Presidential Election of 2024

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Campaign Says It Was Hacked by Iranians, but Details Are Murky

      by

      For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest. But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.By Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.Mr. Trump’s campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Saturday that it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents indeed emerged from the Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from inside the campaign.The New York Times received what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.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

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Falsely Claims Harris’s Rally Crowds Are A.I.-Generated

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his new obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds.The crowds at Ms. Harris’s events, including one in Detroit outside an airplane hangar, were witnessed by thousands of people and news outlets, including The New York Times, and the number of attendees claimed by her campaign is in line with what was visible on the ground. Mr. Trump falsely wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that “there was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it.”A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump has struggled to find his political footing in the weeks since President Biden decided to step aside and Ms. Harris replaced him atop the Democratic ticket: Mr. Trump questioned Ms. Harris’s racial identity at a conference for Black journalists, he later attacked Brian Kemp, the popular Republican governor in the key swing state of Georgia, and he has seen new polling that puts him behind Ms. Harris in several key states.The Harris campaign has begun to mock Mr. Trump for his frustration over her crowds, one of which, it said, topped 15,000 people at an event in the Phoenix area on Friday.“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate, said to the crowd, receiving a loud cheer.In his posts on Sunday, Mr. Trump drew parallels between his false claims of fake crowds and his false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Harris Appeals to Tech Leaders in a Return to San Francisco

      by

      A Sunday fund-raiser offered Vice President Kamala Harris a chance to turn the page on a sometimes frosty relationship between President Biden and Silicon Valley.Joe Biden who?Vice President Kamala Harris, whose political career was born in San Francisco two decades ago, on Sunday returned to the city for the first time since clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, hoping to reset relations with a tech community that has soured some on President Biden.It was a turning of the page and a homecoming all at once. Ms. Harris’s late-morning event raised $13 million from the region’s white-collar establishment that counts her as their own.But her trip was as much a rally as a fund-raiser, with about 700 people piling into the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill. On one of this city’s quintessentially brisk, foggy August mornings, these wealthy givers waited in a queue that snaked up the hill, an indignity that would be unheard-of at a typical fund-raiser at a cozy private home in Woodside or Menlo Park. (Some donors with a connection or two found a way, as they do, to skip the line.)As is often the case in the highly choreographed world of presidential fund-raising, where egos must be treated tenderly, there was a series of receptions before the fund-raiser (with blue, pink and green wristbands) that clearly delineated the pecking order of big donors and their influence. Ms. Harris dropped in on each one, in descending order of price and intimacy, as donors enjoyed peach mimosas and shrimp cocktails before her remarks in the grand ballroom.“This is a room full of dear, dear, dear friends,” she said, standing before a giant “Harris Walz” sign and four flags: two American and two California.Mr. Biden has struggled for financial support from the Bay Area dating to his 2020 presidential campaign, when his list of fund-raisers was heavy on Obama-era ambassadors but light on the billionaire leaders of the tech industry.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

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Scofflaws and Other Hazards on the Roads

      by

      More from our inbox:Neo-Nazis in Nashville and the Speech QuestionVance vs. the Rule of LawA Ban on Masks? Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Traffic Stops Fell in Pandemic, and Didn’t Return” (The Upshot, front page, Aug. 1):Thank you for highlighting the public health crisis that is the rise in traffic deaths across the United States. One point not made is the burden on our children. Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death of children, second to firearms. In my city, Philadelphia, five children, on average, are hit by a car every week.As a pediatric resident physician, I see the devastating outcomes of these statistics in the emergency room and intensive care unit. I advise children to wear a seatbelt, look both ways before crossing a road and wear a helmet when cycling. But people are getting killed even when they do everything right.Plastic bollards separating a designated bike lane don’t work when drivers are willing to barrel over them.We need an evidence-based approach to this public health crisis. Safe road design saves lives. We need to invest in Vision Zero programs to fund structural changes, including speed cameras and physical barriers between cyclists and drivers. Cities need to invest in public transit systems.Culture change takes time. Structural change in the meantime is evidence-based and will work to make all Americans, including our children, safer.Allison NeesonPhiladelphiaTo the Editor:The degree to which American drivers have been ignoring traffic laws over the past several years is mind-blowing. Speeding on highways and parkways is out of control and makes driving an exercise in avoiding catastrophe. It seems as if every other car is drag racing or trying to set a new speed record.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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Says He Dropped Out to Avoid Becoming a ‘Distraction’ for Democrats

      by

      President Biden said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he had abandoned his bid for a second term because he did not want to create “a real distraction” for Democrats, but he expressed no second thoughts about whether he could still do the job, despite concerns about his age and capacity.In his first interview since ending his re-election campaign on July 21, Mr. Biden said that he had “no serious problem” with his health, but added that the highest priority had to be defeating former President Donald J. Trump. “We must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he told Robert Costa on “CBS Sunday Morning.”The president attributed his decision to step aside to pressure from his own party but did not offer new details about the dramatic days leading up to his stunning announcement. “A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races,” he said. “And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic. You’d be interviewing me about, Why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”He said that he initially intended to be a bridge to the next generation in running for president in 2020. “When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” he said. “I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth. But things got moving so quickly, it didn’t happen.”Even though he would have been 86 at the end of a second term had he won again, Mr. Biden suggested that he had originally resolved to seek re-election because he saw Mr. Trump as a singular threat who had to be stopped. He cited the former president’s support from white supremacists and referred to the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that he has said inspired him to run in 2020.“Every other time the Ku Klux Klan has been involved, they wore hoods so they’re not identified,” Mr. Biden said. “Under his presidency, they came out of those woods with no hoods, knowing they had an ally. That’s how I read it. They knew they had an ally in the White House. And he stepped up for them.”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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      How Kamala Harris Is Already Changing the Face of Presidential Power

      by

      I have not been the biggest fan of Kamala Harris, but to my surprise, the candidate who underwhelmed in 2020 is gone. I have watched all of candidate Harris’s public appearances since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for a sense of how she intends to run and possibly govern. The audiences have been vastly different, among them: the annual conclave of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, a National Federation of Teachers convention and the Philadelphia rally where the Harris-Walz ticket made its first official appearance.What I took away: Kamala Harris is a different candidate than we saw four years ago. She is even a different rhetorician than we saw six months ago.Nominee Harris lands her applause lines. The former prosecutor is comfortable going on the attack. Her most consistent message is that Donald Trump wants to send America back to the Dark Ages. Unlike her predecessor, she relishes calling Trump out by name. Even her wacky humor, which has been mocked on social media, suddenly works. She sounds authentic. That’s the holy grail of electoral politics. Every wide-jawed cackle she offers the audience, every twinkle in her eye as she pokes at Trump — it all comes off as someone who is in on the joke. That is hard for any candidate but it is an almost impossible tightrope for a Black female candidate to walk.Authenticity is a mirage. Americans crave the performance of authenticity as a sign that our values are in safe hands — hands just like ours. Of course, people who study this stuff for a living don’t quite agree on what authenticity is. It’s a “you know it when you see it” situation. Political candidates have to negotiate ideas about identity with an audience’s expectations of who should be in power. A tall white guy with a healthy head of hair simply looks presidential.That’s where gender tripped up Hillary Clinton, the first, most viable female candidate for president. Americans were used to looking at her — as first lady, as a congresswoman, as secretary of state and as a national obsession. But for many reasons, a lot of voters (although not a majority of voters) did not think she was authentic enough to be president. She never figured out how to communicate presidential power during her campaign. She couldn’t make the idea of a president look like a woman.Kamala Harris has an even more difficult task: She has to make the presidency look like a Black woman.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

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Made Trump Bigger. Harris Makes Him Smaller.

      by

      Kamala Harris has a very different theory of this election than Joe Biden did.In 2020, and then again in 2024, Biden ceded the battle for attention to Donald Trump. Whether as a matter of strategy or as a result of Biden’s own limitations, Biden adopted a low-key campaigning style, letting Trump dominate news cycle after news cycle. Trump wanted the election to be about Donald Trump, and Joe Biden wanted the election to be about Donald Trump. On that much, they agreed.In 2020, when Trump was the unpopular incumbent, that strategy worked for Biden. In 2024, when Biden was the unpopular incumbent, it was failing him. It was failing in part because Biden no longer had the communication skills to foreground Trump’s sins and malignancies. It was failing in part because some voters had grown nostalgic for the Trump-era economy. It was failing in part because Biden’s age and stumbles kept turning attention back to Biden and his fitness for office, rather than keeping it on Trump and Trump’s fitness for office.Then came the debate, and Biden’s decision to step aside, and Harris’s ascent as the Democratic nominee. Harris has been able to do what Biden could or would not: fight — and win — the battle for attention. She had help, to be sure. Online meme-makers who found viral gold in an anecdote about coconuts. Charli XCX’s “kamala IS brat.”But much of it is strategy and talent. Harris holds the camera like no politician since Barack Obama. And while Harris’s campaign is largely composed of Biden’s staffers, the tenor has changed. Gone is the grave, stentorian tone of Biden’s news releases. Harris’s communications are playful, mocking, confident, even mean. Trump is “old” and “feeble”; JD Vance is “creepy.” Her campaign wants to be talked about and knows how to get people talking. It is trying to do something Democrats have treated as beneath them for years: win news cycles.Biden’s communications strategy was designed to make Trump bigger. Harris’s strategy is to make him smaller. “These guys are just weird,” Tim Walz said on “Morning Joe,” and it stuck. Walz inverted the way Democrats talked about Trump. Don’t make a strongman look stronger. Make him look weaker. Biden’s argument was that Trump might end American democracy. Walz’s argument is that Trump might ruin Thanksgiving.There are many reasons Walz was chosen as Harris’s running mate, not least the chemistry between the candidates. But he was on the shortlist in the first place because he proved himself able to do what Harris wanted done: Get people talking about the thing he wanted them talking about.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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris

      by

      I believe life begins at conception. If I lived in Florida, I would support the state’s heartbeat bill and vote against the referendum seeking to liberalize Florida’s abortion laws. I supported the Dobbs decision and I support well-drafted abortion restrictions at the state and federal levels. I was a pro-life lawyer who worked for pro-life legal organizations. While I want prospective parents to be able to use I.V.F. to build their families, I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded — thrown away as no longer useful.But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.Here’s what I mean.Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?Let’s take an assertion that should be uncontroversial, especially to a party that often envisions itself as a home for people of faith: Lying is wrong. I’m not naïve; I know that politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since Athens. But I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump.Even worse, Trump’s lies are contagious. The legal results speak for themselves. A cascade of successful defamation lawsuits demonstrate the severity and pervasiveness of Republican dishonesty. Fox paid an enormous settlement related to its hosts’ relentless falsehoods during Trump’s effort to steal the election. Rudy Giuliani owes two Georgia election workers $148 million for his gross lies about their conduct while counting votes. Salem Media Group apologized to a Georgia voter who was falsely accused of voter fraud and halted distribution of Dinesh D’Souza’s fantastical “documentary” of election fraud, “2,000 Mules.”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