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      Trump Could Clinch the Nomination Before the G.O.P. Knows if He’s a Felon

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      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

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      Mississippi Primary Runoff Election 2023: Live Results

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      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

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is Very Annoying. It’s Why He’s Surging in the Polls.

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      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

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      A New Trial Date. A New Primary Season.

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      A March trial could become the center of gravity of the G.O.P. primary, structuring the campaigns of Donald Trump and his rivals.This isn’t shaping up to be your usual presidential primary.On Monday, the judge overseeing the election subversion case against Donald J. Trump in Washington set a March 4 trial date, putting his trial right in the heart of primary season.If the trial goes as scheduled and lasts “no longer” than four to six weeks, as the government said in a filing, around two-thirds of the delegates to the Republican convention will be awarded during the trial of the party’s front-runner but, in all likelihood, before a verdict.A March trial could easily become the center of gravity of the primary season — the fact that structures the opportunities available to Mr. Trump and his rivals. It could even start to affect the calculations of the candidates today.When 2024 Republican Delegates Will Be AwardedAbout two-thirds of the delegates to the Republican convention could be awarded during the election subversion trial in Washington, which is expected to begin March 4. More

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      Democrats Want to Flip N.Y. House Seats. But There’s a Primary Problem.

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      To win back a key seat it lost in 2022, the party must first deal with a battle between Mondaire Jones and Liz Whitmer Gereghty, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s sister.Sipping iced coffee at a diner the other day, Liz Whitmer Gereghty looked every bit the dream recruit Democrats need to recapture this coveted suburban House seat north of New York City.She once owned a shop down the street, served on the school board and speaks passionately about abortion rights. She also happens to be the younger sister of one of her party’s brightest stars, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.“My rights are at risk,” said Ms. Gereghty, 50. “Everything feels very urgent, and I have a congressman who is not representing me, so I raised my hand.”Problem is, she was not the only one. Mondaire Jones, a popular former congressman who represented much of the area until January, is also running and believes he is the best candidate to defeat Representative Mike Lawler, the Republican incumbent.It is a pattern repeating itself in swing seats across the country this summer, but nowhere more so than New York, where ambitious Democrats eager to challenge Republicans defending seats that President Biden won are creating primary pileups from Long Island to Syracuse.Contested primaries have long been a reality for both parties. But after Democrats’ underperformance in 2022 made New York a national embarrassment, party officials and strategists have been increasingly worried that Democrat-on-Democrat fights could drain millions of dollars and bruise a crop of eventual nominees, threatening their carefully laid plans to wrest back House control.“My view is we shot ourselves in the foot last cycle, and we seem intent on shooting ourselves in the head this cycle,” said Howard Wolfson, who helps steer tens of millions of dollars in political spending as Michael R. Bloomberg’s adviser.“I can’t for the life of me understand why we can’t figure this out and ensure that we have one strong candidate running in each of these districts,” he added.Paradoxically, the problem could grow only more stark if Democrats win a lawsuit seeking to redraw the state’s district lines. That could ease the party’s path to victory, but also prompt the courts to push the primary date from June to late August, extending the bitter primary season and truncating the general election campaign.There is time for leaders like Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat and a New Yorker, to intervene if they want to. While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee rarely interferes in open primaries, there is a tradition of less direct maneuvering to boost preferred candidates and edge others out.So far, Mr. Jeffries appears to be doing the opposite — privately encouraging more potential candidates, with mixed success, according to four Democrats familiar with his outreach who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss it. He tried to nudge State Senator Michelle Hinchey into a Hudson Valley contest earlier this year and urged the former Nassau County executive, Laura Curran, to enter a large primary field for another seat as recently as July.Mr. Jeffries has also offered support to Tom Suozzi to enter the race for his old House seat on Long Island, where a crowded field of Democrats is circling Representative George Santos, a first-term Republican who faces federal fraud charges.The leader’s allies argue that the competition will strengthen their nominees, and brush off concerns that Democrats will be short on funds. A Democratic super PAC has already earmarked $45 million for New York races. And the D.C.C.C. is pitching donors — as recently as a party retreat in Torrey Pines, Calif., last weekend, according to an attendee — to give to special “nominee funds,” a kind of escrow account collecting money for primary winners.“Leader Jeffries has no plan to endorse in any Democratic primary in New York,” said Christie Stephenson, his spokeswoman. “He is confident that whoever emerges in these competitive districts will be strongly positioned to defeat the extreme MAGA Republican crowd.”But the mix of ego and ideology buffeting the star-studded race between Mr. Jones and Ms. Gereghty shows the potential risks, particularly in such a high-profile race to reclaim a Hudson Valley seat lost last year by Sean Patrick Maloney, who was the chairman of the Democratic campaign committee at the time.Mr. Jones held the Hudson Valley seat, but opted in 2022 to run for an open seat in New York City, where he lost in a primary.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Jones, an openly gay Black Democrat, represented a more liberal configuration of the seat in Congress last term. But after a court imposed new district lines in 2022, Mr. Maloney opted to run for Mr. Jones’s seat instead of his traditional one. Rather than run against a party leader, Mr. Jones chose to move 25 miles to Brooklyn to run for an open seat there.He lost and has now moved back north.In a phone interview, Mr. Jones, 36, said he was confident that voters would understand his “impossible situation,” but regretted his decision not to challenge Mr. Maloney, who lost to Mr. Lawler in a seat Mr. Biden won by 10 points.Mr. Jones said the outcome showed that “you can’t just substitute any Democrat for Mondaire Jones in this district.” More than 100 local and national officials and groups — from the Westchester Democratic chairwoman to the congressional Black and progressive caucuses — have backed his comeback attempt, making him the clear front-runner against Ms. Gereghty.But some of the positions Mr. Jones trumpeted to win more liberal electorates in earlier campaigns could prove cumbersome.He is already tacking toward the center and would say little about Ms. Gereghty in the interview. Mr. Jones referred to his own calls to defund the police in 2020 as “emotional, facile comments”; his current campaign features video of Mr. Jones shaking hands with a local police chief while touting votes to increase police funding.Mr. Jones said he wanted to see New York grant judges new authority to set cash bail for defendants they deem dangerous. And he said he would support a state plan to tax cars traveling into central Manhattan only if there was a carveout for the suburban counties he represented.Over breakfast in Katonah, an affluent Westchester suburb, Ms. Gereghty pitched her modest record as an electoral strength in a general election. She cast herself as a member of the get-it-done wing of the Democratic Party, like her sister, and predicted Mr. Lawler would gleefully use Mr. Jones’s words against him, as he did to Mr. Maloney.“If you got tired of the Sean Maloney ads last year, we’ll at least have some more variety if he’s the candidate,” she said.Ms. Gereghty serves on a school board in her district, and was a former shop owner in the area.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesMs. Gereghty has no plans to drop out. But she has struggled to amass local support.Her most notable endorsement comes from Emily’s List, the national group dedicated to electing women who back abortion rights. Of the $408,000 she’s raised thus far, almost half came from residents of Michigan.Democrats have caught some breaks in neighboring districts.Republicans have yet to field a top-tier challenger to Representative Pat Ryan, the only Democrat defending a swing seat here. They are also headed toward their own fraught primary if Mr. Santos continues to run.Elsewhere, the candidates are crowding in.Three Democrats, including Sarah Hughes, a former gold medal figure skater, are vying to represent the party against Representative Anthony D’Esposito in a Long Island district Mr. Biden won by 14 points.Three more have already raised at least $300,000 to run in Mr. Santos’s neighboring district. That does not include Mr. Suozzi or Robert Zimmerman, the party’s 2022 nominee, who is eyeing another run.A similar dynamic is playing out in Syracuse, where four Democrats are competing over whether a moderate or progressive should take on Representative Brandon Williams, a Republican who narrowly won a seat that favored Mr. Biden by eight points in 2020.“Primaries can be bloodying, and they cost a lot of money,” said Ms. Curran, who has decided not to run for Mr. D’Esposito’s seat. “It clouds the message and the mission.”Republicans have watched it all with delight.Mr. Lawler spent the month of August meeting constituents and gathering large campaign checks. He said he ran into Mr. Jones along the way and got an earful — about how frustrated the Democrat was to be stuck in a primary.He won’t have a Democratic primary vote, but Mr. Lawler, who will have to defend his own conservative votes unpopular in the district, made clear he has a preference.“Look, I’d be happy to run against either,” he said. “But Mondaire Jones certainly has a very long and detailed record that shows him clearly out of step.” More

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      The Thing Is, Most Republicans Really Like Trump

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      Much of what is happening in American politics today can be explained by two simple yet seemingly contradictory phenomena: Most partisans believe that the other side is more powerful than their own, while at the same time feeling quite certain that their own team will prevail in the upcoming election.Just as Democrats view Republicans as wielding outsize influence through dark money, structural advantages in our political system and control of institutions like the Supreme Court, Republicans view themselves as under siege by not just a federal government largely controlled by Democrats but also by the media, the entertainment industry and, increasingly, corporate C-suites.Republicans in particular hold a fatalistic view of the future of the country. In a recent Times poll, 56 percent said they believe we are “in danger of failing as a nation.” Far from the party of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad, the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy countered during last week’s debate: “It’s not morning in America. We live in a dark moment.”Given that many Republicans have such an apocalyptic view of the future, believing that the future of the country hangs in the balance if their party does not win the 2024 election, you might assume that Republicans would prioritize electability as they choose a nominee and seek a safe, steady standard-bearer to face President Biden next November. And you might assume, as many pundits and commentators do, that Republicans would begin to consider that nominating Donald Trump, with all his troubles and legal peril, would be too great a risk.But the belief that the other party would be simply disastrous for the nation is feeding the deep confidence that one’s own side is going to prevail in 2024.What does this mean for Republicans? It means that G.O.P. voters see Mr. Biden as eminently beatable, and they think most Americans see him as they do. Given that, most Republicans aren’t looking to be rescued from Donald Trump. The fact is, they really do like him, and at this point they think he’s their best shot.Despite losing the 2020 elections and then experiencing a disappointing 2022 midterm, most Republicans seem confident that their candidate — even Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump — would defeat Joe Biden handily in 2024. They have watched as Mr. Biden has increasingly stumbled, as gas prices have remained high and as Americans have continued to doubt the value of “Bidenomics.” Many of them believe the pernicious fantasy pushed by Trump — and indulged by too many Republican leaders who should know better — that the 2020 election was not actually a loss.Republican voters see the same polls that I do, showing Mr. Trump effectively tied against Mr. Biden even though commentators tell them that Mr. Trump is electoral poison. And they remember that many of those same voices told them in 2016 that Mr. Trump would never set foot in the White House. In light of those facts, Republicans’ skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser begins to make more sense.It didn’t have to be this way. In the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterms, which were disappointing for many Republicans, there was a brief moment where it seemed like the party might take a step back, reflect and decide to pursue a new approach — with new leadership. In my own polling immediately following the election, I found the Florida governor Ron DeSantis running even with Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup among likely Republican primary voters, a finding that held throughout the winter. Even voters who consider themselves “very conservative” gravitated away from Mr. Trump and toward the prospect of an alternative for a time.But by the end of the spring 2023, following the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis’s rocky entrance into the presidential race, not only had Mr. Trump regained his lead, he had expanded upon it. Quinnipiac’s polling of Republican primary voters showed that Mr. Trump held only a six-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in February, but that lead had grown to a whopping 31 points by May.Any notion that Republicans ought to turn the page, lest they face another electoral defeat, largely evaporated. And the multitude of criminal indictments against Mr. Trump have not shaken the support of Republicans for him, but have instead seemingly galvanized them.In our focus group of 11 Republican voters in early primary states this month, Times Opinion recruited a range of likely primary voters and caucusgoers to weigh in on the state of the race. They were not universally smitten with Donald Trump; some described him as “troubled,” “arrogant” or a “train wreck.” About half of our participants said they were interested in seeing a strong competitor to Mr. Trump within the party.But the argument that Donald Trump won’t be able to defeat Joe Biden? Not a single participant thought that Mr. Trump — or any Republican, really — would lose to Mr. Biden. In polling from CBS News, the ability to beat Joe Biden is one of the top qualities Republican primary voters say they are looking for, and they think Mr. Trump is the best poised to deliver on that result. Only 9 percent of likely Republican primary voters think Mr. Trump is a “long shot” to beat Mr. Biden, and more than six in 10 think Mr. Trump is a sure bet against Mr. Biden. Additionally, only 14 percent of Republican primary voters who are considering a Trump alternative said they were doing so because they worried Mr. Trump couldn’t win.In an otherwise strong debate performance last week, when Nikki Haley argued that “we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America — we can’t win a general election that way,” the reaction from the crowd was decidedly mixed. This isn’t to say such an argument can’t become more successful as the primary season goes on, as Mr. Trump’s legal woes (and legal bills) continue to mount and as the alternatives to Mr. Trump gain greater exposure.But for now they think that Mr. Biden is both enormously destructive and eminently beatable. They are undeterred by pleas from party elites who say Mr. Trump is taking the Republican Party to the point of no return.Republicans both deeply fear a 2024 loss and also can’t fathom it actually happening. Candidates seeking to defeat Mr. Trump in the primary can’t just assume Republican voters will naturally conclude the stakes are too high to bet it all on Trump. For now, many of those voters think Mr. Trump is the safest bet they’ve got.Kristen Soltis Anderson is a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups.Source photographs by Joe Raedle/Getty Images and Brian Snyder/ReutersThe 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

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the Millennial 2024 Candidate, Emphasizes His Generation

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      The 38-year-old entrepreneur says he has a plan to fix what ails Americans his age and younger, but many of his positions are out of step with those voters.Vivek Ramaswamy, rising in the polls and buoyed by the first Republican primary debate this week, was barnstorming through central Iowa on Friday with a trademark smile and a remarkably bleak generational diagnosis of what ails younger America.Millennials like himself, the entrepreneur and political newcomer explained to an overflowing audience in Pella, Iowa, “are starved for purpose, meaning and identity”; robbed of those anchors that made America great — “faith, patriotism, hard work, family”; and stumbling from one cult to another — race, gender, sexuality and climate activism. The government “systematically lies to us,” he said. He told another gathering in Indianola, “We face a nonzero risk that the United States of America could cease to exist,” obliterated by the blossoming alliance of Russia and China.Young Americans, he concluded, have “a black hole in our hearts.”It is hardly Ronald Reagan’s shining city on the hill, Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century or the countless evocations of American exceptionalism that have buoyed politics for decades now, including those offered by some of his 2024 rivals. And yet somehow his evocation of a generational malaise seems to resonate, at least with the crowds that are packing the restaurants, cafes and even larger venues in the state that will cast the first ballots this January for the Republican presidential nomination.Noticeably, however, those crowds don’t seem to include many young voters. And many of his views are out of step with those of his generation as well as with the one below it, particularly his positions on climate change — he loudly rejects prescriptions for combating it, like eliminating, or even reducing, the burning of fossil fuels — and the voting age, which he wants to raise, unless young voters can pass a civics test.Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, has never held elective office or worked in government, and he is competing for the presidential nomination in a party whose most loyal voters are baby boomers and Gen Xers, not millennials. (The Pew Research Center defines a millennial as anyone born between 1981 and 1996.)Yet in national polling averages, he is running second in the primary fight, far behind the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, but overtaking the man who was supposed to be Mr. Trump’s biggest threat, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Ramaswamy has pitched himself as the Republican future, a conservative in Mr. Trump’s image who holds forth at campaign events near a large list of commandments he’s labeled “truth.”Mr. Ramaswamy was greeted by crowds packing restaurants, cafes and larger venues in Iowa. While the crowds are dotted with younger people, they are largely made up of older voters.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHis rhetoric in recent weeks has become increasingly strident, though he still delivers those lines with the calm tones and seeming intellectualism of the Harvard debater he was. He speaks now of “revolution” and his own “radicalism.” On Friday, he condemned Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts; the author Ibram X. Kendi; and other avatars of what he called the “racism of the left” as “the modern grand wizards of the modern K.K.K.”But most of his proposals have not changed for months, including eliminating the Department of Education, the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service; firing 75 percent of the federal work force; ending all aid to Ukraine and freezing the battle lines where they are (“Those would be real wins for Putin, I admit that,” he allowed in Indianola); ending birthright citizenship; and using the military to attack the drug cartels in Mexico.His positions have simply gotten the attention of opponents who until now have declined to take him seriously. Former Vice President Mike Pence called him a “rookie” on Wednesday night. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, accused him of sounding like ChatGPT.“You have no foreign policy experience,” said Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, “and it shows.”But at his events, Iowa voters are clearly with him on policy. Their qualms lie elsewhere.“He’s too young for the country,” said Kevin Klucas, 55, of Oskaloosa, Iowa, not for me, but the country tends to vote for older presidents.”Outside the Fireside Bistro in Indianola, Dan Bailey, 67, and Pat Hoppenworth, 70, agreed that Mr. Ramaswamy, along with the other candidates not named Trump, were all auditioning to join Mr. Trump’s ticket, and that Mr. Ramaswamy had won them over. But they could not agree on the order of the ticket: Ms. Hoppenworth thought the younger man should be president, with the former president by his side; Mr. Bailey said Mr. Ramaswamy would be vice president.“I will never give up on Trump,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy’s views of American society, especially youthful society, could be politically risky. He doesn’t exactly deny the established science of human-made climate change, but he says climate change policy is a “hoax” and that “climatism,” what he calls the youth-driven activism seeking to reverse global warming, is a cult — a position that seems guaranteed to alienate young voters.He has proposed a constitutional amendment that would raise the legal voting age to 25, though 18- to 24-year-olds would retain the right to vote if they passed the same civics test that naturalized citizens must pass.More than anything, he has portrayed his generation and younger ones as empty souls living meaningless lives. “There’s more to life than the aimless passage of time, which is what we teach 18-year-olds today,” he said on Pella’s central square, to an audience at the Butcher’s Brewhuis that was so large dozens had to be turned away.Mr. Ramaswamy sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence during the debate on Wednesday over their idea of the country. The younger candidate said America was “in a dark moment.”Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMr. Ramaswamy’s views seem to strike a chord with the bulk of his audiences, who are older and unindicted by his observations. Rick Giarusso, a 61-year-old retired Army officer from Carlisle, Iowa, spoke of his 29-year-old son and his son’s 26-year-old wife, who he said are both “well-educated professionals” but with “a sense that something is missing.”The younger members of his audiences, a small minority, are more divided. Alex Foley, 32, a Pella resident, asked Mr. Ramaswamy a pointed question on his “truth” that “God is real,” and how he could unite a country where the idea of God inspires so many different beliefs. For Mr. Foley, who said he “loves Jesus intensely,” the notion of a young generation devoid of spirituality seemed alien. His own journey led him from drugs and clerking in a video store to a commitment to the Bible, hardly a path followed only by millennials.“Do I consider myself, aimless, purposeless, meaningless?” Mr. Foley said. “Of course, no one would like to consider themselves such thing. But do I feel like my generation has a particularly increased struggle to find what it is they should be fight for? I would say yes.”Taylor Harrison, 22, a Canadian from Alberta, and Drew Johnson, 24, from Pella, both members of Generation Z, saw the commotion at Butcher’s Brewhuis and packed in to see what Mr. Ramaswamy was all about.“Aimless and soulless, I wouldn’t say,” Ms. Harrison objected. She said her peers felt more that they had been dealt a bad hand, “so we’re not quite sure what to do with it.”“What sells on the news is just what’s wrong with everything,” Mr. Johnson chimed in. “Nobody wants to point out the good. No one wants to show the good things that are happening.”Austin Alexander, from Nashville, Tenn., was passing through Iowa and tracked Mr. Ramaswamy for much of the day. Mr. Alexander, who at 42 is a millennial, didn’t mind Mr. Ramaswamy’s portrayal of younger Americans, though he was quick to say that there were “a variety of faces in our generation.” Still, he said, he is old enough to remember when Lee Greenwood’s country anthem “Proud to Be an American” won over even young listeners. Now, he said, younger Americans are more likely to identify with the critique of violence, greed, nihilism and racism in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.”“I think he accurately diagnoses the lack of identity and purpose that some — many — in my generation and younger struggle with,” he said. “Especially with the identity of our country, there’s been a shift during my lifetime.” More

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      in Elections

      The Republican Debate Proved That Trump Has What It Takes

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      Like far too many of you, I watched the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, during which all of the most popular contenders in the field tried to stand out and establish themselves as a serious alternative for the Republican presidential nomination.An alternative to whom? Donald Trump, who wasn’t on stage for the debate. And yet, despite his absence, there was no way that any of the candidates could escape his presence. The former president loomed over the proceedings, not the least because he is, so far, the uncontested leader in the race for the nomination. His nearest competitor, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, still trails him by nearly 40 points.There’s also the fact that the candidates had no choice but to answer questions about Trump, who has been indicted on state and federal charges related to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The pretense of the debate was that the candidates could talk about themselves and the future of the Republican Party without the former president, but that was simply impossible.But the issue wasn’t just that Trump was unavoidable; it was that none of the other candidates had much to say for themselves. Even the most dynamic of the contenders, Vivek Ramaswamy, was doing little more than his own spin on Trump’s persona. As I argued in our post-debate recap, none of the candidates had any of the charisma or presence or vision that might mark them as something more than just another governor or legislator.Far from giving the other Republicans a chance to shine, Trump’s absence underscored the extent to which he is the only Republican of national stature with the political chops to appeal to Republican voters as well as a considerable chunk of the American electorate.It is obviously true that a major reason for Trump’s dominance in the Republican primaries is the fact that at no point since the 2020 election have Republican officeholders and other figures tried to set him aside as the leader of the party. But we can’t underestimate the extent to which Trump has it what it takes — and most of his competitors simply don’t.Now ReadingRuqaiyah Zarook on the network of lawyers, accountants and other fixers who shield the wealth of the super-rich from taxation, for Dissent magazine.Ratik Asokan on the long struggle of India’s sanitation workers for The New York Review of Books.Clare Malone on David Zaslav for The New Yorker.Ellen Meiksins Wood on capitalism and human emancipation for New Left Review.Marcia Chatelain on the persistence of American poverty for The Nation.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieI was up in the Adirondacks for the first time this summer and obviously spent a lot of time walking around and photographing lakes. This is a picture of Mirror Lake in Lake Placid, which was very picturesque.Now Eating: Masala Black-Eyed PeasAmong the things I hope to accomplish with this newsletter is getting people to eat more beans and field peas, both of which are versatile and affordable staple foods. This recipe, from NYT Cooking, for black-eyed peas in an Indian style, is very easy and very filling. I would serve with flatbreads, a green vegetable and a carrot raita. But by itself with steamed rice would be just as good and just as filling.Ingredients3 tablespoons ghee or neutral oil1 medium yellow or red onion, finely chopped1 ½ teaspoons ginger paste or freshly grated ginger1 ½ teaspoons garlic paste or freshly grated garlic1 teaspoon cumin seeds¾ teaspoon Kashmiri or other mild red chile powder¼ teaspoon ground turmeric3 Roma tomatoes, finely chopped or 1 (15-ounce) can crushed tomatoes1 teaspoon fine sea salt3 cups of cooked black-eyed peas, frozen or from dried3 fresh green Thai or serrano chiles, chopped2 tablespoons lemon juice (from about half a lemon)½ teaspoon garam masala2 tablespoons chopped cilantroDirectionsHeat ghee or oil in a medium-sized pot for 30 seconds on medium-low. Add onion, ginger and garlic, and cook on high heat, stirring frequently, until onions are transparent, 5 to 7 minutes.Stir in cumin seeds, chile powder and turmeric. Add tomatoes and salt. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes break down and the oil separates, 5 to 7 minutes. (If you want your finished dish to be less saucy, cook the tomatoes a little longer.)Stir in black-eyed peas and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and simmer 5 minutes to allow the flavors to meld. Top with green chiles, lemon juice, garam masala and cilantro, if you like. More