally in a Des Moines suburb, is given little chance by anybody outside of his core team. Republican pollsters and strategists have written him off. Faced with Mr. Pence’s situation — being both dominated and burdened by Mr. Trump — most politicians would have concluded, after reviewing polls and focus groups, that there was no “theory of the case” for him to win the nomination.But Mr. Pence appears to have no use for statistical analysis.Mr. Pence in Des Moines on Saturday. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, he polls around just 5 percent.Jordan Gale for The New York Times“Our country’s in a lot of trouble,” Mr. Pence says in his nearly three-minute-long announcement video, accusing “President Joe Biden and the radical left” of weakening America “at home and abroad.”Citing “runaway inflation,” a looming recession, a southern border “under siege,” unchecked “enemies of freedom” in Russia and China “on the march,” and what he calls an unprecedented assault on “timeless American values,” he promises to deliver what he says the nation sorely needs.“We’re better than this,” Mr. Pence says. “We can turn this country around. But different times call for different leadership. Today our party and our country need a leader that’ll appeal, as Lincoln said, to the better angels of our nature.”Whereas some Republican politicians use God as a talking point and have little acquaintance with the Bible, Mr. Pence makes every decision through the filter of Scripture. When he says he has prayed on a decision, he means it, and that includes running for president. Throughout his political career, according to people who have worked for him, Mr. Pence has gathered around his staff and his family in frequent prayer. If his theory of the case in this race seems to rely more on faith than data — that’s because it does.Mr. Pence served as Mr. Trump’s yes-man for three years and 11 months. In that final month, Mr. Pence refused to follow a presidential order that was plainly unconstitutional: to single-handedly overturn the 2020 election. His loyalty to the Constitution was rewarded with people in a pro-Trump mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol, while Mr. Pence and his family rushed to a barely secure room.Instead of punishing Mr. Trump for how he treated Mr. Pence, Republican voters have made him their front-runner. More than 50 percent of Republicans support the former president in national polls. Mr. Pence draws around 4 percent. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, where Mr. Pence is staking his candidacy, he polls around 5 percent.Mr. Pence and Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, began certifying the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Pence has no trouble explaining his policy positions. He will run for president as a national security hawk, a staunch social conservative, a free-trader and a fiscal conservative. Nobody who knows him well doubts his sincerity on any of these issues. He may be running the least poll-tested campaign in the Republican field.The problem is that the Mike Pence known to most Republicans is a man whose job for four years was to cheer Mr. Trump through policies and actions that often contradicted his professed principles. If Mr. Pence, in a moment of introspection, wonders why the party he has long aspired to lead no longer seems interested in being led by someone like him, he may shoulder some portion of the blame himself.The Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt. So much for fiscal conservatism. The Trump-Pence administration had a trade policy that, for the most part, delighted protectionist Democrats. So much for free trade. And while Mr. Trump spent his first three years in office largely listening to his more conventional national security advisers, in his final year he laid the groundwork for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence did not support.Mr. Trump’s current articulation of his “America First” foreign policy — which involves dropping U.S. support for Ukraine and musing about giving away chunks of Ukrainian land to the Russians — could not be further removed from Mr. Pence’s Reaganite vision of America defending freedom across the globe.But it’s not just Mr. Pence’s anti-populist policies that hobble him. It’s that Republican voters have sharply different expectations of their leaders than they did during Mr. Pence’s political rise as a member of Congress and then governor of Indiana.For the past seven years, Mr. Trump has trained Republican voters to value a different set of virtues in their candidates. He has trained them to value Republicans who fight hard and dirty, using whatever tactics are necessary to vanquish their opponents. He has also trained them to avert their gazes from behaviors that were once considered disqualifying.Mr. Pence averted his gaze for four years as Mr. Trump’s vice president, sticking with him through various controversies.Al Drago for The New York TimesFor four years, Mr. Pence, too, averted his gaze. He stuck with Mr. Trump through numerous controversies including the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia. He vouched for Mr. Trump’s character with skeptical evangelicals with whom Mr. Trump ultimately forged his own relationship.When Mr. Trump, as president, showered praise on the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his vice president, bound by loyalty, stayed silent. Yet recently on the campaign trail, after Mr. Trump had congratulated Mr. Kim for his country’s readmission to the World Health Organization’s executive board, Mr. Pence scolded his former boss for “praising the dictator in North Korea.”Mr. Pence may finally feel liberated to tell voters what he really thinks about Mr. Trump. His problem is that most Republicans don’t want to hear it. More