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Utah 2nd Congressional District 2023 Special Primary: Live Results – The New York Times
Elections|Utah 2nd Congressional District Special Primary Election Results https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/05/us/elections/results-utah-us-house-district-2.html More
At campaign stops across the state, the political newcomer has drawn big crowds and praise from voters. But some wonder if he needs more political seasoning.Vivek Ramaswamy, the only top-polling presidential candidate to hit the campaign trail over Labor Day weekend, is enjoying the attention of his newfound status.Across five events in New Hampshire on Saturday, part of an 11-stop swing in the Granite State, Mr. Ramaswamy drew hundreds of attendees, often exceeding the number of seats or the space provided at venues from a state fair in Contoocook to a country store in Hooksett.But the crowds and attention being showered on the 38-year-old political newcomer come with something of a caveat: Many of those showing up at his events and driving his rise in the polls see him as a possible vice president or a great future president — but not necessarily a president yet.“I have socks older than him,” said Pamela Coffey, 69, who came from Peterborough, N.H., to see the candidate in person.Mr. Ramaswamy, who entered the race in February with little name recognition and no political experience, has campaigned at a grueling pace in early states and adopted an everywhere-all-the-time media strategy that in recent weeks has propelled him to third place in the race, just behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.A combative performance in the first Republican presidential debate last month, in which he was attacked more than any other candidate onstage, put a spotlight on him that translated into heightened attendance at his campaign events. But some voters in New Hampshire said they still had reservations about Mr. Ramaswamy’s youth and inexperience.Mr. Ramaswamy has used his status as the first millennial to run as a Republican candidate to lament his generation’s being “hungry for a cause” — primarily to older audiences. One of the most reliable applause lines at his New Hampshire events was his controversial proposal to require that high schoolers pass a civics test before they can vote.Mr. Ramaswamy drew big crowds at his Saturday events, including one at the Hopkinton State Fair in Contoocook, N.H.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMr. Ramaswamy’s “America First” platform and outsider standing are fashioned after former President Donald J. Trump’s, down to his predisposition toward falsehoods. Like Mr. Trump, for example, Mr. Ramaswamy has expressed disdain for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine: He scoffed at “Zelenskyism” and called the president the “pied piper of Hamelin in cargo pants” as cows mooed in the background at an event in Dublin, N.H.Pat Cameron of Goffstown, N.H., said he saw Mr. Ramaswamy as a “great candidate” with “a lot of really good ideas grounded in what this country really believes in.” But he added: “I honestly believe that Trump would be the best. Personally, I would have loved to see President Trump take him as his running mate for vice president.”And Mr. Trump himself complimented Mr. Ramaswamy last week, spurring questions about whether the Republican presidential front-runner would consider Mr. Ramaswamy to run as No. 2 on his ticket if he wins the nomination.On Tuesday, the former president told the conservative commentator Glenn Beck that he thought Mr. Ramaswamy was “a very, very intelligent person.”“He’s got good energy,” Mr. Trump continued. “He could be some form of something.”But Mr. Ramaswamy, who has said repeatedly that he is not running to be second in command, reiterated that stance on Saturday. “I think President Trump and I share this in common: Neither of us would do well in a No. 2 position,” he said at a town hall in Newport, N.H., just after calling Mr. Trump, as he did in the Republican debate, the “best president of the century.”Despite Mr. Ramaswamy’s frequent praise for Mr. Trump — and repeated promises to pardon him, if he wins the presidency — he has sought to differentiate himself in subtle ways. While Mr. Trump has continued to invoke the 2020 election and the indictments he faces, Mr. Ramaswamy calls for a forward-thinking vision of the United States as a “nation in our ascent” with revived patriotism under a drastically altered executive branch.And Mr. Ramaswamy has recently alluded to questions of Mr. Trump’s electability, saying on Saturday that the “America First movement does not belong to one man” and that 2024 “can’t be another 50.1 election.”“I’m the only candidate in this race who can win in a landslide that reunites this country, that brings young people along,” he said in Dublin.Mr. Ramaswamy greeted voters after a house party in Dublin, N.H., on Saturday, one of the day’s five campaign events.Sophie Park for The New York TimesNonetheless, many voters who came to hear him speak in New Hampshire uttered his name with that of Mr. Trump, unprompted.“I like that he’s not like a normal politician,” said Reed Beauchesne, 54, of Concord, N.H. “He reminds me of Trump, in a way. I think he and Trump would be great together, actually.”And for the voters searching for an alternative to Mr. Trump, not being a “normal politician” can be interpreted as a hindrance.“He’s got some points that resonate with everybody, so that’s wonderful, but my biggest concern is his lack of experience,” said David Leak, 63, who added that he preferred Mr. DeSantis. “Every politician talks great on the stump, the speeches are well rehearsed, but what do they do after they get in?” More
The former vice president’s time in the spotlight at the debate did not lift his position in the polls, where he continues to languish in the low-single digits.Mike Pence sat on Wednesday in a cavernous machine shop that was humming with activity as he preached old-time Republican religion: the dangers of the swelling national debt, the need to overhaul Social Security and Medicare, the perils of price controls on prescription drugs and the necessity of projecting military might across the globe.No more than two dozen Iowans had come to C & C Machining in Centerville to hear the last Republican vice president as he pursues his party’s nomination for president. And the ones who showed weren’t so sure how many G.O.P. voters still believed in a gospel that his former running mate, Donald J. Trump, has spent eight years rendering largely obsolete.“The old conservative Republicanism, those are my ideals,” Art Kirchoff, 53, an insurance agency owner, said approvingly to explain why he would vote for Mr. Pence in the Iowa caucuses this January. He had come at the behest of the machine shop’s owner, Gaylon Cowan, a friend, and, Mr. Kirchoff conceded, he wasn’t sure how many of his kind are left in the party. “That’s a good question.”“The old conservative Republicanism, those are my ideals,” said Art Kirchoff, who is supporting Mr. Pence’s bid and was in the modest crowd at an Iowa campaign stop.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Pence says often that there is no one more qualified to be the nominee — and more battle tested — than him, a former House member, former Indiana governor and former vice president. There is, of course, a former president in the race: Mr. Trump, the man Mr. Pence stood behind and supported for four tumultuous years. But when Mr. Trump asked his loyal vice president to violate his oath of office, Mr. Pence says, he stood by the Constitution.By force of will, Mr. Pence grabbed the microphone at the first Republican primary debate this month more than anyone else onstage, speaking for 12 minutes and 37 seconds, much of that time devoted to his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, the day he certified his own defeat at the hands of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris after a pro-Trump mob had ransacked the Capitol and called for his death. At the debate in Milwaukee, the former vice president stretched his airtime by demanding the other seven candidates onstage to his left and right attest to his righteousness.“It was a fun night,” Mr. Pence said on Wednesday.And by dint of his time in the White House, he holds real celebrity status on the hustings. On Thursday, at the Old Threshers Reunion, a sprawling fair and farm-equipment showcase in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, he was mobbed by well-wishers.But then there was Jamison Plank, a 25-year-old pastor, who grabbed Mr. Pence’s hand and demanded to know whether he would vote for Mr. Trump if the former president was the nominee. Mr. Pence demurred, saying he was confident the question was moot, that Mr. Pence would win.Mr. Plank was not.“I’m worried that the Republican establishment is going to destroy Trump,” he said. “I appreciate Mike Pence. I appreciate his faith. I just don’t see him winning.”Mr. Pence met Jamison Plank, a 25-year-old pastor, who questioned his ability to win.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesThe former vice president’s time in the spotlight at the debate did not lift his position in the polls, where he continues to languish in the low-single digits. He is far behind Mr. Trump, but also behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and a political newcomer, Vivek Ramaswamy, whose position on the issues — and perhaps in national polling averages — seems to inspire Mr. Pence on the attack.“He’s wrong on foreign policy. He’s wrong on American leadership in the world. He’s wrong on how we get this economy moving again,” Mr. Pence said on Wednesday of his 38-year-old rival, adding, “I’ve been in the room in the West Wing, and I can tell you, the president doesn’t get to decide what crises he faces.”The crisis he was referring to was the debt and Mr. Ramaswamy’s refusal to grapple with the cost of Social Security and Medicare, entitlement programs groaning under the weight of the retiring Baby Boom generation. But Mr. Trump has said he too will not touch the popular social benefit programs for retirees, as has Mr. DeSantis.And those three brawlers, who have elevated their battles with “deep state” bureaucrats, “left-wing” socialists and “globalist” hawks far above the green eyeshade concerns of federal budgeting, have for now captured the allegiance of 75 percent of Republican primary voters, leaving the more traditional Republicans in the race like Mr. Pence fighting over the crumbs.“If they started listening to the message and not just the hoorah, maybe” traditional conservatism could rise again, Mr. Cowan, 53, said of Republican voters after Mr. Pence spoke at his factory.Mr. Pence likes to say he was conservative before it was cool, a low-tax, small-government Republican willing to fight his own party. Mr. Pence’s positions have the same throwback feel as his pleated khakis, blue blazers and light-blue broadcloth shirts. In Iowa this week, Mr. Pence railed against the Biden administration’s landmark legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices — the same policy Mr. Trump endorsed, though failed to achieve.In a survey late last year by KFF, a health policy research organization, 89 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans said they favored the plank of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorizes negotiations.Mr. Pence greeted a worker at a machine shop campaign stop Wednesday in Centerville, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesHis warnings against overspending come as companies like C & C brace for a huge infusion of new work funded by Mr. Biden’s infrastructure law, another achievement that the Trump-Pence administration promised but did not secure. Mr. Cowan said once repair and replacement orders started rolling in from the companies building new roads, bridges, tunnels and rail lines, “it’s going to help our business tremendously.”On Thursday morning at Weaton Companies in Fairfield, Iowa, Cory Westphal, an executive at Dexter Laundry, an industrial washer and dryer maker, fretted that aggressive union negotiators could drive up wages and labor costs. Mr. Pence answered that he cut the corporate income tax rate to 15 percent, from 21 percent.Beyond the issues is a more existential question dogging Mr. Pence’s candidacy: If a majority — or at least a strong plurality — of Republican primary voters believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, how can the man who certified it secure their support? Mr. Pence has tried to turn the liability of his certification into an asset, a profile in courage on the fateful day of Jan. 6, 2021.It works for some.“Everything he went through with Trump, I just admire that he did the right thing,” Julie Vantiger Hicks, 58, said after getting her picture with Mr. Pence at Threshers Reunion. “He’s an admirable man.”But Mr. Pence was hardly outspoken among the few Republican leaders in the weeks and months before and after the attack on the Capitol who tried to dispel the conspiracy theories around the election that continue to divide the nation.“My objective — once the violence was quelled, the Congress reconvened and finished our work under the Constitution of the United States, and after the president denounced the riot and committed to a peaceful transfer of power — was to see to that orderly transition,” Mr. Pence answered when asked if he could have done more to head off the division that he now faces. More
In clashes with the news media and his rivals, the Republican upstart has retreated from past comments and lied about on-the-record statements.In his breakout performance in the Republican primary race, Vivek Ramaswamy has harnessed his populist bravado while frequently and unapologetically contorting the truth for political gain, much in the same way that former President Donald J. Trump has mastered.Mr. Ramaswamy’s pattern of falsehoods has been the subject of intensifying scrutiny by the news media and, more recently, his G.O.P. opponents, who clashed with him often during the party’s first debate last Wednesday.There are layers to Mr. Ramaswamy’s distortions: He has spread lies and exaggerations on subjects including the 2020 election results, the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol and climate change. When challenged on those statements, Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who is the first millennial Republican to run for president, has in several instances claimed that he had never made them or that he had been taken out of context.But his denials have repeatedly been refuted by recordings and transcripts from Mr. Ramaswamy’s interviews — or, in some cases, excerpts from his own book.Here are some notable occasions when he sought to retreat from his past statements or mischaracterized basic facts:A misleading anecdoteAt a breakfast round table event organized by his campaign on Friday in Indianola, Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy recounted how he had visited the South Side of Chicago in May to promote his immigration proposals to a mostly Black audience.He boasted that nowhere had his ideas on the issue been more enthusiastically received than in the nation’s third most populous city, where his appearance had followed community protests over the housing of migrants in a local high school.“I have never been in a room more in favor of my proposal to use the U.S. military to secure the southern border and seal the Swiss cheese down there than when I was in a nearly all-Black room of supposedly mostly Democrats on the South Side of Chicago,” he said.But Mr. Ramaswamy’s retelling of the anecdote was sharply contradicted by the observations of a New York Times reporter who covered both events.The reporter witnessed the audience in Chicago pepper Mr. Ramaswamy about reparations, systemic racism and his opposition to affirmative action. Immigration was barely mentioned during the formal program. It was so absent that a Ramaswamy campaign aide at one point pleaded for questions on the issue. With that prompting, a single Republican consultant stood up to question Mr. Ramaswamy on his proposals.Trump criticismAt the first Republican debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey accused Mr. Ramaswamy of changing positions on Donald Trump.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIn one of the more heated exchanges of last week’s G.O.P. debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for lionizing Mr. Trump and defending his actions during the Jan. 6 attack.He sought to cast Mr. Ramaswamy as an opportunist who was trying to pander to Mr. Trump’s supporters by attributing the riot to government censorship during the 2020 election.“In your book, you had much different things to say about Donald Trump than you’re saying here tonight,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Ramaswamy bristled and said, “That’s not true.”But in his 2022 book “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” Mr. Ramaswamy had harsh words for Mr. Trump and gave a more somber assessment of the violence.“It was a dark day for democracy,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote. “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”When asked by The Times about the excerpt, Mr. Ramaswamy insisted that his rhetoric had not evolved and pointed out that he had co-written an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal five days after the Jan. 6 attack that was critical of the actions of social media companies during the 2020 election.“Also what I said at the time was that I really thought what Trump did was regrettable,” he said. “I would have handled it very differently if I was in his shoes. I will remind you that I am running for U.S. president in the same race that Donald Trump is running right now.”Mr. Ramaswamy parsed his criticism of the former president, however.“But a bad judgment is not the same thing as a crime,” he said.During the debate, Mr. Ramaswamy also sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence, whose senior aide and onetime chief of staff Marc Short told NBC News the next day that Mr. Ramaswamy was not a genuine populist.“There’s populism and then there’s just simply fraud,” he said.By blunting his message about the former president’s accountability and casting himself as an outsider, Mr. Ramaswamy appears to be making a play for Mr. Trump’s base — and the G.O.P. front-runner has taken notice.In a conversation on Tuesday with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Mr. Trump said that he was open to selecting Mr. Ramaswamy as his running mate, but he had some advice for him.“He’s starting to get out there a little bit,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s getting a little bit controversial. I got to tell him: ‘Be a little bit careful. Some things you have to hold in just a little bit, right?’”Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11Since entering the race, Mr. Ramaswamy has repeatedly floated conspiracy theories about a cover-up by the federal government in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a narrative seemingly tailored to members of the G.O.P.’s right wing who are deeply distrustful of institutions.In a recent profile by The Atlantic, he told the magazine, “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the twin towers.”While he acknowledged that he had “no reason” to believe that the number was “anything other than zero,” Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that the government had not been transparent about the attacks.“But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to,” he said.Yet when Mr. Ramaswamy was asked to clarify those remarks by Kaitlan Collins of CNN two nights before last week’s debate, he backtracked and accused The Atlantic of misquoting him.“I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually,” he said.Soon after Mr. Ramaswamy claimed that his words had been twisted, The Atlantic released a recording and transcript from the interview that confirmed that he had indeed been quoted accurately.When asked in an interview on Saturday whether the audio had undercut his argument, Mr. Ramaswamy reiterated his contention that the news media had often misrepresented him.“I think there’s a reason why,” he said, suggesting that his free-flowing way of speaking broke the mold of so-called scripted candidates. “I just don’t speak like a traditional politician, and I think the system is not used to that. The political media is not used to that. And that lends itself naturally then to being inaccurately portrayed, to being distorted.”Mr. Trump’s allies have used similar justifications when discussing the former president’s falsehoods, citing his stream-of-consciousness speaking style. His allies and supporters have admired his impulse to refuse to apologize or back down when called out, an approach Mr. Ramaswamy has echoed.Mr. Ramaswamy said that he was asked about Sept. 11 while discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his repeated calls for an accounting of how many federal agents were in the field that day. His campaign described The Atlantic’s recording as a “snippet.”At the start of The Times’s conversation with Mr. Ramaswamy, he said that he assumed that the interview was being recorded and noted that his campaign was recording, too.“We’re now doing mutually on the record, so just F.Y.I.,” he said.Pardoning Hunter BidenIn one of many clashes with the news media, Mr. Ramaswamy accused The New York Post of misquoting him in an article about Hunter Biden.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesNo news outlet has been off-limits to Mr. Ramaswamy’s claims of being misquoted: This month, he denounced a New York Post headline that read: “GOP 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ‘open’ to pardon of Hunter Biden.”The Aug. 12 article cited an interview that The Post had conducted with him.“After we have shut down the F.B.I., after we have refurbished the Department of Justice, after we have systemically pardoned anyone who was a victim of a political motivated persecution — from Donald Trump and peaceful January 6 protests — then would I would be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family in the interest of moving the nation forward,” Mr. Ramaswamy was quoted as saying.The next morning on Fox News Channel, which, like The Post, is owned by News Corp, Mr. Ramaswamy told the anchor Maria Bartiromo that the report was erroneous.“Maria, that was misquoted and purposeful opposition research with the headline,” he said. “You know how this game is played.”The Post did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ramaswamy described the headline as “manufactured” and said it was part of “the ridiculous farce of this gotcha game.”Aid to IsraelMr. Ramaswamy clashed with Fox News host Sean Hannity Monday night when confronted with comments he has made about aid to Israel. Mr. Ramaswamy accused Mr. Hannity of misrepresenting his views.“You said aid to Israel, our No. 1 ally, only democracy in the region, should end in 2028,” Mr. Hannity said in the interview. “And that they should be integrated with their neighbors.”“That’s false,” Mr. Ramaswamy responded.“I have an exact quote, do you want me to read it?” Mr. Hannity asked.Mr. Ramaswamy’s rhetoric about support for Israel has shifted.During a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this month, Mr. Ramaswamy called the deal to provide Israel with $38 billion over 10 years “sacrosanct.” But a few weeks later in an interview with The Free Beacon, a conservative website, he said that he hoped that Israel would “not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.” by 2028, when the deal expires.Wearing masksIn the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Masks for All Act, a bill proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that aimed to provide every person in the United States with three free N95 masks, appeared to receive an unlikely endorsement on Twitter — from Mr. Ramaswamy.“My policy views don’t often align with Bernie, but this strikes me as a sensible idea,” he wrote in July 2020. “The cost is a tiny fraction of other less compelling federal expenditures on COVID-19.”Mr. Ramaswamy was responding to an opinion column written for CNN by Mr. Sanders, who is a democratic socialist, and Andy Slavitt, who was later a top pandemic adviser to Mr. Biden. He said they should have picked someone from the political right as a co-author to show that there was a consensus on masks.But when he was pressed this summer by Josie Glabach of the Red Headed Libertarian podcast about whether he had ever supported Mr. Sanders’s mask measure, he answered no.When asked by The Times for further clarification, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged that he was an early supporter of wearing masks, but said that he no longer believed that they prevented the spread of the virus. He accused his political opponents of conflating his initial stance with support for mask mandates, which he said he had consistently opposed.An analogy to Rosa Parks?Mr. Ramaswamy appeared to compare Edward J. Snowden to Rosa Parks before immediately distancing himself from the comment.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesWhen he was asked by the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on his show in June whether he would pardon the former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden for leaking documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, Mr. Ramaswamy said yes and invoked an unexpected name: the civil rights icon Rosa Parks.He said that Mr. Snowden, a fugitive, had demonstrated heroism to hold the government accountable.“Part of what makes that risk admirable — Rosa Parks long ago — is the willingness to bear punishment he already has,” he said. “That’s also why I would ensure that he was a free man.”To Mr. Hewitt, the analogy was jarring.“Wait, wait, wait, did you just compare Rosa Parks to Edward Snowden?” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy immediately distanced himself from such a comparison, while then reinforcing it, suggesting that they had both effectuated progress of a different kind.“No, I did not,” he said. “But I did compare the aspect of their willingness to take a risk in order for at the time breaking a rule that at the time was punishable.” More
I intended to write a normal horse-race column this week, about what we can glean from the polling that came out after the first Republican debate. The emphasis was going to be on the resilience of Ron DeSantis, the success of Nikki Haley, the modest perils for Donald Trump in not showing up for these affairs — and then the larger problem of how DeSantis or Haley or anyone else might unite the anti-Trump vote instead of just repeating the fragmentation of 2016.But is anything we could learn from one Republican debate more significant than the news that the most important legal case against Trump, his federal trial for alleged election-related crimes, will begin the day before Super Tuesday? Probably not. So let’s save DeSantis and Haley for another day and talk about the significance of a front-runner’s trial running through the heart of a primary campaign.From any theory of the law’s relationship to democratic deliberation, this seems like an extremely suboptimal convergence. If you take the judicial process seriously — as an exercise in fact finding and adversarial argument, with the presumption of innocence at the outset yielding to a legitimate verdict at the end — then clearly under ideal circumstances the trial of a major presidential contender would be completed before voters begin passing judgments of their own. Under less optimal circumstances, a verdict would be rendered before most of the votes are cast, instilling confidence that a majority of the electorate shared the same knowledge about the law’s decision.To its credit, that’s what the prosecution asked for: a January start date, with the trial potentially wrapping up around the end of the first phase of the campaign. But instead we’re headed for a world where the trial and the campaign are fully intertwined, with each primary associated with a different snapshot of the case’s progress — some votes cast pretrial, some after the opening statements, some with the prosecution’s arguments as a backdrop and some following the defense’s rebuttal.This means in turn that an underlying problem for these trials as an attempted vindication of the rule of the law — the fact that everyone watching can see that the law’s decisions are provisional and the final arbiter of Trump’s fate is the voting public — will be highlighted over and over again throughout the judicial process itself. The Republican primary electorate will be a kind of shadow jury, offering its reactions in real time, constantly raising or lowering the odds that the defendant can reverse a guilty verdict by the simple expedient of becoming the next president of the United States.The shrugging response from many liberals is that there’s simply no alternative here, that Trump committed so many potential crimes that the pileup of cases requires at least one, and possibly several, to go to trial during the primary campaign.But only one of the four prosecutions, the classified documents case, involves alleged crimes committed close to the 2024 election. In every other instance there’s been a winding, multiyear road to prosecution that could have been plausibly expedited so that Trump faced a jury by 2023.The pileup isn’t deliberate; New York and Georgia prosecutors didn’t get together with Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and plan things to end this way, and some of the federal delay arguably reflected a reluctance to pursue a case. But there is still a recurring pattern with these anti-Trump, anti-populist efforts, which so often seem to converge on stratagems and choices that further undermine confidence in officially neutral institutions.These choices are often defended with the suggestion that any criticism is just a bad-faith attempt to let Trump or his voters off the hook. So in that vein it should be stressed, not for the first time in this column, that Trump’s voters are responsible for his continued popularity, that he might well be headed to renomination without the pileup of prosecutions and that prosecutors aren’t forcing G.O.P. voters to do anything they don’t seem inclined to do already.But the pileup still seems like a boon to his renomination effort. Yes, there’s always “the possibility that Mr. Trump collapses under the weight of his legal challenges,” as my colleague Nate Cohn puts it. But we have months of polling in the shadow of these prosecutions, and it strongly suggests that along with the core Trump bloc (30 percent to 40 percent of the Republican electorate, let’s say) that will vote for him no matter what, there’s another bloc that’s open to alternatives but rallies to him when he’s perceived to be liberalism’s major target, in much the same spirit that liberals and feminists once rallied to an accused sexual predator named Bill Clinton when he was the target of the religious right.To beat Trump in the primary, any challenger would need part of that bloc to resist the rallying impulse and swing their way instead. So timing Trump’s prosecution but not the final outcome of the trial to some of the most important primaries seems more likely to cement his nomination than to finally make his poll numbers collapse.A conviction might be a different matter. There may be Republican voters who regard these prosecutions as theater designed to keep Trump from the nomination and therefore expect the legal cases to fall apart when his lawyers make their defense. A Reuters/Ipsos poll a few weeks ago found that 45 percent of the G.O.P. electorate said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony, compared with 35 percent (that Trumpian core again) who said they would and that more than half said they wouldn’t support him in the fall campaign if he was imprisoned.I do not believe the latter number, but at the very least the poll suggests that there is still enough faith in the legal system for an actual conviction to have a different effect on the Republican primary than the prosecutions have thus far.But on the current timeline, a conviction before the primary is decided is exactly what we aren’t going to get.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More
The federal election interference case — one of four — is set to start just before Super Tuesday and a cascade of consequential primaries.By the time Donald J. Trump is sitting at his federal trial on charges of criminally conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, he may have already secured enough delegates to effectively clinch the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.The former president’s trial is scheduled to start March 4, by which point five states are expected to have held nominating contests. The next day, March 5, is Super Tuesday, when 15 states, including delegate-rich California and Texas, plan to hold votes that will determine if any Trump challenger has enough political oxygen to remain a viable alternative.Primaries in Florida, Ohio and Illinois come two weeks later. Florida and Ohio will be the first winner-take-all contests, in which the top vote-getter statewide seizes all of the delegates rather than splitting them proportionally. Winner-take-all primaries have historically turbocharged the front-runner’s path to the presidential nomination. Mr. Trump’s federal trial, if it proceeds on its current timeline, won’t be close to finished by then.The collision course between the Republican Party’s calendar and Mr. Trump’s trial schedule is emblematic of one of the most unusual nominating contests in American history. It is a Trump-dominated clash that will define not only the course of the 2024 presidential primary but potentially the future direction of the party in an eventual post-Trump era.“It’s a front-runner set of rules now,” said Clayton Henson, who manages the ballot access and delegate selection process for the Trump campaign, which has been instrumental in rewriting the rules to benefit him.Mr. Trump has complained the March 4 start date of the trial amounts to “election interference” and cited Super Tuesday, but it is likely to have a greater effect on his ability to campaign for primaries in subsequent weeks. About 60 percent of the delegates will be awarded from contests after Super Tuesday.Generally, defendants are required to be present in the courtroom at their trials. After preliminary matters such as jury selection, prosecutors in Mr. Trump’s election case have estimated they will need about four to six weeks to present their case, after which defense lawyers will have an opportunity to call additional witnesses.That timeline also means it is likely that a majority of the delegates will have been awarded before a jury determines Mr. Trump’s fate.If Mr. Trump holds his dominant polling advantage throughout the primaries but then a jury transforms him into a convicted felon, any forces within the G.O.P. that would want to use that development to stop him would have one last opportunity to block his nomination — the same end-run around voters that officials tried at the party convention in 2016.That possibility would almost certainly lead to a schism between Trump loyalists and what used to be called the party’s establishment, an unpleasant reality in which defeating Mr. Trump could doom Republicans to a long cycle of electoral defeats.“Given what’s happening on the legal front, state parties need to think about what options they’re giving themselves” to allow delegates flexibility at the party’s national convention, said Bill Palatucci, a Republican National Committee member from New Jersey who advises the super PAC supporting Chris Christie and who opposes Mr. Trump.Republican state parties have until Oct. 1 to submit their formal delegate allocation rules to the national committee.“All this is happening so quickly, it’s unprecedented, and so as states formulate what their rules are going to be,” Mr. Palatucci added, “everybody’s got a whole new set of circumstances to consider.”There are no signs that the party’s leadership is contemplating using Mr. Trump’s legal troubles against him. The chairwoman of the R.N.C., Ronna McDaniel, has defended Mr. Trump in numerous media appearances and the committee has been raising money by telling online donors that the former president is the victim of a political prosecution.The chairwoman of the R.N.C., Ronna McDaniel, has defended Mr. Trump.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesOn Monday night, just hours after Judge Tanya S. Chutkan set the March trial date, one of the main organs of the Republican establishment, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, sounded the alarm.“Mr. Trump might have the G.O.P. nomination sewn up before a verdict arrives and voters learn whether he’s a convicted felon,” the Journal editors wrote. “This would certainly delight Democrats.”The renewed panic about the possibility of nominating a convicted felon recalls the 2016 effort to block Mr. Trump’s nomination after he had won a clear delegate majority in the primaries.Then, a group of Republican delegates loyal to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried to muster support from one-fourth of the convention’s rules committee, a body that meets in the weeks before the national convention, to throw open the nominating contest to the full roster of more than 2,000 delegates. Had they succeeded, the renegade delegates still would have needed a majority vote of all the delegates in order to seize the nomination from Mr. Trump.Now, short of a full capitulation from Mr. Trump, removing him as the nominee at the convention after he has secured enough delegates remains an extreme long shot. A surrender by Mr. Trump seems highly unlikely given that advisers have said he views getting re-elected — and taking command of the pardon power plus control over the Justice Department — as his best insurance policy. Despite Mr. Trump’s claims, however, it is not clear that a president can pardon himself, so he might be on safer legal ground if some other Republican secured the nomination, became president and then pardoned him.The Trump campaign is taking no chances on a contested convention. His team is far more experienced and professional than it was in 2016, when Mr. Cruz’s forces organized state party conventions in Louisiana, Colorado and elsewhere to elect Cruz loyalists as convention rules committee delegates. Mr. Trump has a tighter grip on the party’s grass-roots supporters than he did in 2016, and his aides — including Mr. Henson, Brian Jack, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — have been working for months behind the scenes to ensure he will have loyal delegates in state parties across the country, according to people with direct knowledge of their efforts.Mr. Trump’s team also has a stronger hold on state parties themselves, after three advisers — Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Nick Trainer — worked to consolidate support within them ahead of the 2020 election to stave off primary challenges to Mr. Trump. Many of those changes, which favor Mr. Trump, remain in place.Mr. Trump himself has gotten involved deep in the weeds of convention politics. He has awarded endorsements not just for state party bosses but for leaders of the two largest county Republican parties in Nevada — the sort of local officials who will have significant influence in choosing which grass-roots leaders will represent their states as convention delegates next July in Milwaukee.This loyalty has already delivered results for Mr. Trump’s campaign. This month, the Nevada Republican Party quietly announced it would not share political data or coordinate with super PACs — a blow to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has outsourced much of his campaign’s political operation to the super PAC Never Back Down. Never Back Down is led by Jeff Roe, the architect of Mr. Cruz’s 2016 campaign.Mr. LaCivita said in a statement that “no degree of trickery or gamesmanship” and “no amount of editorials in The Wall Street Journal” would stop Mr. Trump’s nomination at the convention.“There’s been much more attention to detail and focus on those small things,” he added, “that if not attended to early on can lead to big headaches.”Mr. Trump’s aides, like, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, center, have been working for months behind the scenes to ensure he will have loyal delegates in state parties across the country.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe mere possibility of a chaotic contested national political convention — a dream of political observers who have known nothing but scripted, made-for-television quadrennial gatherings since 1980 — may inspire well-funded Trump rivals to remain in the race just in case delegates decide it would be foolhardy to anoint a convicted felon as their party’s standard-bearer for the general election.Mr. Trump has vowed to appeal the March 4 trial date in the election case. That is not legally permitted: Generally, grievances over issues like whether a defense team had adequate time to prepare must wait to be taken up on appeal after any guilty verdict.Still, it is possible that his legal team will ask an appeals court or the Supreme Court to intervene before the trial using a long-shot method known as a petition for a writ of mandamus. Higher courts tend to be reluctant to grant such requests to disrupt the normal judicial process and have set a very high bar that must be met before they will consider doing so.Even if a jury acquits Mr. Trump in the federal election case — or one or more holdout jurors produce a mistrial — there are three other cases that could potentially lead to him being a convicted criminal by the time of the convention.He is facing bookkeeping fraud charges in New York, where a trial is set to begin March 25, although it is now might be pushed back. He is set to go on trial in Florida in May on federal charges related to his hoarding of sensitive national-security documents after leaving office. And he has been charged in another 2020 election case in Georgia, for which a trial date has not yet been set.Ben Ginsberg, who for decades was among the Republican Party’s top election lawyers before breaking with the party over Mr. Trump in 2020, said no amount of delegate machinations would be likely to stop a Trump nomination should he win enough early nominating contests.“If he wins Iowa and New Hampshire,” Mr. Ginsberg said, “I think it’s all over anyway.” More
Source: Election results and race calls are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Ilana Marcus, Charlie Smart and Isaac White. Editing by Wilson Andrews, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. More
Of all the descriptors attached to Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old political tyro enjoying a bizarre surge in the Republican primary race for second place, the most common one seems to be “annoying.” After the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, a Politico headline quoted a party strategist about Ramaswamy’s performance: “It just got to be annoying.” In a widely shared essay, the writer Josh Barro, a Harvard contemporary of Ramaswamy, probed the quality that “makes Vivek so annoying.” CNN’s S.E. Cupp called him, in a column: “Obnoxious. Annoying. Disrespectful. Inexperienced. Conspiratorial.”Matt Lewis, an anti-Trump conservative writer for The Daily Beast, marveled that there are some who actually like Ramaswamy’s cocky, know-it-all persona: “As Seinfeld might say, ‘Who are these people?’”The answer, of course, is much of the Republican Party. The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos polled likely Republican primary voters before and after last week’s debate. Following his performance, Ramaswamy’s favorability rating rose from 50 percent to 60 percent, even though his unfavorability rating rose even more, from 13 percent to 32 percent. Participants in a CNN focus group of Iowa Republicans declared him the debate’s winner, as did a poll released on Thursday from JL Partners. The day after the debate, his campaign reportedly raised more than $1 million.The question is what Ramaswamy’s supporters see in this irksome figure. Some Republicans, clearly, appreciate the way he sucks up to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy has called “the best president of the 21st century.” But that doesn’t explain the roughly 10 percent of Republicans who tell pollsters they’re planning to vote for Ramaswamy instead of Trump. It can’t only be his shtick as Fox News’s “woke and cancel-culture guru,” as one anchor called him, since at this point even the Florida governor Ron DeSantis has learned that railing against wokeness is a losing message. Nor is Ramaswamy’s appeal tailored to the downwardly mobile Trump voters who appreciated the former president’s pledges to protect their entitlements, since Ramaswamy’s promise to “dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s failed ‘Great Society’” makes Paul Ryan look like a social democrat.Instead, I suspect that Ramaswamy’s fans are drawn to him for all the reasons his critics find him insufferable. Conservatives love being championed by representatives of groups that they think disdain them. Despite the right’s deep resentment of the entertainment industry, Republicans tend to adore celebrity candidates, from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump. Think of the infamous tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” (They deleted it once the rapper Kanye West’s right turn veered into outright Hitler fandom.) At Democratic conventions I’ve seen famous actors walk around either unrecognized or ignored, while at Republican conventions C-listers are feted like superstars.Ramaswamy, too, is a performer, but what he’s performing is a parody of meritocratic excellence. If you’ve spent time around entitled Ivy League grads, you likely recognize him as an exaggerated version of a familiar type: the callow and condescending nerd who assumes that skill in one field translates to aptitude in all others. But to his fans, the very fact that he’s such a pure product of elite institutions — in addition to Harvard, he went to Yale Law and made his fortune with a biotech start-up he ran from Manhattan — likely gives him extra oomph as a class traitor.People who care about the basic workings of government are gobsmacked by Ramaswamy’s apparent ignorance — on Sunday, for example, he said that if he’d been in Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have pushed through election reform “in my capacity as president of the Senate.” But he’s good at sounding like he knows what he’s talking about. Sarah Longwell, a political strategist who has conducted extensive focus groups with Republican primary voters, said that people who like Ramaswamy inevitably say, “I think he’s really smart.”That’s why Chris Christie’s comparison of Ramaswamy to Barack Obama, whom conservatives saw as a smug, smooth-talking foreign interloper, fell flat. Ramaswamy’s very superficial similarities to Obama work for him, giving conservative audiences the satisfaction of hearing their resentments affirmed by a defector from the culture of the coastal gentry. At the debate, Ramaswamy encouraged the analogy when he ripped off an old Obama line to introduce himself as a “skinny guy with a funny last name.” Longwell doesn’t think Ramaswamy has a shot at beating Trump for the nomination, but, she said, “I think that Republicans want their own Obama.”Many older white conservatives, after all, feel threatened by multiethnic younger generations that largely reject their most fundamental values about faith, gender and patriotism. Ramaswamy is part of this menacing cohort, and he’s telling Republicans that their suspicions about it are correct. “More than anything, he has portrayed his generation and younger ones as empty souls living meaningless lives,” Jonathan Weisman wrote in The Times. He’s a young man running an anti-youth campaign; a centerpiece of Ramaswamy’s platform is a call to strip the franchise from most people under 25 unless they pass a civics test. And he’s a person of color who argues, even in the wake of another white supremacist mass shooting, that most American racism comes from the left. If he annoys those who find him most familiar, that’s surely part of the point.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
