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      Kamala Harris Rallies Democrats, Pumps Up Biden and Warns of Trump

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      On the final day before South Carolina’s primary election officially kicks off the Democratic presidential nominating contest, Vice President Kamala Harris urged supporters not to ignore a contest that is widely expected to be uncompetitive but where she and President Biden are hoping for a morale-lifting rout.“South Carolina, you are the first primary in the nation, and President Biden and I are counting on you,” Ms. Harris told a crowd on Friday at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. “Are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in democracy? Do we believe in opportunity for all, and are we ready to fight for it?”The rally was Ms. Harris’s ninth trip to South Carolina as vice president and was already her third of the year, an indication of the importance she and Mr. Biden’s campaign have placed on a dominant performance to begin their party’s presidential nominating season.Standing before two banners bearing the slogan “First in the Nation” — with the word “First” underlined — Ms. Harris highlighted the Biden administration’s achievements, including expanding high-speed internet access, increasing federal funding for historically Black colleges and universities, and reducing prescription drug costs.She also warned supporters about what former President Donald J. Trump could do with another White House term.“For years, the former president has stoked the fires of hate and bigotry and racism and xenophobia for his own power and political gain,” she said. “The former president has told us who he is, and it is on us, then, to recognize the profound threat he poses to our democracy and to our freedoms.”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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      Haley Entered 2024 With $14.6 Million, Fueling Her Enduring Bid

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      Nikki Haley, the last candidate standing between former President Donald J. Trump and the Republican nomination, raised $24 million in the last three months of 2023 and entered this year with $14.6 million in her campaign account, a hefty sum that has all but ensured she will have the money to press on with her insurgent bid for the White House.The final fund-raising numbers of last year do not reveal how much Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has raised since she came in a distant third place in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, then lost again in the New Hampshire primary election eight days later.But the filings with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday do indicate that her frugal presidential campaign has kept a lid on spending as it has pressed for new contributions.“We are running a smart campaign and that means spending our money wisely,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Haley campaign. “Seventy percent of Americans don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch, and we have the resources and energy to make sure that doesn’t happen.”While Ms. Haley’s campaign handled money carefully, a super PAC backing her, SFA Fund Inc., spent heavily on advertising in 2023. The group reported raising $50.2 million in the second half of 2023, for a total of $68.9 million all year, but spent nearly all of it, ending the year with about $3.5 million on hand.This week, Ms. Haley, who was Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, made her pitch to some of the wealthiest donors in the country, seeking their support as she continues a long-shot bid for the Republican nomination. And when the week is done, her aides say, she will sit down, as she has throughout her run, and personally review her campaign’s expenses.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?  More

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      Illinois Hearing Officer, a Former Republican Judge, Says Trump Engaged in Insurrection

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      But the hearing officer said the State Board of Elections should let the courts decide whether Mr. Trump’s conduct disqualified him from the ballot.A former Republican judge appointed to hear arguments on whether to disqualify former President Donald J. Trump from the Illinois primary ballot said on Sunday that he believed Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection by attempting to remain in office after the 2020 election.But the former judge, Clark Erickson, whose nonbinding opinion will be considered by the State Board of Elections on Tuesday, added that he believed the board did not have the authority to disqualify Mr. Trump on those grounds and that the question should instead be left to the courts.The mixed decision was at least a symbolic setback for the former president, who has faced official challenges to his candidacy in 35 states and has been found ineligible for the primaries in Colorado and Maine. Mr. Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president, is still likely to appear on the primary ballots in both of those states as the U.S. Supreme Court considers an appeal of the Colorado ruling.In Illinois, at least five of the eight members of the Board of Elections would have to vote on Tuesday to remove Mr. Trump for him to be struck from the ballot. The appointed board is made up of four Democrats and four Republicans. Their decision can be appealed to the courts before the March 19 primary.The Illinois challenge, like those in other states, is based on a clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that disqualifies government officials who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.At a hearing on Friday in downtown Chicago, lawyers for residents objecting to Mr. Trump’s candidacy accused the former president of insurrection and played footage from the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Lawyers for Mr. Trump denied the allegation and argued that, in any case, the constitutional clause in question did not apply to the presidency. 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?  More

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      Nikki Haley Isn’t Going Anywhere

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      What is Nikki Haley doing? What are her real intentions? Those questions have dominated every aspect of her candidacy.So much of what’s been said about Ms. Haley the last few months has been about what she’ll do after she loses — even that the original premise of the campaign must have contained hidden ambitions or total delusion. There’s been an assumption, even from would-be allies, that there must be another angle to the campaign, that she must want the vice presidency.That’s partly because, in her speeches, Ms. Haley often resists giving her listeners satisfaction, withholding the obvious point, allowing them to fill in what they want, both to Ms. Haley’s benefit and peril. She did not make a strong moral case against Donald Trump last year.But here we are after her big loss in New Hampshire, framed by many as the definitive end. Right now, Ms. Haley’s unwillingness to publicly engage with the obvious works differently, reveals different things.For instance, in a hotel ballroom by the Charleston, S.C., airport, with people decked out in “SC ❤️ NH” stickers, cheerfully wanting something they and everybody else know they probably won’t get, she proceeded as normal, giving that homecoming crowd primarily her normal remarks. She layered in critiques of Mr. Trump that dealt with inarguable surface realities, like how he talked about her the night before rather than about solutions to the nation’s problems: “He didn’t talk about the American people once; he talked about revenge!” (When she ran through a variety of problems he could have talked about, one woman yelled, “He don’t know!”)Insofar as she engaged with the obvious, literal reason that people in the room seemed so amped — that she was still in the race — it was this: “You know, the political elites, in this state and around the country, have said that we just need to let Donald Trump have this.” That was clearly what people in the room, who dropped into a long “noooo,” had come to hear discussed.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?  More

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      Nikki Haley Was Target of ‘Swatting’ Incident in December, Authorities Say

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      A bogus account of a shooting at a South Carolina home owned by Nikki Haley sent the authorities scrambling in late December, but the Republican presidential candidate and a former governor of the state, was not there at the time, Reuters reported on Saturday.The news service published details about the Dec. 30 “swatting” incident at Ms. Haley’s home on Kiawah Island, S.C., one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response. Reuters obtained the information as part of a public records request, which included an email from Craig Harris, the town’s public safety director, discussing the incident with local officials.The email said that an unknown person had called 911 and “claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself while at the residence of Nikki Haley.” The case remains under investigation, according to the email, which did not discuss a motive for the call.The details of the incident took nearly a month to emerge, a stark contrast to a series of high-profile “swatting” attempts that targeted politicians and government buildings in late December and early January.The Haley campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. When reached by Reuters, the campaign declined to address the report.Ms. Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in former President Donald J. Trump’s administration, is the last serious candidate battling him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. She lost to Mr. Trump in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday by 11 percentage points, and they have increasingly clashed over her decision to stay in the race.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?  More

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      Trump Campaigns in Nevada, Where He Has Virtually No Rival

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      Former President Donald J. Trump, long the dominant front-runner in the Republican nominating contest, has made it clear for months that he is itching to focus on a likely general election matchup between him and President Biden.On Saturday, he’ll campaign in Nevada, a critical battleground state. But first he’ll need at least a handful of his supporters to turn out for the nominating caucuses in the state on Feb. 8 — and his last remaining Republican rival for the nomination, Nikki Haley, is doing everything she can to remind him she’s still in the race even if they won’t meet head-to-head in Nevada.Off the trail on Friday, Ms. Haley assailed Mr. Trump as “unhinged” on Fox News as she continued to try and bait him into a one-on-one debate. Mr. Trump was in a New York City courtroom, but his campaign sent out email blasts pointing to articles that seemed to bolster the case that she should cede the race to him, and attacking her on immigration.“There’s one thing Americans know — Nikki will always put America last,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, wrote.There are two contests coming up in Nevada: the caucuses, and a presidential primary on Feb. 6. The presidential primary features Ms. Haley on the ballot, but won’t count toward the G.O.P. nomination, so she is skipping the state entirely. The caucuses feature Mr. Trump without a single major competitor — and that’s the contest that will determine who gets the state’s delegate prize.Critics have argued that the state party set up the caucuses to benefit Mr. Trump — which the party denies.“Nevada will certainly be a good messaging opportunity for Trump, because he’s going to win all the delegates here, and he will win unopposed,” said Jeremy Gelman, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. “He will be able to say he swept Nevada.”Still, the specter of Ms. Haley’s continued presence in the race is likely to hang over Mr. Trump’s speech on Saturday, his first campaign event since winning in New Hampshire, where he beat her by 11 percentage points.The former president and his team were hoping his showing there would persuade Ms. Haley to end her campaign. But she vowed to keep fighting, drawing Mr. Trump’s ire.“I don’t get too angry,” he said on Tuesday. In a signal of the likelihood that he would continue escalating his attacks against her, he added: “I get even.”On Saturday, she will be across the country, holding a rally in her home state of South Carolina, the site of her next electoral battle with Mr. Trump on Feb. 24. Back in Las Vegas, he’ll share a different split screen, this one with Vice President Kamala Harris.Ms. Harris will attend a get-out-the-vote event at a labor union headquarters meant to encourage turnout in Nevada’s Democratic primary. More

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      A Radical Proposal for Nikki Haley: Try to Win More Votes

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      Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary but found a cause: getting under Donald Trump’s not exactly rhinoceros-thick skin. The story of the Republican primary campaign in the days since Trump’s victory has been one where the victor acts like a sore loser and the likely loser loosens up, goads her stronger rival and finds a pool of small-dollar donors to keep her in the race.Haley’s turn toward mockery and confrontation has created modest excitement in the disillusioned world of NeverTrump punditry. Maybe the remaining non-Trump Republican is giving up on being vice president or winning some future G.O.P. primary campaign. Maybe she’s ready to make Trump’s unfitness her exclusive theme. Maybe, as The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio speculates, by needling and attacking and bringing out Trump’s worst behavior, she can even bring about the long-awaited Republican crackup that would finally defeat Trump on the scale that he deserves.I don’t think this hope makes a lot of sense. The idea that there exists some form of elite Republican denunciation, combined with egregious Trumpian misbehavior, that could shatter the G.O.P. coalition and send him to a Barry Goldwater or George McGovern-style defeat, seemed plausible enough eight years ago. It’s what I expected and what Republicans deserved.But I should have heeded the wisdom of Bill Munny in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Because since then we’ve seen all kinds of terrible behavior, coupled with attempted repudiations from all sorts of Republicans, including Trump’s own aides and cabinet appointees. And yet the rule has held: Ask people if they like Trump and majorities do not, but put Trump up against the current Democratic Party, and he becomes a viable candidate for president.Maybe Haley is the right figure to change that. But she has nowhere near the pre-Trump fame of a Mitt Romney or the ideological credibility of a Liz Cheney. And based on what we saw from Chris Christie’s campaign, a pure repudiate-Trump candidacy is only likely to enhance Trump’s margins in the remaining primaries, emphasizing Haley’s hopelessness rather than her gumption.Moreover, wouldn’t there be something a little bit strange, after two consecutive primary campaigns in which Republicans desperately competed for a chance to face off with Trump one-on-one, for the winner of that prize to immediately give up on winning any more supporters? Haley’s consolidation of gentry Republicans succeeded in boxing out Ron DeSantis’s attempt to build a larger non-Trump coalition. Is she really not even going to attempt to build a larger coalition of her own?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?  More

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      Nikki Haley Looks to Home Turf to Challenge Trump

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      Nikki Haley, facing growing doubts and pressure to drop out, has winnowed the race to a one-on-one contest and is looking to make her case in South Carolina.A combative Nikki Haley brought her presidential campaign back to South Carolina on Wednesday after a disappointing defeat the night before in New Hampshire, and told a boisterous crowd in a cavernous ballroom in North Charleston that she would fight Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination.“The political elites in this state and around the country say we just need to let Donald Trump have this,” she told her supporters, who were jeering at the idea. “Listen. We’ve only had two states that have voted. We’ve got 48 more.”Nowhere is more immediately important than South Carolina, where she served two terms as governor before being tapped to serve as Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But just because it’s her home state does not mean it is friendly territory. As Ms. Haley looked to reinvigorate her campaign here on the ground, Republicans, as varied as local party officials and the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, stepped up the pressure on her to drop out. As she made her case for pressing on, the former president significantly consolidated his support.While she spoke, the Trump campaign blasted out a fresh list of endorsements in South Carolina that now includes the state’s two senators, most of its House members, its governor and lieutenant governor, and much of its State House — more than 150 names in all.“Welcome home to Trump Country, Nikki,” Austin McCubbin, Mr. Trump’s South Carolina director, taunted.Some of Ms. Haley’s closest allies and confidants on Wednesday continued to insist that Ms. Haley had met her own expectations: She had winnowed the field and was now in the two-person contest she wanted, with time enough until the primary on Feb. 24 to spread her message to a broader electorate and draw contrasts between herself and Mr. 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?  More