Presidential Election of 2024

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      Why Trump Can Afford to Disrespect His Anti-Abortion Voters

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      The Babylon Bee, which is like The Onion for conservative Christians, last month ran a despairing story about the presidential options anti-abortion voters have before them. “Pro-Lifers Excited to Choose Between Moderate Amount of Baby Murder and High Amount of Baby Murder,” said the headline. It was a dark joke, but it spoke to something real: a disquiet among some anti-abortion activists over Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the abortion bans enabled by his Supreme Court appointees. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told my Times colleague Astead W. Herndon that declining evangelical enthusiasm for Trump could be a “grave danger” to his campaign.As someone who wants Trump to lose, I hope he’s right, but I’m skeptical. “One of the things that Trump has done is reveal what you might call the G.O.P.’s dirty little secret, and that is that it’s never really been only about abortion,” said Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute. Conservative activists, he argued, have long seen themselves as part of a moral crusade against the killing of babies, but Republican voters, even white evangelical ones, tend to have more complicated views. In P.R.R.I. surveys, he said, white evangelicals are more likely to identify the economy, crime and immigration as critical issues than abortion. “The bond between Trump and rank-and-file Republicans and between Trump and white evangelical Protestants has really not been abortion,” said Jones.Clearly, a second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for reproductive rights. He obviously doesn’t care about abortion and is happy to take whatever position suits him at any given moment. But many of the people he will sweep into office with him are devoted to abortion bans. Part of the purpose of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was to make sure there was a deep bench of MAGA apparatchiks ready to staff a second Trump administration, freeing him from the legal and bureaucratic roadblocks that stymied his first administration. The same people Heritage selected to defend Trump at all costs have thought deeply about how to use the levers of the federal government to restrict abortion.Still, in his spasmodic abortion positioning, Trump has annihilated the expectation that Republicans show deference to the social conservatives who’ve been crusading against abortion for a generation. On his vanity social media site, Truth Social, he wrote that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He’s come out against six-week abortion bans. He removed a plank from the Republican Party platform calling for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. He’s promised that his administration would provide free in vitro fertilization, a procedure that the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in June.In doing all this without losing significant support among Christian conservatives, he’s demonstrated how little leverage the anti-abortion movement has over him.Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on this issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Steps Up Threats to Imprison Those He Sees as Foes

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      The former president is vowing to prosecute those he sees as working to deny him a victory, while laying the groundwork to claim large-scale voter fraud if he loses.Donald J. Trump has long used strongman-style threats to prosecute people he vilifies as a campaign tactic, dating back to encouraging his 2016 rallygoers to chant “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. And during his term as president, he repeatedly pressed the Justice Department to open investigations into his political adversaries.But as November nears, the former president has escalated his vows to use the raw power of the state to impose and maintain control and to intimidate and punish anyone he perceives as working against him.After Democrats replaced President Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as their 2024 nominee — and Mr. Trump’s lead in the polls eroded — Mr. Trump’s targets expanded.He has been laying the groundwork to claim that there was large-scale voter fraud if he loses, a familiar tactic from his 2016 and 2020 playbooks, but this time coupled with threats of prosecution. Those who may face criminal scrutiny for purported efforts at election fraud, Mr. Trump has declared, will include election workers, a tech giant, political operatives, lawyers and donors working for his opponent.Over the past month, he has shared a post calling for former President Barack Obama to be subject to “military tribunals” and reposted fake images of well-known Democrats clad in prison garb. He has threatened the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with a life sentence for helping state and local governments fund elections in 2020. He stoked fears of voter intimidation by urging police officers to “watch for the voter fraud” at polling places because some voters may be “afraid of that badge,” and warned that people deemed to have “cheated” in this election “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Mr. Trump wrote on his website Truth Social on Saturday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Se enfría el apoyo a Kamala Harris, según una nueva encuesta

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      Es la primera encuesta nacional no partidista en un mes en que Donald Trump aventaja a la vicepresidenta; casi el 30 por ciento de los votantes dijo que necesitaban saber más sobre ella.Kamala Harris iba ligeramente por detrás en la última encuesta nacional de Times/SienaJamie Kelter Davis para The New York Times¿Comienza a menguar el auge de Kamala Harris?Esa es la pregunta que plantea la encuesta de ayer del New York Times y el Siena College, según la cual Donald Trump la aventaja por poco entre los votantes probables de todo el país, 48 por ciento a 47 por ciento.Para mí, el resultado es un poco sorprendente. Es la primera ventaja de Trump en una encuesta nacional no partidista en aproximadamente un mes. Por esa razón, vale la pena ser al menos un poco cauteloso acerca de estos resultados, ya que no hay mucha confirmación de otras encuestas.Dicho esto, no sería difícil de explicar si el apoyo de la vicepresidenta Harris realmente se ha desvanecido un poco en las últimas semanas. Después de todo, se estaba beneficiando de un entorno noticioso ideal: un mes ininterrumpido de cobertura elogiosa desde la salida del presidente Joe Biden de la carrera en julio hasta la convención demócrata en agosto. Es posible que se encontrara en un momento de euforia política; de ser así, tendría sentido que se desinflara en las dos semanas sin incidentes transcurridas desde la convención.También hay una razón plausible por la que la encuesta del Times/Siena sería la primera en captar un giro hacia Trump: simplemente no ha habido muchas encuestas de alta calidad desde la convención, cuando Harris estaba en la cresta de la ola. Esta semana ha habido un puñado de encuestas online, pero no ha habido ninguna encuesta tradicional de alta calidad con entrevistas realizadas después del 28 de agosto.¿Por qué no ha habido más encuestas? Una explicación es el fin de semana del Día del Trabajo, que siempre hace una pausa en las encuestas. También es plausible que muchos encuestadores prefieran esperar hasta después del debate del martes antes de hacer otro sondeo. Cualquiera que sea la explicación, la encuesta del Times/Siena sería una de las primeras oportunidades para recoger una reversión hacia Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      De Niro and Pelosi Join ‘Paisans for Kamala’ Call to Raise Money for Harris

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      Every presidential election brings with it a technological innovation or two: the Bill Clinton and Bob Dole campaigns’ first-ever campaign websites, Barack Obama’s email list, Donald Trump’s candidacy-by-tweet.For the weeks-old Kamala Harris campaign, it has been a Zoom window.On Sunday night, former Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York was holding forth from one such window, swirling a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in a restaurant in Baltimore’s Little Italy, trying to draw an Italian family dinner memory out of Robert De Niro at “Paisans for Kamala,” a livestreamed online fund-raiser billed as an Italian Sunday Dinner that was hosted by the Italian American Democrats.“Tell us a story!” Mr. de Blasio implored. “Tell us a memory! Tell us a dish!”“I guess the closest thing I have is Marty Scorsese’s mother,” Mr. De Niro replied from a neighboring Zoom box. “She makes great pizza. She did. She passed away years ago.” He warned Democrats against complacency — “We know what’s coming, we see it coming”— and then excused himself to attend a Harris fund-raiser with Nancy Pelosi, who popped up in her own Zoom window later in the evening.The streamed fund-raiser was the latest of several dozen similar efforts that have raised millions of dollars on behalf of Ms. Harris since the group Win With Black Women hosted the first on July 21. Subsequent events have included “White Dudes for Harris” (featuring the actor Jeff Bridges, in character as the Dude from “The Big Lebowski”), “Cooking for Kamala” (hosted by Padma Lakshmi and featuring celebrity chefs like José Andrés and Giada de Laurentiis), “Deadheads for Kamala” (Ben and Jerry, inevitably), and many more.The events are a very post-pandemic spin on the small-donor fund-raising that powered the campaigns of Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders in recent cycles, a sort of telethon adapted to the technologies Americans learned to know and tolerate during years of remote work and school. (On Sunday night’s stream, both Leon Panetta, the former secretary of defense and director of the C.I.A., and Steve Buscemi, the actor, struggled briefly with the mute button.)The relative ease of participating, as well as Democrats’ sense of urgency around the election, have meant that even small groups have assembled significant wattage for their calls. Besides Mr. De Niro and Mr. Buscemi, Sunday night’s stream featured Marisa Tomei, John Turturro, Mark Ruffalo and Lorraine Bracco.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Teen Voices Matter in the 2024 Election

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      For most teenagers, a presidential election year offers a dilemma. Elections have consequences, as the saying goes, and this is especially true for young people, who are at the center of any number of issues dividing the U.S. electorate. Yet most teens can’t vote.All spring and summer, the Headway team has been talking with high school students about this year’s election. Headway is an initiative at The New York Times that covers the world’s challenges through the lens of progress. Since the march of progress will have its longest effects on the youngest of us, that lens has made Headway especially interested in the experiences of the world’s youth.We have been especially curious about youth voter turnout this year, given how youth engagement in presidential elections has changed over the past few cycles. The 2020 election was particularly striking. The spread of the coronavirus meant that going to the voting booth was particularly fraught. The two contenders for the presidency were the oldest in American history. The 2016 election had notably low youth participation. On the eve of the 2020 election, The Times posed the question, “Why don’t young people vote, and what can be done about it?”But then young people defied expectations. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at Tufts University, Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 voted at higher rates in 2020 than they had in any elections except 1992 and 1972 (which was right after the voting age was lowered to 18). Their votes last election far outstripped the margin of victory in swing states, making them critical to the outcome.In collaboration with Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization that covers education in several American communities, the Headway team has been posing questions about the election to high school students, and asking them what questions they have for their peers about the race. We’ve heard from nearly 1,000 students from red, blue and purple states, all representing diverse backgrounds and schools. Their responses have been illuminating. While some high schoolers don’t consider the election particularly relevant to their interests, many do. Even when they can’t vote, many teenagers in every part of the country are highly interested in the election. They are eager to inform themselves about it, craving more forums to discuss it with peers and others, and yearning to see their voices represented in the outcome.So for the next two months, if you’re a teenager in the United States, we want to ask you all about your experience of the election. Consider this your formal invitation to participate in what we’re calling the Headway Election Challenge.

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      G.O.P. Report to Denounce Biden Administration Over Afghanistan Withdrawal

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      In an election-season document, Republicans are set to offer few new revelations but instead heap blame on the “Biden-Harris administration” while absolving former President Donald J. Trump.House Republicans are preparing to release an investigative report blaming the Biden administration for what they called the failures of the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying out a scathing indictment that appeared timed to tarnish Vice President Kamala Harris in the final weeks before the presidential election.The roughly 350-page document set to be released on Monday is the product of a yearslong inquiry by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It accuses President Biden and his national security team of being so determined to pull out of Afghanistan that they flouted security warnings, refused to plan for an evacuation and lied to the American public throughout the withdrawal about the risks on the ground and missteps that led to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members.“The Biden-Harris administration prioritized the optics of the withdrawal over the security of U.S. personnel on the ground,” the report states. The document, a draft of which was reviewed by The New York Times, also contends that the administration’s mismanagement resulted in “exposing U.S. Defense Department and State Department personnel to lethal threats and emotional harm.”Details of the document were reported earlier on Sunday by CBS.The findings are largely a recitation of familiar lines of criticism against Mr. Biden, offering few new insights about what might have been done differently to avoid the Taliban’s swift march into Kabul and the disastrous U.S. evacuation operation in August 2021. But they come at a critical time in the presidential race, when Mr. Trump has been working to persuade voters that Ms. Harris is unfit to be the commander in chief.The authors single out Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, for particular condemnation, charging that he failed to coordinate a viable exit strategy and misrepresented the situation on the ground to the public.They absolve former President Donald J. Trump almost entirely of responsibility for the debacle, even though an inspector general found in 2022 that the deal his administration struck with the Taliban in 2020, known as the Doha Agreement, to orchestrate a rapid U.S. withdrawal, was a major factor in the crisis. The report instead faults Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, for the shortcomings of that pact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Judge’s Decision to Delay Trump’s Sentencing

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      More from our inbox:Risky Covid Behavior‘Glorious’ Outdoor Dining in New York CityA Librarian’s FightDonald J. Trump, the first former American president to become a felon, is seeking to overturn his conviction and win back the White House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Judge Pushes Sentencing of Trump to After Election” (front page, Sept. 7):I must disagree with the hand-wringing of my liberal colleagues who lament the fact that Donald Trump won’t be sentenced for his conviction in the hush-money case until after the election.Your article notes that the public will not know before they go to the polls “whether the Republican presidential nominee will eventually spend time behind bars.”With all due respect, so what? The former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Those who recoil at the idea of their president being a convicted felon won’t vote for him; those who support him will not change their minds based on the severity of the sentence.Other than being used as a talking point on the left (“he got four years in prison!!”) or on the right (“he got probation — I told you it was no big deal”), what could a sentence now possibly achieve?While no one, including Donald Trump, is above the law, this case is unique in our history. The sentence must be viewed as judicially sound, and for that it cannot become a partisan football, especially this close to an election.Eileen WestPleasantville, N.Y.To the Editor:Donald Trump’s lawyers have consistently maintained that his trials should not go forward because it may affect the 2024 election. Their many motions have contributed to delaying three of the four trials he faces. They have now persuaded Justice Juan Merchan in New York to put off sentencing in the fourth, justified by the judge because of the unique circumstances and timing surrounding the event.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Will Taylor Swift Endorse Kamala Harris? That’s the Wrong Question.

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      The conventions are over. The first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris looms. But for many observers, there’s a highly anticipated event in this election season that’s yet to happen and could occur at any moment: an endorsement announcement from Taylor Swift.Just one day after President Biden announced in July that he was abandoning his re-election bid, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder speculated publicly about the possibility of Ms. Swift endorsing Ms. Harris. The “Will Taylor Swift Endorse Kamala Harris?” headlines soon proliferated. During the Democratic National Convention in August, a rumor surfaced about a supposed mystery guest on the final night — who many excited observers speculated might be Ms. Swift. (In the end, there was no surprise guest.) The countdown clock restarted: When might we expect Ms. Swift’s official endorsement?A better question might be: Why should we care? We already know that celebrity endorsements have limited power to sway a race. In 2004, John Kerry had endorsements from celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Larry David, and in 2020, Bernie Sanders had Ariana Grande and Killer Mike’s official support. They lost. Ms. Swift, who endorsed Mr. Biden late in the 2020 race, failed to meaningfully move the needle in 2018, when she backed Phil Bredesen, a Democrat and the former governor of Tennessee, over Marsha Blackburn in a Senate race that Ms. Blackburn won. If celebrities had the amount of persuasive power that some Americans apparently wish they had, a substantial percentage of the population would be steadfast vegan Scientologists by now.The fantasy that a superstar like Ms. Swift might come around on a white horse to sway the electorate is a seductive one — but it’s worth asking what we hope this superstar will save us from. It’s not that Ms. Swift’s fans hope she’ll save them from Donald Trump. It’s more that, as an electorate, we continue to hold out hope that celebrities, through their sheer persuasive charisma, will save us from the hard work of politics itself.It would be exceedingly convenient if a superstar entertainer could make irrelevant the thorny questions of how to persuade voters in key states to vote for your chosen candidate. Ms. Swift’s popularity can’t be discounted, and it cuts through all sorts of American divides. An NBC News poll in 2023 reported that Ms. Swift was regarded favorably or neutrally by nearly 80 percent of registered voters. If she wears a specific pair of shoes out of her house, those shoes might sell out the moment they’re identified. But our political decisions are, and should be, rooted in more practical concerns. Anger among Arab American voters in Michigan over U.S. support for Israel and the war in Gaza, for example, is significant enough that it could cost Democrats the state. The idea that a Swiftie-inclined voter might ignore those concerns simply because of an endorsement from a favorite pop star isn’t just insulting, it’s dystopian.You might be thinking: But what about the ’60s? What about Bob Dylan and “Blowin’ in the Wind”? Didn’t celebrities change the course of history? Protest music did flourish; the cause, though, was another story. In a 2003 interview in the magazine In These Times, Kurt Vonnegut reflected on his experience speaking out against the Vietnam War: “Every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing.” Yet this “laser beam of protest,” Vonnegut said, proved to have “the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More