Presidential Election of 2024

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      Why Joe Biden Has Slow-Walked His Way to a 2024 Run

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      Closed-door planning meetings involving White House officials, the Democratic National Committee and outside advisers are intensifying as President Biden nears a final decision about how and when to kick off his 2024 campaign.Mr. Biden’s seemingly off-the-cuff remark at an airport in Ireland on Friday that he would announce his campaign “relatively soon” was the kind of tantalizingly vague comment that could be — and was — read by his aides and others as either a reaffirmation that he was in no particular hurry to announce or a sign of gathering momentum.Behind the scenes, advisers and allies are weighing how soon the president should set in motion a re-election operation — an announcement that will surprise no one but will signal the start of a challenging new phase of his presidency.Before Mr. Biden’s remarks on Friday, conflicting signals abounded about the imminence of an announcement. Preparations have accelerated, according to people involved in and briefed on the planning sessions, even as those involved discuss the pros and cons of delaying a formal announcement into early summer, seeing little advantage in interrupting Republican infighting. At the same time, there has been increasing discussion among the broader Biden team about the notion of a low-key video announcement on April 25, the fourth anniversary of his entrance to the 2020 race — the kind of symmetry that Mr. Biden is said to appreciate.What is clear is that any external pressure that Mr. Biden and his team once felt to formally enter the 2024 race has mostly evaporated. No serious primary challenge to the president has emerged, and potential opponents have rallied behind him. The leading Republican candidate, former President Donald J. Trump, faces felony charges related to a hush-money payment to a porn star. And Republicans are generally more focused on thrashing one another and dragging the party to the right than on attacking Mr. Biden, who is content to draw a sharp contrast to the G.O.P. chaos from the Oval Office.“There is no immediate urgency,” said Kate Bedingfield, who recently departed the White House as communications director. “The president has the luxury of being able to decide when he wants to announce.”The waiting game began last year, with the suggestion that Mr. Biden would enter the race after the winter holidays. Then came hints that a campaign would begin after the State of the Union address and the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. Then the likely timing was April, to take advantage of the beginning of a fund-raising quarter. (Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said, “There has never been a time frame for any announcement.”)Inside the West Wing, Mr. Biden has kept most direct discussions about 2024 limited to a pin-size inner circle, where two senior aides, Anita Dunn and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, are taking the lead. He has yet to designate a campaign chief, and only last week Democrats announced that Chicago would host the party’s 2024 convention.Mr. Biden traveled to Kyiv in February and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesAt 80, Mr. Biden is already the oldest president in American history, and he is likely to face questions about his plans no matter how many times he teases his re-election intentions without formalizing them. “I’m planning on running, Al,” he told Al Roker of NBC News at the White House Easter Egg Roll last week. “But we’re not prepared to announce it yet.”Mr. Biden’s timeline is well behind where President Barack Obama’s was at this point in 2011. Mr. Obama released a video that year in the first week of April announcing his bid, but top aides including David Axelrod and Jim Messina had begun forming the campaign months earlier. And Mr. Obama had chosen Charlotte, N.C., to host the convention in early February 2011.A top Democratic donor allied with Mr. Biden was quietly asked early this year to begin planning for a New York fund-raising trip in late April or early May to coincide with a potential kickoff to a 2024 re-election campaign. Then the donor received new guidance recently that such an event was on hold — and no new timeline was provided.“The longer he waits, the less scrutiny he is under,” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, said. “You have to measure that against creating momentum in these states that will matter. You’ve got to build infrastructure.”The desire to rebuild key relationships and renew political outreach in a way that only a campaign makes possible is one of the few internal pressures to get started. Mr. Biden won the Electoral College by a comfortable 306 to 232, but seven states in 2020 were decided by less than three percentage points.Money is at the center of the timing conversation. Delaying will postpone building a war chest for the general election.Those preparing to raise money for the campaign express few doubts that the party’s big donors will pony up to back Mr. Biden, and some officials fear an earlier entry might prove to be a wheel-spinning exercise, demanding that the aging president traverse the grueling fund-raising circuit sooner than necessary.And given that a majority of Democrats consistently say in polls that they prefer someone other than Mr. Biden as the nominee, a reliable infusion of grass-roots dollars is not guaranteed — at least until voters see the stakes of the election. Mr. Biden struggled to raise money online in 2019, breaking records only once he emerged as the nominee.Mr. Biden’s advisers argue that he and the Democrats bucked political history — and similar low ratings — to outperform in the 2022 midterm elections, in part by relentlessly painting Republicans as extremists.That is the basic blueprint for 2024. The Biden campaign-in-waiting is expected to be built around one of the president’s favorite political sayings: Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.On four consecutive days last week, Mr. Biden posted tweets attacking “MAGA Republicans,” part of a drumbeat of warnings about the policies that Republicans want to roll back, including abortion rights. The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade turbocharged Democratic voters in 2022 and is expected to be a motivator into 2024, even if abortion has been an uneasy topic for Mr. Biden.If Mr. Obama had soaring oratory and Mr. Trump had concertlike rallies, Mr. Biden’s advisers feel his strength is his governing ability and projection of competence. Spending time on the campaign trail, with its unscripted moments, introduces the risk of age-related mishaps.The president’s slipping on stairs while boarding Air Force One or falling off a bicycle were minor episodes during his first two years in office that nonetheless circulated heavily in the conservative news media. A similar incident during the heat of a presidential campaign could be far more significant.Mr. Biden’s advisers believe his strength is his governing ability and projection of competence. Spending time on the campaign trail, with its unscripted moments, introduces the risk of age-related mishaps. Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. O’Malley Dillon, the White House deputy chief of staff, said Mr. Biden was maintaining an aggressive schedule. “Whether it was in Kyiv, barnstorming the country highlighting the manufacturing jobs he’s bringing back, averting international crises in the wee hours of the morning like he did in Bali or putting Republicans on defense over Social Security in the State of the Union, the American people and the world see his qualified leadership,” she said, “and younger aides have to push themselves to keep up with that pace.”Republicans have steadily hammered Mr. Biden’s mental and physical state, and are already trying to transform any Rose Garden-based approach into a liability. “He’s going to be Biden in the basement again,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, predicted on Fox News last week.The Biden operation has taken steps to signal a coming bid, like announcing a “national advisory board” of influential Democratic leaders last month in The Washington Post. But some of the elected officials who were named as top Biden surrogates on the board found out about their involvement in such a council only when reading about it, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. There have been no communications to the full advisory board since its creation.In Washington, speculation has raged about who will serve as campaign manager, with an approved short list of Democratic operatives circulating for potential senior roles. Yet not all of the people on that list have had substantive contact with top Biden officials this year.Michael LaRosa, a former adviser to Jill Biden, the first lady, said power would inevitably be centralized at the White House regardless of the location of the campaign’s headquarters — Wilmington, Del., is favored but Philadelphia has also been under consideration — or the person named as campaign manager.“The person who is going to be running the campaign is going to be taking orders from the West Wing,” Mr. LaRosa said. He described Mike Donilon, Ms. Dunn, Ms. O’Malley Dillon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed as “the five people who inform his decision making when it comes to anything on policy or politics.”“And I don’t mean that in a disparaging way,” he added. “This president, like every president before him, has a small circle of trust who he seeks advice from.”A top Biden adviser disagreed with the suggestion that the West Wing would dominant the campaign, saying the eventual campaign manager would be “empowered.”Whenever he does enter the race, Mr. Biden is expected to reveal a slate of top campaign advisers — not just a single campaign manager — to put forward a diverse team.“They should have as much diversity as they can at the highest echelons of the campaign,” said Mr. Rocha, who has focused on mobilizing Latino voters. “Their biggest challenge is going to be motivating Latinos to vote for him.”Mr. Biden has been doing some extra contributor outreach. Donors are often among the attendees to the White House Easter Egg Roll, and some were among those invited to an additional breakfast with Mr. Biden and the first lady in the state dining room before the event, according to two people with knowledge of the breakfast, which did not appear on the president’s public schedule.Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, Democrat of Delaware, who is close with Mr. Biden, downplayed the timing of his 2024 entry. “The American people are going to judge him on the job that he’s done for four years as president,” she said, “not on the one day that he announces.” More

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      The 2024 Presidential Campaign is Finally Kicking into Gear

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      Candidates are visiting early primary states, attending cattle calls and holding donor summits. The nascent campaign seems to be kicking into gear.From small towns in Iowa and New Hampshire to the grand stages of interest groups’ conventions, the 2024 presidential campaign is underway, whether or not Americans are ready.The past week has brought at least four declared or likely candidates to New Hampshire, three to Iowa and one to South Carolina. Nine addressed the National Rifle Association’s annual forum in Indianapolis, and three attended a Republican donor retreat in Nashville.The formal choreography of the campaign is falling into place. Last Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago to host its convention next August. On Wednesday, the Republican National Committee, in a surprise to no one, chose Fox News to host the party’s first debate this August.The declared candidates filed their quarterly fund-raising reports late this week, revealing the first big campaign finance error of the season. The campaign of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, exaggerated her fund-raising total by more than $2 million by double-counting sums transferred between different committees.Five major candidates have officially announced campaigns: four Republicans (former President Donald J. Trump, Ms. Haley, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author) and one Democrat (the self-help author and 2020 candidate Marianne Williamson).But on the campaign trail, it seems like more.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who announced an exploratory committee on Wednesday, had a particularly packed week, with trips to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. A tour of Alex’s Restaurant in Goose Creek, S.C., on Friday had the look and feel of a full-blown campaign stop, with supporters holding signs and the number of reporters rivaling the number of diners.Mr. Scott talked with voters and restaurant staff before heading outside to take questions from reporters — walking a thin line between being a declared candidate and one in waiting.“The message is resonating,” he said, underlining his belief that his conservative talking points with religious overtones will appeal to a broad swath of Republican voters. Asked if he had made up his mind about running for president, he said: “I’m getting closer. Without any question.”He added that he would return to Iowa and New Hampshire in the coming days and had plans to stop in Nevada, another early-voting state.While Mr. Scott was in South Carolina, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — the top challenger to Mr. Trump in early polls, though not officially in the race — spoke at Liberty University in Virginia and then flew to New Hampshire. Mr. DeSantis addressed a crowd of 500 at a state Republican Party dinner in Manchester.The event raised $250,000 for the state party, with the party chairman saying Mr. DeSantis had directed his own donors to give an additional $132,000.After his nearly 40-minute speech, Mr. DeSantis spent just as long methodically working his way through the crowd, visiting all 50 tables for handshakes, backslaps, photos and small talk. “Did you get it?” he asked picture takers. “County chairman for where?”The low-stakes interactions appeared designed to dispel criticism that Mr. DeSantis was unwilling to engage in the traditional retail campaigning that political activists in early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire value. On Saturday, he also stopped by an airport diner.The governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, was in Nashville, far away from home, testing out his own possible campaign at the Republican National Committee’s private donor retreat. There he spoke at a luncheon on Saturday and implicitly blamed Mr. Trump for the party’s underwhelming performance in the midterm elections. (Data backs him up: A New York Times analysis found that candidates Mr. Trump supported in primaries performed about five percentage points worse than other Republicans did in the general election.)Mr. Trump was at the retreat, too, casting himself against that evidence as the only candidate who could win a general election. So was his former vice president, Mike Pence, whom Trump supporters declared their desire to hang when they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.“The old Republican Party is gone, and it’s never coming back,” Mr. Trump said in a speech Saturday, less than two weeks after he was arraigned in New York on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. “Instead of being the party of the establishment class, we are now the party of the working class, the party of all Americans.”The evening before, Mr. Pence cast the 2024 election as a fight between “one vision grounded in traditional Republican principles, and another vision that grasps what some think the American people want to hear.” He took repeated but indirect aim at Mr. Trump, noting that in 2022, “candidates that were focused on the past, particularly those focused on relitigating the last election, did not do well.”On Sunday, Mr. Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who announced his campaign this month and was in Iowa a few days ago, partook in another campaign staple: the Sunday morning talk show interview.Appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Mr. Hutchinson gave the usual answer to the question of why he was running — “because we need leadership that brings out the best of America and doesn’t appeal to our worst instincts.” Then the host, Margaret Brennan, pressed him on how he would respond to the country’s bleak parade of mass shootings.He did not endorse any new federal legislation and expressed skepticism about whether red-flag laws — which allow the removal of guns from people deemed to pose a danger to themselves or to others — protected due process. At the same time, he urged states to make greater use of existing laws that allow the institutionalization of people deemed to pose a danger to themselves or to others.There has been much less activity across the aisle, where President Biden is inching toward formally declaring a re-election campaign that he has already said was definite. (“We’ll announce it relatively soon,” he said on Friday.)No one with a large support base has risen to challenge him. But he does have one official competitor, Ms. Williamson, who has been traversing New Hampshire since Friday, hitting Dover, Henniker, Keene, Lancaster and Littleton.A second challenger, the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., plans to announce his campaign this Wednesday.The election will be just 566 days away.Rebecca Davis O’Brien More

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      How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives

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      When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives were set adrift.The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.“We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.”What has stuck, somewhat unexpectedly, is the issue of transgender identity, particularly among young people. Today, the effort to restrict transgender rights has supplanted same-sex marriage as an animating issue for social conservatives at a pace that has stunned political leaders across the spectrum. It has reinvigorated a network of conservative groups, increased fund-raising and set the agenda in school boards and state legislatures.The campaign has been both organic and deliberate, and has even gained speed since Donald J. Trump, an ideological ally, left the White House. Since then, at least 20 states, all controlled by Republicans, have enacted laws that reach well beyond the initial debates over access to bathrooms and into medical treatments, participation in sports and policies on discussing gender in schools.“We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.”Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAbout 1.3 million adults and 300,000 children in the United States identify as transgender. These efforts have thrust them, at a moment of increased visibility and vulnerability, into the center of the nation’s latest battle over cultural issues.“It’s a strange world to live in,” said Ari Drennen, the L.G.B.T.Q. program director for Media Matters, a liberal media monitoring group that tracks the legislation. As a transgender woman, she said, she feels unwelcome in whole swaths of the country where states have attacked her right “just to exist in public.”The effort started with a smattering of Republican lawmakers advancing legislation focused on transgender girls’ participation in school sports. And it was accelerated by a few influential Republican governors who seized on the issue early.But it was also the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics. With gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender, conservative groups spotted an opening in a debate that was gaining attention.“It’s a sense of urgency,” said Matt Sharp, the senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that has provided strategic and legal counsel to state lawmakers as they push through legislation on transgender rights. The issue, he argued, is “what can we do to protect the children?”Mr. Schilling said the issue had driven in thousands of new donors to the American Principles Project, most of them making small contributions.The appeal played on the same resentments and cultural schisms that have animated Mr. Trump’s political movement: invocations against so-called “wokeness,” skepticism about science, parental discontent with public schools after the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns and anti-elitism.Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, a group that fights discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people, said there was a direct line from the right’s focus on transgender children to other issues it has seized on in the name of “parents’ rights” — such as banning books and curriculums that teach about racism.“In many ways, the trans sports ban was the test balloon in terms of how they can frame these things,” she said. “Once they opened that parents’ rights frame, they began to use it everywhere.”For now, the legislation has advanced almost exclusively in Republican-controlled states: Those same policies have drawn strong opposition from Democrats who have applauded the increased visibility of transgender people — in government, corporations and Hollywood — and policies protecting transgender youths.The 2024 presidential election appears poised to provide a national test of the reach of this issue. The two leading Republican presidential contenders, Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not officially declared a bid, have aggressively supported measures curtailing transgender rights.“The trans sports ban was the test balloon in terms of how they can frame these things,” Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, said. “Once they opened that parents’ rights frame, they began to use it everywhere.” Octavio Jones for The New York TimesIt may prove easier for Republicans like Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis to talk about transgender issues than about abortion, an issue that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement. The Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion created a backlash among Democrats and independents that has left many Republicans unsure of how — or whether — to address the issue.Polling suggests that the public is less likely to support transgender rights than same-sex marriage and abortion rights. In a poll conducted in 2022, the Public Policy Research Institute, a nonpartisan research group, found that 68 percent of respondents favored allowing same-sex couples to marry, including 49 percent of Republicans.By contrast, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Americans supported requiring that transgender athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth; 85 percent of Republicans held that view.“For many religious and political conservatives, the same-sex marriage issue has been largely decided — and for the American public, absolutely,” said Kelsy Burke, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. “That’s not true when it comes to these transgender issues. Americans are much more divided, and this is an issue that can gain a lot more traction.”The singer Anita Bryant championed the “Save Our Children” campaign in 1977 to repeal a local ordinance in Dade-Miami County that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, a historic setback for the modern gay rights movements.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe focus on perceived threats to impressionable children has a long history in American sexual politics. It has its roots in the “Save Our Children” campaign championed in 1977 by Anita Bryant, the singer known for her orange juice commercials, to repeal a local ordinance in Dade-Miami County that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, a historic setback for the modern gay rights movements.The initial efforts by the conservative movement to deploy transgender issues did not go well. In 2016, North Carolina legislators voted to bar transgender people from using the bathroom of their preference. It created a backlash so harsh — from corporations, sports teams and even Bruce Springsteen — that lawmakers eventually rescinded the bill.As a result, conservatives went looking for a new approach to the issue. Mr. Schilling’s organization, for instance, conducted polling to determine whether curbing transgender rights had resonance with voters — and, if they did, the best way for candidates to talk about it. In 2019, the group’s research found that voters were significantly more likely to support a Republican candidate who favored a ban on transgender girls participating in school sports — particularly when framed as a question of whether “to allow men and boys to compete against women and girls” — than a candidate pushing for a ban on transgender people using a bathroom of their choosing.With that evidence in hand, and transgender athletes gaining attention, particularly in right-wing media, conservatives decided to focus on two main fronts: legislation that addressed participation in sports and laws curtailing the access of minors to medical transition treatments.In March 2020, Idaho became the first state to bar transgender girls from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, with a bill supporters in the Republican-controlled legislature called the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”A burst of state legislation began the next year after Democrats took control of Congress and the White House, ending four years in which social conservatives successfully pushed the Trump administration to enact restrictions through executive orders.In the spring of 2021, the Republican-controlled legislature in Arkansas overrode a veto by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, to enact legislation that made it illegal for minors to receive transition medication or surgery.It was the first such ban in the country — and it was quickly embraced by national groups and circulated to lawmakers in other statehouses as a road map for their own legislation. The effort capitalized on an existing disagreement in the medical profession over when to offer medical transition care to minors. Despite that debate, leading medical groups in the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, say the care should be available to minors and oppose legislative bans.Later that spring, Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, traveled to a private Christian school in Jacksonville to sign a bill barring transgender girls from playing K-12 sports. With his approval, Florida became the largest state to date to enact such restrictions, and Mr. DeSantis signaled how important this issue was to his political aspirations.“In Florida, girls are going to play girls’ sports and boys are going to play boys’ sports,” he said, winning applause from conservatives he would need to defeat Mr. Trump.To some extent, this surge of legislation was spontaneous. Ms. Drennen, of Media Matters, said state lawmakers appeared to be acting out of a “general animus” toward transgender people, as well as a fear of political reprisals. “They are worried about this coming up in a primary,” she said.But for several years, conservative Christian legal groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Liberty Counsel have been shifting their resources.For now, the legislation has advanced almost exclusively in Republican-controlled states: Those same policies have drawn strong opposition from Democrats.Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe 2024 presidential election appears poised to provide a national test of Americans’ support for transgender rights.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 2018, Kristen Waggoner, then the general counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom, was the lead counsel in the Supreme Court defending a Colorado baker who, citing religious beliefs, refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The court ruled narrowly in favor of the baker.The next year, the Alliance took on a case involving a group of high school girls in Connecticut who challenged the state and five school boards for permitting transgender students to participate in women’s sports. Their lawsuit was rejected by a federal appeals court.Mathew D. Staver, the founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, which was a major force behind a 2008 voter initiative in California that banned same-sex marriage, said the group is now fighting gender policies in the courts. It has challenged laws, often enacted in states controlled by Democrats, that restrict counseling services designed to change a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation, often referred to as conversion therapy.“Those counseling bans violate first-amendment speech, because they only allow one point of view on the subject of sexuality,” he said.In March 2021, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota declined to sign a bill that would have banned transgender girls from sports teams. She later reversed course. Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThough some on the left are still uncertain about how to best navigate the fraught politics of transgender issues, there’s an emerging consensus on the right. The case of what happened to Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a rising star in the Republican Party, is instructive.In March 2021, Ms. Noem declined to sign a bill passed by her state’s Republican-controlled legislature that would have banned transgender girls from sports teams from kindergarten through college. Conservative groups accused her of bowing to “socially left-wing factions.” Tucker Carlson of Fox News, in a tense interview with Ms. Noem, implied she was bowing to “big business” in refusing to sign the bill.“There’s a real political effort now that will extract a punishment from you if you betray the social conservatives,” said Frank Cannon, a founder of the American Principles Project. He said the episode with Ms. Noem “sent a signal to every other governor in the country.”Eleven months later, the governor appeared to have received the message, signing a similar version of the bill in the interest, she said that day, of “fairness.” More

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      Tim Scott Sets a Positive Tone for 2024. Will His Party Come Along?

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      The all-but-declared 2024 candidate hosted supporters and donors in his home state of South Carolina with a kill-them-with-kindness message. But will it resonate with the Republican base?Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, two days after announcing an exploratory committee for president, brought his message to friendly territory.After greeting supporters on Friday at Alex’s Restaurant, a Charleston-area eatery, the senator made the case for his candidacy to a group of donors at a private retreat that took place over two days at a high-end hotel near the heart of Charleston’s downtown.Among the most pressing questions from his backers at the retreat — both longtime supporters and relative newcomers — was how his message, at this stage a mostly positive and Bible-backed homage to America’s future, might play in what many expect to be a vitriolic Republican presidential primary.Mr. Scott defended his strategy, according to two people who attended the retreat, saying he would take a kill-them-with-kindness approach, and he maintained that positivity is core to his personality and to his potential campaign. But, he added, he would be able to defend himself if he should face negative attacks.The assembled group, a mix of South Carolina-based donors and national funders committed to Mr. Scott, left the two-day event on Saturday afternoon seemingly bought in to his potential presidential candidacy. His challenge now will be getting a broader Republican audience to follow suit.“I haven’t seen him do anything offensive that would annoy anybody,” said Jim Morris, a Charleston-based retiree who attended Mr. Scott’s restaurant visit on Friday. Mr. Morris said he had not decided whom he would support in the Republican primary but criticized the party’s widespread infighting.“The party needs to get back together a little bit,” he said. “We don’t have to be the same, but we don’t have to hate each other.”Should he formally begin a presidential campaign, as is widely expected, Mr. Scott will face an uphill battle to the Republican nomination. Public polling shows that former President Donald J. Trump maintains a hold on a majority of the party’s base, with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida capturing much of the rest. And though Mr. Scott has the advantage of outsize name recognition in this must-win state, he will still have to fight for support from donors and voters with another South Carolina powerhouse, former Gov. Nikki Haley, who has already declared her candidacy.But the senator would enter the presidential primary with a financial advantage: He has roughly $21.8 million in his Senate campaign account. A handful of big-name Republican donors, including the tech magnate Larry Ellison, have given to the super PAC supporting him.Mr. Scott, the son of a single mother and the grandson of a man forced to drop out of elementary school to pick cotton, has made his compelling personal story a feature of his public speeches and interviews. He often mentions his background to highlight a rise he believes would only be possible in America.“It’s a blessing to come from a state like South Carolina, where a kid who grows up in a single-parent household mired in poverty can one day even think about being president of the United States,” he told reporters on Friday. “Only made in America is my story.”Mr. Scott’s history and positive message, however, can sometimes seem at odds with the mood of many in his party. Mr. Trump, long known for crafting insulting descriptors for his competitors, goes after Democrats and Republicans alike. The super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign has spent nearly $4 million on television ads — most critical of Governor DeSantis — in the last three weeks, according to the advertising tracker AdImpact. Mr. DeSantis’s PAC has returned fire, running an ad suggesting that the former president joined Democrats in supporting gun control.“The ones who are negative are the ones who are loudest,” said Kathy Crawford, 67, an independent voter and lifelong Charleston resident who said she would support Mr. Scott in the Republican primary if he ran. Voters, she said, “want to bring the country back together, and they want a positive message.”And Mr. Scott’s message could resonate with a key audience in the Republican primary: conservative evangelical Christians. Mr. Scott has spent significant time focusing on evangelical voters in his tour of early primary states, often meeting with small groups of religious leaders in between quasi campaign stops. His public remarks are often peppered with quotes from the Bible. And in the video announcing his presidential exploratory committee, he pledges to “defend the Judeo-Christian foundation our nation is built on and protect our religious liberty.”Mr. Scott’s Friday restaurant appearance had all the makings of a campaign stop, as he greeted employees, worked the room around a swarm of reporters and hugged patrons. Outside, supporters held signs that read “Please Run 4 President” and “Cotton to Congress to White House,” alluding to his biography.“It is always good to come home,” Mr. Scott said to applause.But Mr. Scott has already gotten a taste of the added pressure that comes with being a possible presidential contender. At stops in Iowa and New Hampshire this week, the senator did not directly answer reporters’ questions about which abortion restrictions he might support as president, at one point saying he would support a ban on the procedure after 20 weeks and another time offering a vague answer, only claiming that he was anti-abortion.In an interview with NBC News on Friday, he promised to sign “the most conservative, pro-life legislation” that Congress passes if elected president, without throwing his support behind a specific time frame.Mr. Scott will travel to Iowa and New Hampshire again next week and told reporters he also planned to make stops in Nevada in coming weeks. When asked if he was considering a presidential campaign to juice a vice-presidential nod — a belief his advisers widely reject — he disputed the claim with an air of optimism.“If you’re going to go for it, go for it all,” he said. “Period.” More

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      Why DeSantis Needs to Run This Year

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      The resurgence of Donald Trump in the 2024 primary polls, the unsurprising evidence that his supporters will stand by him through a prosecution, and the tentativeness of Ron DeSantis’s pre-campaign have combined to create a buzz that maybe DeSantis shouldn’t run at all. It’s been whispered by nervous donors, shouted by Trump’s supporters and lately raised by pundits of the left and right.Thus the liberal Bill Scher, writing in The Washington Monthly, argues that Trump looks too strong, that there isn’t a clear-enough constituency for DeSantis’s promise of Trumpism without the florid drama, and that if DeSantis runs and fails, he’s more likely to end up “viciously humiliated,” like Trump’s 2016 rivals, than to set himself up as the next in line for 2028.Then from the right, writing for The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy channels Niccolò Machiavelli to argue that while DeSantis probably will run, he would be wiser to choose a more dogged, long-term path instead — emphasizing “virtu” rather than chasing Fortune, to use Machiavelli’s language. In 2024 Trump might poison the prospects of any G.O.P. candidate who beats him, while Joe Biden could be a relatively potent incumbent. But if the Florida governor continues to build a record of conservative accomplishment in his home state, “2028 would offer a well-prepared DeSantis a clear shot.”I think they’re both wrong, and that if DeSantis has presidential ambitions he simply has to run right now, notwithstanding all of the obstacles that they identify. My reasoning depends both on the “Fortune” that McCarthy invokes and on an argument that Scher’s piece nods to while rejecting: the idea that presidential candidates are more likely to miss their moment — as Chris Christie did when he passed on running in 2012, as Mario Cuomo did for his entire career — than they are to run too early and suffer a career-ending rebuke.It’s true that fortune doesn’t always favor the bold. (As McCarthy notes, that phrase originates in Virgil’s “Aeneid,” where it’s uttered by an Italian warlord just before he gets killed.) But the key to the don’t-miss-your-moment argument is that when it comes to something as difficult as gaining the presidency, mostly fortune doesn’t favor anybody. Every would-be president, no matter their virtues as a politician, is inevitably a hostage to events, depending on unusual synchronicities to open a path to the White House.A great many successful political careers never have that path open at all. A minority have it open in the narrowest way, where you can imagine threading needles and rolling lucky sixes all the way to the White House. Only a tiny number are confronted with a situation where they seem to have a strong chance, not just a long-shot possibility, before they even announce their candidacy.That’s where DeSantis sits right now. The political betting site PredictIt places his odds of being president in 2024, expressed as a share price, at 23 cents, slightly below Trump and well below Biden, but far above everybody else. Those odds, representing a roughly 20 percent chance at the White House, sound about right to me. If you look at national polls since Trump’s indictment, DeSantis’s support has dipped only slightly; if you look at polls of early primary states he’s clearly within striking distance, Trump has a floor of support but also a lot of voters who aren’t eager to rally to him (his indictment may have solidified support, but it didn’t make his numbers soar) and DeSantis has not yet even begun to campaign. He’s in a much better position than any of Trump’s rivals ever were in 2016, and you could argue that he starts out closer to the nomination than any Republican candidate did in 2008 or 2012.Not to run now is to throw this proximity away, in the hopes of starting out even closer four years hence. But DeSantis’s current position is itself a creation of unusual political good fortune. Yes, he’s been skillful, but that skill wouldn’t have gotten him here without events beyond anyone’s control — the Covid-19 pandemic, the woke revolution in liberal institutions, the split between Mike Pence and Trump after Jan. 6, the strength of the Florida economy, and more.It’s obviously possible to imagine a future where fortune continues to favor DeSantis and he goes into 2028 as the prohibitive favorite. But time and chance are cruel, and there are many more paths where events conspire against him, and he wakes up in 2027 staring at PredictIt odds of 5 percent instead.If he were at 5 percent odds right now — if Trump were leading him 75-20 in New Hampshire and Iowa rather than roughly 40-30, or if Biden’s approval ratings stood at 70 percent instead of 43 percent — I would buy the argument for waiting.But DeSantis today is a man already graced by Fortune. And even if the goddess doesn’t always favor boldness, she takes a stern view of those to whom favor is extended who then refuse the gift.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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      Virginia’s Youngkin Pauses on Possible 2024 Campaign

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      Glenn Youngkin was seen as a promising candidate after he was elected governor of Virginia, a Democratic-leaning state. But he appears to be putting national aspirations on hold.Virginia’s governor is putting the presidential hoopla on ice.Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican whose surprising election in a blue-trending state set off instant talk of a presidential run, has tapped the brakes on 2024, telling advisers and donors that his sole focus is on Virginia’s legislative elections in the fall.Mr. Youngkin hopes to flip the state legislature to a Republican majority. That could earn him a closer look from rank-and-file Republicans across the country, who so far have been indifferent to the presidential chatter surrounding him in the news media, and among heavyweight donors he would need to keep pace alongside more prominent candidates. He has yet to crack 1 percent in polls about the potential Republican field.Backing away for now is also a bow to political reality. Mr. Youngkin has a shortage of clean conservative victories in the divided Virginia legislature, compared with, say, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who stole much of Mr. Youngkin’s thunder on “parents’ rights” issues in education.An effort by Mr. Youngkin last year to raise his profile by campaigning for Republicans around the country fizzled when most proved too extreme for voters and lost their races.Tellingly, Mr. Youngkin’s two top political advisers, who guided his gubernatorial victory and were mapping out a 2024 strategy, both took jobs this month with a super PAC that supports the presidential candidacy of Mr. DeSantis.Asked about his presidential decision timeline this week, Mr. Youngkin said, “Listen, I didn’t write a book, and I’m not in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina.” Instead, he said, he is putting his full focus on November’s statewide Virginia election, when all 140 seats in both chambers of the General Assembly are on the ballot. A decision to enter the 2024 campaign in November would be historically late, well past the first Republican debate in August.“I am wholly focused on the Commonwealth of Virginia, and I’m looking forward to these elections,’’ Mr. Youngkin said during an appearance to promote Virginia’s agricultural exports. Standing outdoors at a terminal for barges near Richmond — dressed in a blue suit and tie rather than the red fleece vest he wore while seeking office, a symbol of his suburban dad-ness — the governor, 56, said that gaining majorities in the legislature “is what this year is all about.”His political fund-raising committees announced last week that they had collected $2.75 million in the first three months of the year, surpassing the best quarterly results of any prior Virginia governor and providing a war chest that could help Republicans in local races.Success, however, is far from assured. Virginia Democrats plan to campaign heavily on Mr. Youngkin’s unsuccessful push for a 15-week abortion ban, an issue that has mobilized voters in state after state since the reversal of Roe v. Wade.Mr. Youngkin in January at a rally for Kevin Adams, a Senate candidate, in Virginia Beach.Kristen Zeis for The New York Times“There is no amount of money that is going to overcome the regressive policies that Glenn Younkin and the MAGA Republicans have been trying to impose on Virginia,” said Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Virginia.She predicted that suburban voters who favored Mr. Youngkin in 2021 would broadly reject Republicans, after the Supreme Court ended the national right to abortion last year and as conservatives press for national restrictions, most recently through a federal judge in Texas who revoked the 23-year-old approval of a common abortion pill.“We’re going to remind voters of this every single day: Don’t treat women like second-class citizens,” Ms. Swecker said.Republicans are counting on Mr. Younkgin’s strong job approval rating, 57 percent in a poll last month from Roanoke College, and his fund-raising prowess as a wealthy former financial executive who can connect with the G.O.P. donor class well beyond his state.Francis Rooney, a former Republican congressman from Florida whose family owns construction, real estate and insurance businesses, donated $100,000 to Mr. Youngkin in November.“We need to be doing things as Republicans to get back to a broader majority,’’ said Mr. Rooney, praising the governor’s appeal to independents and some Democratic voters. But when asked what Mr. Youngkin had told donors about his presidential ambitions, he said, “I don’t think anybody knows other than him.”Recently, Mr. Youngkin’s top political strategist, Jeff Roe, who continued to advise him after guiding the 2021 race, signed on as a consultant to a super PAC preparing the ground for a DeSantis presidential run.Another top Youngkin strategist, Kristin Davison, joined the same DeSantis group, Never Back Down. (Mr. Roe and Ms. Davison also continue to consult for Mr. Youngkin.)The day after Mr. Roe’s new job was reported, Mr. Youngkin named a new adviser to run his political action committee, Spirit of Virginia. That strategist, Dave Rexrode, has a long history in local Virginia elections.“If you look at where House and Senate districts are in play, the governor has a high job approval in all these districts,” Mr. Rexrode said. “They like what he’s doing in Richmond, and they want to send allies to work with the governor.”In his first year in office, Mr. Youngkin signed a bill giving parents a veto over schoolbooks with “sexually explicit content,’’ a measure rooted in one mother’s objection to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in the curriculum. Elizabeth Frantz/ReutersVirginia’s legislative races will be contested based on new maps that were drawn without regard for incumbents, deeply scrambled familiar political geographies and led to a wave of retirements. Both parties consider the House of Delegates, where Republicans hold a slight majority, and the State Senate, which Democrats narrowly control, to be in play.In his first year in office with the divided legislature, Mr. Youngkin won $4 billion in tax cuts while giving teachers a 10 percent raise in a budget deal with Democrats. He also signed a bill giving parents a veto over schoolbooks with “sexually explicit content,” a measure rooted in one mother’s objection to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in the curriculum.This year, Democrats stopped Mr. Youngkin’s proposed 15-week abortion ban. But on his own, he has rolled back the policies of earlier governors of both parties that automatically restored voting rights to people leaving prison. He has used executive orders to try to rescind environmental mandates from previous administrations, including on power-plant emissions and gas-powered vehicles.On Monday, Mr. Youngkin was asked about the ruling by the Texas judge last week invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. If upheld, it would reduce access to abortions for Virginia women, even though abortion is legal in the state.Mr. Youngkin said he didn’t “have much of an opinion” on the case, which is making its way through appeals courts. “And we’ll just have to wait to see how that gets finalized,” he said.If Mr. Youngkin does wait until after November’s elections to enter the presidential primary, he not only will miss the first Republican debate in August, but he will also start considerably behind his potential rivals in fund-raising and voter attention. He would be bucking recent history, when very few presidential hopefuls waited past summer and none went on to win their party nomination.But the 2024 cycle could be different, with former President Donald J. Trump directing fire and fury at early challengers who pick up steam, notably Mr. DeSantis, who has fallen back in polls.Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said missing the first debate could be a blessing. “The people who are in it are going to get banged up” by Mr. Trump, he said.If Virginia Republicans win control of both chambers of the legislature, Mr. Youngkin would emerge as “the fresh face, the new conqueror” of a state that, through 2020, was under full Democratic control, Mr. Sabato said.Given the electoral losses Republicans have repeatedly suffered in the Trump era, Mr. Youngkin “can step in and promise to put the party together,” he added. At least, he said, “that’s their theory.” More

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      Biden Says He Will Announce 2024 Campaign ‘Soon’

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      The president, who is widely expected to run again but faces little pressure to imminently announce a formal bid, tiptoed beyond his previous public comments on the subject.President Biden inched closer on Friday to formally announcing his re-election campaign, telling reporters that he would do so “relatively soon.”“No, no, no, no,” he said during a trip to Ireland, when asked whether his “calculus” had changed in recent days on when to make his announcement. “I’ve already made that calculus. We’ll announce it relatively soon. But the trip here just reinforced my sense of optimism about what can be done.”Asked if that meant he had made a decision, he responded, with a hint of impatience, “I told you, my plan is to run again.”He had: Four days earlier, speaking to Al Roker of NBC News at an Easter event at the White House, Mr. Biden said, “I plan on running,” adding, “But we’re not prepared to announce it yet.”Mr. Biden made his latest remarks on Friday at an airport in Ireland, where he has spent part of his week. On Wednesday, he gave a speech in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Then he traveled to the Republic of Ireland, where he visited his ancestors’ hometown.Mr. Biden’s 2024 campaign has been a subject of will-he-or-won’t-he debate since the moment he was elected as the oldest president in United States history. He is now 80, and would be 86 by the end of a second term, which has made even some of his fellow Democrats uncomfortable.But Mr. Biden suggested from the start that he would probably run again.He has not faced much pressure to imminently announce a formal campaign, though, because there is no sign of a competitive Democratic primary. The self-help author Marianne Williamson is running against Mr. Biden, and the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has indicated that he will also run, but neither has a large base of support.And across the aisle, the early weeks of the Republican primary have been consumed by news of former President Donald J. Trump’s mounting legal problems, including his arraignment in New York last week on 34 felony charges related to a hush-money payment to a porn star who said they had sex. That has left little incentive for Mr. Biden to draw attention to himself and away from Republicans’ troubles. More