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      Black Voters’ Shift to Trump Is a Warning Sign for Biden, Strategists Say

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      New York Times/Siena College polling painted a worrisome picture of the president’s standing with a crucial constituency. Democratic strategists warned that the erosion could threaten his re-election.Black voters are more disconnected from the Democratic Party than they have been in decades, frustrated with what many see as inaction on their political priorities and unhappy with President Biden, a candidate they helped lift to the White House just three years ago.New polls by The New York Times and Siena College found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of the most important battleground states said they would support former President Donald J. Trump in next year’s election, and 71 percent would back Mr. Biden.The drift in support is striking, given that Mr. Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters nationally in 2020 and 6 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. A Republican presidential candidate has not won more than 12 percent of the Black vote in nearly half a century.Mr. Biden has a year to shore up his standing, but if numbers like these held up across the country in November 2024, they would amount to a historic shift: No Democratic presidential candidate since the civil rights era has earned less than 80 percent of the Black vote.The new polling offers an early warning sign about the erosion of Mr. Biden’s coalition, Democratic strategists said, cautioning that the president will probably lose his re-election bid if he cannot increase his support from this pivotal voting bloc.A number of Democratic strategists acknowledged that the downbeat numbers in battleground states extended beyond Black voters to the party’s core constituencies, warning that the Biden campaign had to take steps to improve its standing, particularly with Black, Latino and younger voters. The Times/Siena polls surveyed registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster for Mr. Biden’s campaign in 2020, said the president’s political operation had not been “present enough” for Black Americans and younger voters.“I don’t think we’ve been voicing what we delivered to the African American community and particularly among younger African American men,” she said. “We have to get the numbers up and we have to get African American voters out to vote, and we have to get the numbers up with young people and we have to get them out to vote.”Mr. Biden’s numbers in the polling were particularly low among Black men. Twenty-seven percent of Black men supported Mr. Trump, compared with 17 percent of Black women.Still, there are signs that Democrats’ hurdles with Black voters, however alarming for the party, leave room for improvement. About a quarter of Black voters who said they planned to support Mr. Trump said there was some chance they would end up backing Mr. Biden.Cornell Belcher, who worked as a pollster for former President Barack Obama, said he doubted that many Black voters would switch their support to Mr. Trump. His bigger fear, he said, is that they might not vote at all.“I’m not worried about Trump doubling his support with Black and brown voters,” said Mr. Belcher, who focuses particularly on surveying voters of color. “What I am worried about is turnout.”He added: “But that’s what campaigns are for. We build a campaign to solve for that problem.”Karen Wright, a business consultant in McDonough, Ga., who immigrated to the United States from Jamaica in 1982, said she had always voted for Democrats, seeing them as the best option for younger immigrants, particularly those from predominantly Black countries like hers.Now, though, she believes Mr. Biden has not followed through on his campaign promises on immigration, worries that Democrats have gone too far in their embrace of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and faults them for books used in public education that she believes are too sexually explicit.Next year, Ms. Wright, 53, said that she planned to support Republicans up and down the ballot — and that she was not alone.“My clients are mostly Black,” she said. “They voted Democrat last year and they all said next election they’re going to vote Republican.”Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, a group that aims to mobilize Black voters in Milwaukee, said canvassers who worked with her organization had encountered an overwhelming number of Black voters who did not want to vote or did not see the value in turning out again.“People are like: ‘Why should I vote? I don’t feel like voting. Voting doesn’t do anything. My life hasn’t changed,’” she said, adding that the group had found that high prices and housing instability had fed people’s pessimism. “If your basic needs aren’t being met, it’s difficult to pay attention to politics and it’s difficult to have faith in that system when you voted before but you’re still struggling day to day.”Still, Cliff Albright, a veteran progressive organizer and a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said Democrats had time to get back on track. Black voters, he said, are responding to the same fears about economic and global uncertainty that many Americans are confronting.“We’re a year out from the election,” Mr. Albright said. “If you ask the very same people the same question a year from now, when the choice is very clear, the same 22 percent might have a very different answer.”He added: “Is there work to be done? Yes. But is the sky falling? No.”Black voters have long powered Democratic presidential victories. Their support in South Carolina in 2020 set Mr. Biden on the path to becoming the nominee. During the general election, Black voters were again crucial to his victory.Officials with Mr. Biden’s campaign acknowledge that they have work to do to shore up the president’s standing with Black voters. Erin Schaff for The New York TimesBiden campaign officials now say they recognize they have work to do with Black voters, and they and their allies have begun multimillion-dollar engagement campaigns targeting them.Last month, the Biden campaign started an organizing program in Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The campaign has dispatched top surrogates to hold events aimed at Black voters and has bought advertising on Black radio programs that promotes the “real difference for Black America” his policies have made. “President Biden is getting it done,” a narrator says. “For us. And that’s the facts.”Quentin Fulks, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said, “We know we have to get to work and we have to communicate with these voters and we have to do it earlier than ever before.”In interviews, Black voters said they had seen little progress from the Biden administration on some of their top priorities, including student loan debt relief, affordable housing and accountability for the police.Some worried that Mr. Biden was more focused on foreign policy than on domestic issues like inflation. In the Times/Siena poll, 80 percent of Black voters rated the economy as “only fair” or “poor.”A few said that their openness to supporting Mr. Trump, despite his offensive comments about Black communities and the 91 felony charges he faces in several criminal cases, reflected their disaffection with Mr. Biden and his party more than any real affinity for the former president.Keyon Reynolds-Martin, a father of one in Milwaukee, praised what he saw as Mr. Trump’s prioritizing of the economy and domestic policy, recalling the stimulus checks he received during the pandemic. Mr. Trump initially did not support the relief checks, which were spearheaded by Democrats. He later affixed his signature to them, representing the first time a president’s name had appeared on an Internal Revenue Service disbursement.Mr. Reynolds-Martin, 25, said he planned to vote for Mr. Trump next fall, when he casts his first ballot ever.Of Mr. Biden, he said, “He’s not giving money to help the United States, but he’s giving money to other countries,” adding, “At least Donald Trump was trying to help the United States.”Talitha McLaren, 45, a home health aide in Philadelphia, said she was undecided about whether to vote in 2024.She worries about a total erosion of democracy under a second Trump administration, but she is also frustrated with Mr. Biden and his party for failing to tackle rising costs that have not kept pace with her income and for not providing help with her student loan debt. On Tuesday, she plans to vote for the Democrat running for mayor of her hometown.“Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to support the Democrats,” she said. “But they haven’t won me over yet on what they’re trying to do for the country. Because what they’re doing now ain’t working.”Alyce McFadden More

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      Why Biden Is Behind, and How He Could Come Back

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      A polling deficit against Trump across six key states is mainly about younger, nonwhite and less engaged voters. Kamala Harris performs slightly better.Four years ago, Joe Biden was the electability candidate — the broadly appealing, moderate Democrat from Scranton who promised to win the white working-class voters who elected Donald J. Trump.There are few signs of that electoral strength today. More

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      New York Election Will Test Asian Americans’ Political Power

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      Whether they stick with Democrats or continue their shift to the right, Asian American voters will help decide competitive races on Nov. 7.Two years ago, many Asian American voters in New York City demonstrated their political muscle by voting for Republicans in traditional Democratic enclaves, voicing their concerns about crime and education while sending a warning signal to Democrats.The message was quickly received.“Our party better start giving more” attention to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Representative Grace Meng, a Democrat and the first Asian American elected to Congress from New York, wrote on Twitter at the time, using more colorful language to drive home her point.Asian Americans’ growing political clout was also seen in the New York City Council that year, when a record five were elected, including the first Indian American and Korean American members.As the Nov. 7 election nears, in which every City Council seat will be up for grabs, Asian Americans’ strength — as well as their political alliances — will be put to another test.Several Asian Americans are running in this year’s Council races, most notably in a so-called Asian opportunity district in Brooklyn that was created last year as part of a once-a-decade redistricting process to reflect the community’s growth.“I’ve never seen so many Asian Americans running for office,” said Councilwoman Linda Lee, the Democratic incumbent from Eastern Queens who is running against Bernard Chow, a health care benefits adviser and a Republican, in another race where both major party nominees are of Asian descent.Councilwoman Linda Lee, a Democrat, was one of a record five Asian Americans to be elected to the Council in 2021.Janice Chung for The New York TimesWith Asian American influence clearly on the rise, Democratic and Republican leaders are strategizing over how best to capture their votes.Leading Democrats, including Attorney General Letitia James, have expressed concern that the party is losing touch with Asian American voters, especially in southern Brooklyn and Queens, in part because it has not capably battled “misinformation and disinformation.”Republicans, meanwhile, have cast the wave of migrants who have recently come to New York in a negative light, hoping to attract more conservative Asian American voters by deploying a similar strategy as last year, when they amplified fears of crime as a wedge issue.Focusing on such issues may attract Asian American swing voters who may not otherwise be inclined to “completely flip Republican,” said Jerry Kassar, chairman of the state Conservative Party, but are “willing to cast their vote for Republicans.”The Queens district being contested by Ms. Lee and Mr. Chow includes the Hollis, Douglaston and Bellerose neighborhoods and is 45 percent Asian. Like in many districts with significant Asian American populations, Democrats and Republicans there often hold similar stances on the top line issues of public safety, education and the arrival of migrants.Both Ms. Lee and Mr. Chow opposed the placement of a tent complex for 1,000 men in the parking lot of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Floral Park, Queens, but Mr. Chow contends, incorrectly, that the migrants are here illegally.“I earned my way in,” said Mr. Chow, who emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States to attend college before becoming a citizen.In July, while Ms. Lee was holding a news conference in a building near the psychiatric center to oppose the tent city, on the grounds that the infrastructure in the area wasn’t sufficient to provide for 1,000 additional people, Mr. Chow was outside with protesters, some who held up signs that said “send them back.”Mr. Chow said opposing the shelter was not enough and that Ms. Lee could have done more, including standing with protesters to demand change. Ms. Lee said she spends time with voters explaining what she has done to mitigate issues around the tent city but rejects the xenophobic comments made at some of the rallies.“Asylum seekers come here from horrible situations, and they want to work,” Ms. Lee said.In northern Queens, Asian American voters are being courted in a rematch of a 2021 election in which the Republican candidate, Vickie Paladino, narrowly defeated Tony Avella, a Democrat.Councilwoman Vickie Paladino, a Republican, works with three surrogates, including Yanling Zhang, right, to better reach Asian American voters.Janice Chung for The New York TimesMs. Paladino often knocks on doors with one of three Asian American surrogates, and Mr. Avella has prioritized printing campaign fliers in Mandarin and Korean, reflecting the fact that Asians now comprise 38 percent of the district.“I think the Asian community is finally coming into its own,” Mr. Avella said. “For decades, they were not listened to. Now, they can turn an election.”Asians are the fastest growing group in New York City, according to the 2020 census, which shows that New York City gained 630,000 new residents, 55 percent of whom are Asian, in the previous decade. “Asian Americans are a waking giant,” said Trip Yang, a Democratic consultant who is working on Mr. Avella’s campaign. “We’re not sleeping any more.”Both Ms. Paladino and Mr. Avella have said the nation’s southern border should be closed because of how the migrant crisis is affecting the city.But Mr. Avella has accused Ms. Paladino of making xenophobic remarks about Asians. He sent out a campaign mailer highlighting comments that Ms. Paladino made about how many “Asian languages” there are and noting that she liked a social media post saying that the country should “stop catering to Asians” because “we speak English,” using an expletive for emphasis.Ms. Paladino said Mr. Avella had dug up “joke tweets” from years ago because he had “nothing productive to add to the conversation,” and that she had worked on behalf of Asian Americans for years.Tony Avella, left, prints campaign fliers in Mandarin and Korean, in recognition that 38 percent of his district is of Asian descent.Janice Chung for The New York TimesIn the new Asian opportunity district in southern Brooklyn, the Democratic nominee, Susan Zhuang, and the Republican nominee, Ying Tan, each held rallies in August to oppose a migrant center in Sunset Park that is not even located in their district.Ms. Zhuang and Ms. Tan have focused their campaigns on crime, quality-of-life issues and education, as they fight to represent a district that is 54 percent Asian.During a recent debate, they argued over whether the other had done enough to protect the specialized high school entrance exam and speak out against migrant shelters. Ms. Tan said the city’s right to shelter should be eliminated entirely, while Ms. Zhuang said it should not apply to recent migrants.Mr. Yang, the Democratic consultant, said that the candidates’ response to the migrant influx illustrates how many Asian American voters are more concerned with particular issues than political party lines. Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, are more likely to be unaffiliated with a political party than any racial minority, he added.Hate crimes against Asian Americans is one those issues. A protest on Monday about a 13-year-old Asian teen who was beaten by an adult drew both Mr. Chow and John Liu, a center-left Democratic state senator and the first Asian American elected to citywide office.Both Mr. Liu and Mr. Chow called for criminal charges against the teen’s father to be dropped because he was acting in self-defense.“Incidents like that make people aware in terms of the importance of local elected officials,” said Yiatin Chu, president of the Asian Wave Alliance, which co-sponsored the protest. “What are they saying? How are they helping us navigate these things?”The protest was one of many recent examples of how Asian Americans are pushing elected Democrats to take their concerns more seriously.Shekar Krishnan, the first Indian American elected to the City Council, has a large Bangladeshi population in his district, but noted that there were very few Bengali dual-language programs in public schools.“Government is not hearing our concerns and not taking them seriously enough and treats us still like a monolith,” said Mr. Krishnan, who represents Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens.Grace Lee, an assemblywoman who represents Lower Manhattan, and Mr. Liu are publicly working to protect the commuter vans that are prevalent in Asian communities, and make sure they are not unduly harmed by new congestion pricing rules.The vans are a form of mass transit “that is vital to the Asian American community,” Ms. Lee said. “Those are the sort of things where representation matters.”Ms. Meng said she was starting to see things change. In a recent special election in a Queens Assembly district covering Kew Gardens, College Point and Whitestone, Democrats were able to win over voters who had supported Lee Zeldin, last year’s Republican nominee for governor, instead of Gov. Kathy Hochul.The Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee ran ads in Asian media every day during early voting and worked with a Chinese newspaper to place messages in WeChat, a Chinese messaging app.Councilwoman Sandra Ung represents a district in Flushing, Queens, that has the state’s highest share of Asians.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesOn a warm Friday evening, Sandra Ung, one of the five Asian Americans elected to the Council in 2021, walked north on Main Street in Flushing to knock on doors. Asians comprise 72 percent of her district, the highest share in the city, and Ms. Ung wanted to reach older, first-generation immigrants.One woman, speaking in Mandarin, wanted help finding her polling place. Ms. Ung, a Democrat, and her campaign manager both pulled out their phones.“Ni hao,” Ms. Ung said to another woman who stuck her hand out of the door just far enough to grab a flier written in Mandarin, Korean and English. After a brief conversation in Chinese, the woman said she planned to vote for Ms. Ung.“Sometimes,” Ms. Ung said as she headed for the next apartment, “they just want to have someone who is speaking their language.” More

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      Tim Scott Tackles Race and Racism in Chicago, Trying to Gain Traction

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina gave his speech as his struggling presidential campaign said it would move most of its staff to Iowa.Senator Tim Scott, struggling to gain traction less than three months before the first Republican primary ballots are cast, came to the South Side of Chicago on Monday to rebuke the welfare state and the liberal politicians he dismissed as “drug dealers of despair.”The speech was at New Beginnings Church in the poor neighborhood of Woodlawn. It may have been delivered to Black Chicagoans, but the South Carolina senator’s broadsides — criticizing “the radical left,” the first Black female vice president, Kamala Harris, and “liberal elites” who want a “valueless, faithless, fatherless America where the government becomes God” — were aimed at an audience far away. That audience was Republican voters in the early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the donors who have peeled away from his campaign.His political persona as the “happy warrior” gave way to a chin-out antagonism toward the Black leaders who run the nation’s third-largest city, and the Democratic Party that “would rather lower the bar for people of color than raise the bar on their own leadership.”Speaking to a largely receptive audience in a church run by a charismatic Republican pastor, Mr. Scott added: “They say they want low-income Americans and people of color to rise, but their actions take us in the opposite direction. The actions say they want us to sit down, shut up and don’t forget to vote as long as we’re voting blue.”The speech came just minutes before a Scott campaign staff call announcing that the senator’s once-flush campaign would move most of its resources and staff to Iowa, in a last-ditch effort to win the first caucus of the season and rescue the campaign.“Tim Scott is all in on Iowa,” his campaign manager, Jennifer DeCasper, said in a statement.Mr. Scott, the first Black Republican senator from the South in more than a century, launched his presidential bid in May, with a roster of prominent Republicans behind him, a $22 million war chest and a message of optimism that separated him from the crowded primary field. To many white Republicans, his message on race, delivered as a son of South Carolina, where slavery was deeply embedded and where the Civil War began, resonated, while many Black Democrats found it naïve and insulting.“If you stop at our original sin, you have not started the story of America, because the story of America is not defined by our original sin,” he said early this year as he considered a presidential run. “The story of America is defined by our redemption.”But from the beginning, even supporters wondered aloud whether optimism and uplift were what Republican voters wanted, after so many years of Donald J. Trump and the rising culture of vengeance in the G.O.P.This past weekend, Don Schmidt, 78, a retired banker from Hudson, Iowa, put it bluntly to Mr. Scott as the senator campaigned in Cedar Falls before the University of Northern Iowa beat the University of North Dakota in football. Mr. Schmidt told Mr. Scott he was thinking of supporting him or Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor.“But,” he cautioned, “I don’t know whether you can beat Trump.”Race has lately been a particularly problematic subject for Mr. Scott. He has at once maintained there is no such thing as systemic racism in the United States, but has also spoken of having a grandfather forced from school in the third grade to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South, and of his own brushes with law enforcement simply because he was driving a new car.His audience on Monday on the South Side were the grandchildren of the Black workers who left the segregated South during the Great Migration to lean their shoulders into the industrialization of the Upper Midwest. And he seemed to invite the pushback he got after the speech as part of the political theater.Rodrick Wimberly, a 54-year-old congregant at the New Beginnings Church, was incredulous that Mr. Scott really did not believe that the failings of some Black people were brought on by systemic impediments. He brought up redlining that kept Black Chicagoans out of safer neighborhoods with better schools and lending discrimination that suppressed Black entrepreneurship and homeownership.“What we see in education, in housing, the wealth gap widening, there is statistical data to show or suggest at the very least there are some issues that are systemic,” Mr. Wimberly told the senator. “It’s not just individual.”But Mr. Scott held his ground, just as he has since June, when the senator tried to stir up interest in his campaign with a clash on the television show “The View” over an assertion that he didn’t “get” American racism.When Mr. Wimberly suggested that the failing educational system was an example of the systemic racism holding Black Chicagoans back, Mr. Scott responded: “But who’s running that system? Black people are running that system.”Such sparring has largely failed to lift his campaign, however. On Saturday, his hometown newspaper, The Post and Courier of Charleston, advised Mr. Scott and other Republican candidates to drop out and endorse Ms. Haley as the candidate best positioned to challenge Mr. Trump in the primaries, which begin in fewer than three months.Last week, Mr. Scott’s super PAC, Trust in the Mission PAC, or TIM PAC, told donors it would cancel “all of our fall media inventory.”“We aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” Rob Collins, a Republican strategist who is a co-chairman of the super PAC, wrote in the blunt memo. As Bill Brune, 73, a Republican and Army veteran from La Motte, Iowa, put it this weekend: “There’s a lot of good people, but they get no attention. The good guys finish last.”Republican politicians, including Mr. Trump, who has a glittering high-rise hotel on the Chicago River, have for years used the city as a stand-in for urban decay and violence, though that portrait is at best incomplete. Vivek Ramaswamy, another Republican presidential candidate, came to a different South Side neighborhood three miles from New Beginnings in May to discuss tensions among Black residents over the city’s efforts to accommodate an influx of migrants, many of whom were bused there from the border by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas — but also to show his willingness to speak with audiences usually ignored by Republican candidates.Monday’s appearance was, in effect, Mr. Scott’s take on adopting — and amplifying — Mr. Ramaswamy’s flair for the dramatic. Shabazz Muhammad, 51, was released from prison in 2020, after serving 31 years. Since then, he said, he has struggled to find work and housing because of his record and what he called “the social booby traps” in his way. Beyond the candidate’s critique of the welfare state, Mr. Muhammad wanted to know specifically what Mr. Scott wanted to do to help people like him.Mr. Scott, though sympathetic, was unwavering in his description of social welfare policies as “colossal, crippling, continual failures.”“Are we tough enough to get better and not bitter?” he asked his audience.Neil Vigdor More

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      Indigenous Australians Say ‘Reconciliation Is Dead’ After ‘Voice’

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      The rejection of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament is likely to lead to an irreversible shift in the nation’s relationship with its first peoples.The result of the referendum was decisive, and at the same time, divisive. It bruised Indigenous Australians who for decades had hoped that a conciliatory approach would help right the wrongs of the country’s colonial history. So, the nation’s leader made a plea.“This moment of disagreement does not define us. And it will not divide us,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, visibly emotional, said this month, after voters in every state and territory except one rejected the constitutional referendum. “This is not the end for reconciliation.”But that was a difficult proposition to accept for Indigenous leaders who saw the result as a vote for a tortured status quo in a country that is already far behind other colonized nations in reconciling with its first inhabitants.The rejection of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament — a proposed advisory body — was widely anticipated. Nonetheless, it was a severe blow for Indigenous people, who largely voted for it. With many perceiving it as the denial of their past and their place in the nation, the defeat of the Voice not only threatens to derail any further reconciliation but could also unleash a much more confrontational approach to Indigenous rights and race relations in Australia.Supporters of the “Yes” campaign in Sydney this month.Jenny Evans/Getty Images“Reconciliation only works if you have two parties who are willing to make up after a fight and move on,” said Larissa Baldwin Roberts, an Aboriginal woman and the chief executive of GetUp, a progressive activist group that campaigned for the Voice. “But if one party doesn’t acknowledge that there is even a fight here that’s happened, how can you reconcile?”She added, “We need to move into a space that is maybe not as polite, maybe not as conciliatory and be unafraid to tell people the warts-and-all story around how dispossession and colonization continues in this country.”For Marcia Langton, one of the country’s most prominent Aboriginal leaders, the consequences were obvious. “It’s very clear that reconciliation is dead,” she said.For decades, Ms. Langton and others championed a moderate approach to Indigenous rights. They worked within Australia’s reconciliation movement, a broadly bipartisan government approach aimed at healing and strengthening the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.One visible sign of this effort is the flying of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags next to the Australian flag in most official settings. Many public events start with an acknowledgment of the traditional owners of the land the event is held on.But activists have long said that these displays can be tokenistic, and the focus on unity can come at the expense of agitating for Indigenous rights. And the referendum has shown that wide schisms still persist in how Australia views its colonial past — as benign or harmful — and over whether the entrenched disadvantages of Indigenous communities result from colonization or people’s own actions, culture and ways of life.“We are very much behind other countries in their relationships with Indigenous people,” said Hannah McGlade, a member of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, who is an Aboriginal woman and a supporter of the Voice.A rally against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Melbourne last month.James Ross/Australian Associated Press, via ReutersIn countries like Finland, Sweden and Norway, the Sami people have a legal right to be consulted on issues affecting their communities. Canada has recognized First Nations treaty rights in its Constitution, and New Zealand signed a treaty with the Maori in the late 1800s.British colonialists considered Australia uninhabited, and the country has never signed a treaty with its Indigenous people, who are not mentioned in its Constitution, which was produced more than a century after Captain Cook first reached the continent.To rectify this, more than 250 Indigenous leaders came together in 2017 and devised a three-step plan for forgiveness and healing. The first was a Voice, enshrined in the Constitution. A treaty with the government would follow, and finally, a process of “truth-telling” to uncover Australia’s colonial history.But some Indigenous activists argued that forgiveness shouldn’t be on offer. And other Australians were rankled by the suggestion that there was something to forgive.“The English did nothing wrong. Neither did any of you,” one author wrote for a national newspaper earlier this year. Another columnist argued that any compensation paid to Aboriginal people now would be “by people today who didn’t do the harm, to people today who didn’t suffer it.”Some Aboriginal leaders opposed the Voice but by and large, polls showed, the Indigenous community was in favor of it.Aboriginal residents in Jimbalakudunj in a remote part of Western Australia.Tamati Smith for The New York TimesBut for many opponents, “this was cast as a referendum about race, division and racial privileges, special privileges — it really failed to grasp or respect Indigenous people’s rights and the shocking history of colonization, which has devastating impacts to this day,” Ms. McGlade said.For decades, the country has gone back and forth on how improve Indigenous outcomes. The community has a life expectancy that is eight years shorter than the national average, and suffers rates of suicide and incarceration many times higher than the general population.Although many Indigenous leaders and experts have said the repercussions of and trauma from colonization are the root cause of this disadvantage, governments — particularly conservative ones — have been resistant to this idea. The remedy, some former prime ministers have said, is to integrate remote Indigenous communities with mainstream society.During the debate about the Voice, this view was echoed by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an Aboriginal senator who became a prominent opponent of the Voice, and who said that Indigenous people faced “no ongoing negative impacts of colonization.” Aboriginal communities experienced violence “not because of the effects of colonization, but because it’s expected that young girls are married off to older husbands in arranged marriages,” she added.Such arguments helped galvanize opposition to the Voice.“A significant chunk of the Australian public has been able to find legitimacy in that opposition to not to come to terms with that past,” said Paul Strangio, a professor of politics at Monash University.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia and the minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, delivering statements on the referendum results in Canberra this month.Lukas Coch/EPA, via ShutterstockIn April, the main opposition party, the conservative Liberal Party, said it would vote against the Voice, all but sealing its fate — constitutional change has never succeeded in Australia without bipartisan support. Its leaders argued that proposal was divisive, lacked detail, could give advice on everything from taxes to defense policy, and was a politically correct vanity project from Mr. Albanese, the prime minister, that distracted people from issues like the high cost of living.This stance, Mr. Strangio said, appealed to a sense of “economic and cultural insecurity” among many voters, particularly those outside big cities.The particulars of the Voice, Mr. Albanese and other supporters said, would have been hashed out by Parliament if it succeeded. But the lack of concrete details gave rise to misinformation and disinformation, the sheer volume of which shocked experts. In such a climate, any pursuit of more forceful politics by Indigenous activists may bring a more combative response. On Friday, Tony Abbott, a former conservative prime minister, said Australia should stop flying the Aboriginal flag next to the national flag, and acknowledging traditional place names.The defeat of the Voice, Mr. Strangio said, is likely to emboldened the conservative opposition to continue with “the politics of disenchantment, of cultural and economic insecurity, that taps into that grievance politics.”He added, “We are in for a polarized, divisive debate.” More

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      As Haley and Ramaswamy Rise, Some Indian Americans Have Mixed Feelings

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      Democrats and Republicans have been courting the small but fast-growing and vital demographic in purple suburbs and swing states.Suresh Reddy, a centrist Democrat and city councilman, is watching the Republican presidential primary with a mix of pride and disappointment.When Mr. Reddy and his wife, Chandra Gangareddy, immigrants from southern India, settled in the Des Moines suburbs in September 2004, they could count the number of Indian American families on one hand. Only one Indian American had ever served in Congress at the time, and none had dared to mount a bid for the White House.Now, for the first time in the nation’s history, two Indian Americans — Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy — are serious presidential contenders who regularly invoke their parents’ immigrant roots. But their deeply conservative views, on display as they seek the Republican nomination, make it difficult for Mr. Reddy to fully celebrate the moment, he said.“I’m really proud,” he said. “I just wish they had a better message.”That disconnect, reflected in interviews with two dozen Indian American voters, donors and elected officials from across the political spectrum — in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and across the country — may complicate the G.O.P.’s efforts to appeal to the small but influential Indian American electorate.Indian Americans now make up about 2.1 million, or roughly 16 percent, of the estimated 13.4 million Asian Americans who are eligible to vote, the third largest population of Asian origin behind Chinese and Filipino Americans, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the 2021 American Community Survey. Indian Americans also have tended to lean more Democratic than any other Asian American subgroups, according to Pew.Though a small slice of the overall electorate, the demographic has become one of the fastest-growing constituencies, and is large enough to make a difference at the margins in swing states and in purple suburbs, including in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada.Debate over the prominence of Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy is playing out in Indian American homes and places of worship in Des Moines and beyond. In interviews, many described their rise as a political triumph at a time when Indian Americans have become more visible in fields beyond medicine, tech and engineering.Venu Rao, a Democrat and retired engineer and program manager in Hollis, N.H., said Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy captured the ideological diversity among South Asian Americans, even if he doesn’t agree with their positions.“I am glad that we have a choice,” Mr. Rao said.But many of those interviewed also expressed frustration and dismay over the candidates’ hard-line positions on issues like race, identity and immigration. Some worried Mr. Ramaswamy’s pledges to dismantle agencies like the Education Department would destroy the same institutions that had been crucial to Indian American success and upward mobility.Others said they appreciated Ms. Haley’s attempts to strike a more center-right tone on some topics like abortion and climate change but indicated concern about what they described as her tepid pushback against former President Donald J. Trump and his 2020 election lies.“It can be really easy to see this as a win and be like, ‘Oh my god — look there, those are two brown faces on national TV. That’s amazing,’” said Nikhil Vootkur, 20, a student at Tufts University in Boston. But, “the diaspora, it has matured, and when a diaspora matures, you have a lot of ideological cleavages.”Over the past decade, Indian Americans have been rapidly climbing the political ranks. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat and the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, is the first woman, first Black person and the first Asian American to hold her office.Khimanand Upreti, the priest at a Hindu temple in Madrid, Iowa, described Mr. Ramaswamy as “very fresh and clean” and without former President Donald Trump’s controversies.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesIn 2015, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a onetime rising Republican star, became the first Indian American to run for president. But Mr. Jindal, who changed his name, Piyush, to Bobby and converted to Christianity when he was young, made a push for assimilation that turned off many Indian American voters. Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy have toggled between proud embraces of their roots and scorching criticism of the “identity politics” that has been known to alienate the Republican Party’s largely white and evangelical Christian base.Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, a political newcomer and millionaire entrepreneur from Cincinnati, Ohio, uses his Hindu faith to connect with Christian voters and expresses gratitude that his parents immigrated from the southwestern coast of India to the “greatest nation on Earth.”Ms. Haley, 51, a former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador from Bamberg, S.C., has written and spoken extensively about her experience as the daughter of Sikh immigrants from northern India, including the pain of watching her father, who wears a turban, endure racism and discrimination.Mr. Ramaswamy, who is running in the mold of Mr. Trump, has made a concerted effort to appeal to Indian Americans in the primary. He has made several appearances at the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Iowa, where many patrons have met his parents, and he has drawn the independent support of its Hindu priest, Khimanand Upreti, who in an interview described Mr. Ramaswamy as “very fresh and clean” and without Mr. Trump’s controversies.On the trail, Ms. Haley has talked less about her identity and often describes her immigrant family in general terms. But in a response to a voter question at a town hall in Hampton, N.H., on Thursday night, she explained how her father’s experience with prejudice helped her connect with a hurting community and persuade state lawmakers to take down the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State House, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston. She also used her parents’ immigrant background to tear into President Biden’s decision to provide temporary protected status and work permits for Venezuelan migrants.“My mom would always say if you don’t follow the laws to get into this country, you won’t follow the laws when you are in this country,” she said.At their home in Waukee, west of Des Moines, Nishant Kumar and Smita Nishant, who immigrated from New Delhi and Mumbai some two decades ago, and their daughter, Anika Yadav, 17, said the 2024 Iowa caucuses would be the first election they would all be able to participate in. The Nishants have only recently obtained citizenship, and Ms. Yadav will be old enough to vote in the next presidential election.The Nishant family in Waukee, Iowa: Smita Nishant and her husband, Nishant Kumar, with Anika Yadav and Atiksh Yadava. They are looking forward to voting next year.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe family first became politically engaged when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 — and would have backed Democrats in the past few elections if they could have voted. But as they weigh the 2024 presidential contenders, they have found Mr. Ramaswamy smart and refreshing, they said.They have seen less of Ms. Haley, but Ms. Yadav says she likes Ms. Haley’s experience on foreign policy and the way she holds herself on the national stage, even if she has not made her Indian American identity central to her campaign.“I think a lot of women, specifically young women, are leaning toward Nikki Haley — even young women who are Democrats,” she said.Still, some Indian American Democratic-leaning voters and prominent Indian American Democrats expressed concern or sadness over Mr. Ramaswamy’s and Ms. Haley’s approaches to issues of race and identity, saying they fed into “model minority” stereotypes and carried dog whistles that minimized or diminished the specific systematic racism faced by Black Americans.Both, when discussing their life story, tend to emphasize their successes as evidence of racial and ethnic progress in the United States. Both promote hard-line immigration measures and denounce race-conscious policies such as affirmative action in school admissions.Mr. Ramaswamy in particular has generated criticism for suggesting white supremacy was an exaggerated “boogeyman” and for pledging to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Ms. Haley has said she opposes birthright citizenship for people who have illegally entered the country.Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, criticized their approach on immigration and faulted them for ignoring the history of Asian exclusion in the nation’s immigration laws. The work of Indian and Black leaders during the civil rights movement helped open the pathways to migration and citizenship for Indian families to enter the United States, he said.“Their story about the Indian American experience will not fully connect because it has so many omissions,” Mr. Khanna said.But Bhavna Vasudeva, a longtime friend of Ms. Haley’s in Columbia, S.C., argued that Ms. Haley’s Republican values held real appeal for second-generation Indian Americans, adding that her approach to her family’s racial struggles exhibited a strong sense of “Chardi Kala,” an expression that for Punjabi and Sikh Indians and Indian Americans has become synonymous with “resilience” and a “positive attitude” in the face of fear or pain.“You can’t tell anyone who is a brown woman about racism and discrimination,” Ms. Vasudeva, a donor to Ms. Haley’s campaign, said. “We have faced it all with our heads high and crown straight.” More

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      After Jacksonville, Tensions Flare Between DeSantis and Black Floridians

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      At a vigil for the shooting victims, Mr. DeSantis had to speak over loud boos from a largely Black crowd. His agenda in Florida has earned him few Black allies.Days after being sworn in as Florida’s governor in 2019, Ron DeSantis pardoned the Groveland Four, a group of Black men who had been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a white woman decades earlier.At the time, Mr. DeSantis’s decision seemed like it could serve as a vital olive branch to Florida’s wary African American community. Accusations of racism had trailed him throughout a bruising general election, which he had begun by warning voters not to “monkey this up” by voting for his Democratic opponent, who was Black. The case of the Groveland Four, who all died before having their names cleared, had received national attention, and Mr. DeSantis said their treatment represented a “miscarriage of justice.”Four years later, Mr. DeSantis’s relationship with Black Floridians could hardly be worse. As he moved increasingly to the right ahead of his run for president, Mr. DeSantis pushed an agenda that cemented his status as a rising conservative star nationally but that has outraged many Black voters and leaders in his home state.Those policies include changing how slavery is taught in schools, cutting funding for diversity and inclusion initiatives and redistricting a Black-led congressional district in northern Florida out of existence. Some Black professional groups have stopped holding conferences in the state, while several Black leaders have condemned Florida — and Mr. DeSantis — as an example of racism in policymaking.Now, a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville that killed three Black people over the weekend has escalated those tensions to new heights.At a vigil on Sunday for the victims, Mr. DeSantis had to speak over loud boos from the largely Black crowd. He condemned the murders and called the killer, a white man who the authorities said intentionally targeted Black people before killing himself, “a major-league scumbag.”Mr. DeSantis was confronted with loud boos at the vigil for the shooting victims.John Raoux/Associated PressJeffrey Rumlin, a pastor who spoke after Mr. DeSantis, offered a correction. “Respect for the governor,” Mr. Rumlin, who is Black, told the crowd, but “he was not a scumbag. He was a racist.”Shevrin Jones, a state senator from South Florida, said Mr. DeSantis’s reception at the vigil was telling.“The response from Jacksonville’s Black community was the response from the Black community across the state of Florida,” said Mr. Jones, a Black Democrat. “We’ve never had a relationship with the governor.”Mr. DeSantis’s office, which is preparing for a major hurricane, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did his campaign.Kiyan Michael, a Republican state representative from the Jacksonville area, defended Mr. DeSantis. Far from being racist, she said, his support for policies like universal school choice and efforts to crack down on the employment of undocumented immigrants, had helped African Americans. The governor made modest gains with Black voters in his re-election last year, according to an Associated Press analysis.Ms. Michael, who is Black, also praised Mr. DeSantis for attending the Jacksonville vigil.“He could have sent somebody in his place. He didn’t,” she said. “He knew that he was going into a hornet’s nest, but he came himself to show his heart, his concern, his compassion.”The list of policies that Mr. DeSantis’s critics describe as harmful to African Americans is long, and many have been challenged in court.As governor, Mr. DeSantis sought to restrict enacting a popular referendum to restore the voting rights of many felons. After the George Floyd rallies, he signed legislation that many civil rights activists said criminalized political protests, as well as laws eliminating diversity and inclusion spending from state universities and restricting the teaching of the academic framework known as critical race theory. He also set up a new state police force to enforce election laws that arrested mainly Black people in a high-profile sweep and has seen many of its cases stumble in court. And he removed two elected state attorneys from office. Both were Democrats who supported criminal justice reform. One was Black.Perhaps the biggest backlash was early this year, when Florida education officials rejected an Advanced Placement course on African American studies and subsequently adopted new standards that said students should be taught how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The line was widely denounced, with a number of Black conservatives, including Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 rival Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, criticizing its inclusion.In the presidential race, Mr. DeSantis has leaned on his “war on woke,” aiming to eliminate liberal viewpoints on race and gender from many parts of public life.Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald, via Associated PressA backlash came when Florida education officials said students should be taught how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat, via Associated PressMr. DeSantis defended the changes, saying on Fox News this month that the standards overwhelmingly showed the “injustices of slavery,” while also demonstrating that “people acquired skills in spite of slavery, not because of it, and then they used those when they achieved their freedom.”As a young man, Mr. DeSantis taught American history at a private boarding school in Georgia. There, The New York Times previously reported, some students said he offered lessons on the Civil War that seemed slanted, factually wrong and sometimes presented in ways that sounded like attempts to justify slavery.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has leaned on his record leading Florida, particularly his “war on woke,” which seeks to eliminate liberal viewpoints on race and gender from many parts of public life. Republican primary voters have generally responded well, although Mr. DeSantis is still polling far behind the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.A general election, however, could be a different story. Mr. DeSantis’s status as a lightning rod for racial issues could galvanize Black turnout against him. Black voters are a key part of the Democratic electorate and their participation at the polls is vital. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost to Mr. Trump as Black turnout declined in a presidential election for the first time in 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center. Four years later, Joseph R. Biden Jr. won as Black voters came back to the polls in higher numbers.Angie Nixon, a Democratic state representative from Jacksonville, said in an interview that the harms of Mr. DeSantis’s policies were not just limited to Black voters.“He attacks marginalized communities in general because his base doesn’t like them,” Ms. Nixon said. “Because that’s low-hanging fruit for him to gain even more points politically among a base of voters. That’s all he’s ever done — is to try to appeal to a base of people.”Black leaders in Florida described their relationship with Mr. DeSantis as strained at best. In his five years as governor, Mr. DeSantis has held no formal meetings with the state’s legislative Black caucus, according to its members. In contrast, his predecessor, Rick Scott, did sit down with the Black legislators, although the meetings grew contentious and were eventually canceled after the caucus members said they were not being listened to.“I worked with Jeb Bush. I worked with Martinez. I worked with Rick Scott,” said the former congressman Al Lawson, referring to several past Republican Florida governors, including Bob Martinez. “None of them disenfranchised Blacks as much as this governor, DeSantis.”Mr. Lawson’s former district — once heavily Black and Democratic — is now held by a Republican, a product of a redistricting process in which Mr. DeSantis took the unusual step of putting forth his own maps, rather than leaving it entirely to the Legislature, where he enjoys significant support with G.O.P. supermajorities. (A legal challenge asserting that the changes harmed Black voters could restore Mr. Lawson’s district.)This summer, Black national organizations have shunned the state or encouraged their members to travel elsewhere. The National Association of Black Engineers said it would move its 2024 convention, originally set for Orlando, to Atlanta. Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black fraternity, said it would no longer hold its 2025 convention in Orlando. Both organizations cited recent policies in Florida that they felt posed a threat to Black Americans.In May, the N.A.A.C.P. released a travel advisory to Black Americans considering visiting Florida, calling the state “openly hostile” to members of racial minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. people.Carol Greenlee, 73, pushed for decades for the pardon and eventual exoneration of her father, Charles Greenlee, one of the Groveland Four, over the 1949 crime in Central Florida. She saw the pardon as a moment of hope and reconciliation, especially after the previous governor, Mr. Scott, had declined to take up the case, despite the urging of the Legislature.“It felt like we were moving forward,” she said. “It felt like the pendulum was swinging toward justice.”Ms. Greenlee, who lives in Tennessee but has followed Mr. DeSantis’s path as governor, said his subsequent actions had left her baffled and angry.“I have to shake my head and wonder what happened with some of the stances he has taken,” she said. “It’s almost like a 180-degree turnaround.” More

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      Trump Voters Can See Right Through DeSantis

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      Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, appeared to be a formidable challenger to Donald Trump — on paper at least.He didn’t back down from fights with the left; he started them.“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history,” DeSantis said.He has thumbed his nose at blue state governors, shipping them planeloads of immigrants. He has removed locally elected Democratic prosecutors. Whenever he sees what he believes to be an excess on the left, he stamps it out — from drag shows to critical race theory.He is not just a supporter of the hard-right agenda; he has personally weaponized it. Unlike traditional conservatives, wary of the abuse of state power, DeSantis relishes using his authority to enforce his version of what is moral and what is not.Since declaring his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, however, DeSantis has lost traction: Support for him has fallen from 31.3 percent on Jan. 20 to 20.7 percent on May 15, the day he announced, all the way down to 14.9 percent on Aug. 21, according to RealClearPolitics.As DeSantis prepares for the first Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, the central question he faces is why his support collapsed and whether he can get his campaign back on track.There are a lot of answers to the first question, most of them with a grain or more of truth. DeSantis has turned out to be a stiff on the stump, a man without affect. He speaks in alphabet talk: C.R.T., D.E.I., E.S.G. His attempts to outflank Trump from the right — “We’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on day one” — seem to be more politically calculated than based on conviction. In terms of executive competence, attention to detail and commitment to an agenda, DeSantis stands head and shoulders above Trump, but he has so far been unable to capitalize on these strengths.That much is understood, but is DeSantis burdened by a larger liability? I posed the following question to a cross section of political operatives and political scientists:Ron DeSantis has been noticeably unsuccessful in his challenge to Trump. Why? Is it because DeSantis does not or cannot demonstrate the visceral animosity that Trump exudes?Trump has a talent for embedding language more common to a Queens street corner — in either long, rambling speeches covering a host of subjects, some controversial, some not, or in having seemingly unacceptable rhetoric leaked from private meetings.The net result is that his supporters get to realize Trump is willing to refer to “shithole countries” in Africa and Latin America, to say about immigrants that “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” or to describe Latino gang members: “These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”The response to my inquiries was illuminating.“Trump’s speech style,” Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Law School-San Francisco, wrote by email, “adeptly channels the talk traditions of blue-collar men who pride themselves on not having to suck up and self-edit to get ahead, which is the way they see professionals’ traditions of decorum.”Not only that, Williams continued, “Trump is way ahead of DeSantis in his perceived ability to get things done as a strong leader — that’s Trump cashing in on his enactment of blue-collar traditions of tough, straight-talking manliness. Also Trump is fun while DeSantis is a drip.”Like many Democrats, Williams argued, “DeSantis holds the delusion that politics is chiefly about policy differences” when in practice it is more often “about identity and self-affirmation. Trump understands instinctively that non-college Americans feel distinctly dissed: Non-college grads are 73 percentage points lower than grads to believe they’re treated with dignity.”Williams described DeSantis’s approach to campaigning as “a clumsy color-by-numbers culture-wars formula” accompanied by a speaking style “more Harvard than hard hat, as when he talked about ‘biomedical security restrictions’ in his speech to the Republican Party convention in North Carolina (whatever those are??).”Williams cautioned against categorizing all Trump voters as racist:In 2016, 20 percent of Trump voters were true “grievance voters” who were very identified with being white and Christian and had cold feelings toward people of color and immigrants. But 19 percent were “anti-elites” with economically progressive views and moderate views on race, immigration, the environment and gay marriage. Writing off all Trump voters as mere racists is one of the many ways, alas, the left helps the right.Williams cited a paper published earlier this year, “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes” by Justin Grimmer, William Marble and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, that “showed that, while racial resentment strongly predicts Trump voting, that’s not why he won: He won because he also attracted a much larger group of voters with only moderate levels of racial resentment.”Taking a different, but parallel, tack, Linda Skitka, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois-Chicago, wrote by email: “Another alternative is that Trump tends to be all reaction and hot rhetoric, but weak or inconsistent on policy. People can therefore project their preferred policy preferences on him and believe he represents them via ‘gist.’”In Skitka’s view,DeSantis, in contrast, is very specific and consistent about policy, and he is too extreme for many on the right. To ice the cake, he appears to be really bad at retail politics — he just isn’t likable, and certainly isn’t charismatic. Together, I don’t think DeSantis can compete to overcome these obstacles, even if he were to start using Trump-like rhetoric.In a particularly devastating comparison of DeSantis with Trump, David Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell, wrote: “Trump is able to speak the language of hate and resentment in a way that everyone believes is real, and not just a calculated act.”Everything about DeSantis,by contrast, seems calculated. He’s the Yale and Harvard guy now complaining about intellectuals and elites. He’s talking about wokism and critical race theory, when no one knows what those are (even Trump noted no one can define woke, though he yells against it himself). When he tries to be as visceral as Trump, he just comes off as weird. DeSantis saying he’s going to start “slitting throats” reminded me of Romney’s “severely conservative.” While DeSantis’s is a dangerous escalation of violent imagery, they both sound bizarre and unnatural.At a more fundamental level, Bateman wrote:It’s not at all clear that what most Republican voters (rather than donors) want is a mainstream and party-credentialed version of Trump. The fact that Trump legitimately was an outsider to Republican politics was a core part of his appeal. So too was the calculation by donors and party activists that Trump’s being simultaneously aligned with social and racial conservatives, but able to present himself as not tied to Republican orthodoxy, made him a more attractive candidate in a national election.Bateman suggested that insofar as DeSantis is seen as “an establishment Trump, who I expect most voters will see as fully aligned with G.O.P. orthodoxy but even more focused on the priorities of racial and social conservatives (taking over universities, banning books, or attacking transpersons), he starts to look more like a general election loser.”David O. Sears, a professor of psychology at U.C.L.A., wrote by email that he “was inspired by your inquiry to do a free association test” on himself to see what he linked with both Trump and DeSantis.The result for Trump was:Archie Bunker, trash-talking, insulting people, entertaining, male, white, older, angry, impolite on purpose, Roller Derby, raucous, uninhibited, tell it like it is, high school locker room, dirty socks thrown in a corner, telling his locker room buddies that he threw his mom the finger when she told him to clean up his room for the millionth time (but of course didn’t dare).For DeSantis:Serious, boring, no sense of humor, Wimbledon, ladies’ tea party, PBS/NPR, civics class, lecture, Ivy League, expensive suit neatly pressed hanging in the closet. “Yes, Mom.”DeSantis’s drive to displace Trump from his position as the party’s top dog faces a combination of personal and structural hurdles.Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, argued in an email that DeSantis has adopted an approach to the nomination fight that was bound to fail:DeSantis’s strategy, and that of any candidate not named Trump, should be to consolidate the Maybe Trump voters. But DeSantis has seemed like he was going after the Always Trump voters with his aggressive language (“slitting throats”), his comment that Ukraine was just a “territorial dispute,” his suggestion that vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. would be a good candidate to head the Centers for Disease Control, and his doubling down on whether slavery might have been beneficial to some enslaved people.The problem with this approach, Ayres continued, is that “the Always Trump voters are ‘Always Trump’ for a reason — they are not going to settle for the second-best Trump if they can get the real thing.”Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, wrote:There is no room for DeSantis or anyone else to outflank Trump on the right, where Trump has his most loyal base. Candidates can argue that Trump is insufficiently conservative on some issues, but that it not the point for Trump loyalists. Candidates can try to echo the ugliness of Trump’s rhetoric, but that too misses what really draws these voters to Trump.What other candidates cannot replicate, in Garin’s view,is Trump’s persona and style. Nobody else (especially DeSantis) has his performance skills, and no one else conveys the same boldness, naturalness, and authenticity in voicing the grievances of MAGA voters. Trump makes hatred entertaining for his supporters. DeSantis, by contrast, is a boring drag in his meanness.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, places even more emphasis on the built-in challenges facing a Republican running against Trump: “It is extremely difficult to unseat an incumbent party leader in a primary,” Lee wrote by email. “Approval of Trump among Republicans is still high enough to make it extraordinarily difficult for any alternative candidate to make a case against him.”As if that were not daunting enough, Lee added,DeSantis’s difficulties are compounded by the fact that the roughly one third of Republicans who disapprove of Trump disapprove of him for different reasons. Some Republicans would like to see a more moderate alternative, in the mode of the pre-Trump Republican Party. Other Republicans fully embrace the changes Trump brought to the party, but oppose him for various reasons relating to him personally (such as his behavior on Jan. 6, his crude and offensive style, or doubts about his electability). It is extremely difficult for any alternative to consolidate the support of all the Republicans who would like an alternative to Trump. Even if a candidate succeeds in doing so, he or she still would not have a majority among Republicans, unless Trump drops further in support.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, elaborated on the difficulties facing DeSantis’s bid to position himself to the right of Trump. “The DeSantis strategy is weak in that there are not enough Republican voters to be gained to the right of Trump,” he wrote in an email. ” In addition, Shapiro contended, “Trump’s style and language are more authentic and natural.” Trump’s “Queens street-rhetoric style may help, but the point is that Trump sounds real and not staged for political purposes, in contrast to DeSantis’s endless use of ‘woke,’ which is very vague and has had more meaning in liberal-left and educated elite circles and does not have the clear meaning that Trump’s position-taking has. DeSantis sounds staged and forced in discussing this.”Robert Erikson, a colleague of Shapiro’s in the Columbia political science department, wrote by email:DeSantis appears about to become the latest in a long line of promising candidates who failed to convince their party’s base that they should be president. The list includes many seasoned politicians who were otherwise successful at their craft. For the G.O.P., the line runs from George Romney (1968) through Rudy Giuliani (2008) to Jeb Bush and Scott Walker (2016). Democratic examples include Ed Muskie (1972) and John Glenn (1984). All saw an early collapse of their seemingly strong position, with some dropping out before Iowa or New Hampshire.“Can DeSantis overcome this challenge?” Erikson asked in his email. “Underdogs often surprise and win nominations by arousing enthusiasm among a sizable bloc of primary and caucus voters. Jimmy Carter was an example. The more contemporary list includes Obama and Trump.”So far, DeSantis shows no signs of following in the footsteps of past insurgents.Martin Carnoy, a professor at Stanford’s graduate school of education, argued that Trump has successfully carved out a special place in the Republican universe and there is no room left for a challenger like DeSantis.“DeSantis’s main problem,” Carnoy wrote by email,is that he is not Trump and Trump is still around largely filling the space that Trump himself has defined and continues to define. This is the “victim” space, where the “victims” are the “forgotten core Americans,” besieged by liberals who want to help everyone but them — migrants, blacks, LGBTQIA, homeless, foreign countries in fights for democracy.Carnoy argued that “large blocs of the U.S. population have not been swept up in the economic growth of the past 40 years, which has largely enriched the top 1 percent of income earners.” Blame Ronald Reagan, he added, “but also blame Democrats, who left this political space to the very Republicans that created it.”While Democrats failed to compete for this space, Carnoy contended that “Trump figured out in 2015 that he could continue to help the rich (including himself) economically through traditional tax reduction policies — stoking inequality — and simultaneously enthuse the forgotten by throwing rich red ‘victim identity’ meat to this bloc of white (and Hispanic) working class voters.”Dianne Pinderhughes, a political scientist at Notre Dame, wrote by email that an image of DeSantis at a campaign event captured for her the weakness of his campaign for the nomination.“He has no affect,” Pinderhughes wrote. “My favorite example is a photo of him. He’s surrounded by a group of people, campaign supporters, but every face in the photo is flat, unexcited, unsmiling (including of course the candidate).”DeSantis’s interests, according to Pinderhughes, “are similar to Trump’s but his persona doesn’t allow or facilitate his emotional engagement with his public, who also want to align with him, but there’s no arousal there. He’s not emotionally down and dirty in the way that Trump’s wild stump speeches arouse support in the broader public.”The 2024 contest for the Republican nomination is exceptional in that the leading candidate is a once successful, once failed candidate seeking to represent his party for the third time.Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out in an email that “the Republican presidential primary is not a typical open-seat race, because Donald Trump occupies an unusual position as a quasi-incumbent. He has extraordinary name recognition and familiarity, having served a term as president and dominated headlines for eight years.”Because of that, “DeSantis needs to do more than simply taking positions that are popular with Republican voters — he needs to give G.O.P. primary voters a reason to leave behind Trump, a figure who remains popular among the party’s activists and voters,” according to Hopkins’s analysis of the contest.It will be very difficult to persuade Republican primary voters to abandon Trump, Hopkins wrote, citing “a nationwide survey I conducted earlier this summer. I found that on key issues from immigration to health care and climate changes, the differences between all Republicans, Trump supporters, and DeSantis supporters were typically fairly minimal. On issues alone, it’s hard to envision DeSantis convincing G.O.P. voters to abandon Trump.”DeSantis’s best shot, Hopkins suggested, “may be to follow Biden’s lead from 2020 and convince primary voters that he’s the most likely to win a general election.”One of the questions I posed to the people I queried for this column was “whether the willingness to give undiluted expressions of views on race and immigration has become the equivalent of a threshold issue on the right” — a must for anyone seeking the Republican nomination.Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, expressed a jaundiced view of the question itself:The premise of the question implies that this is a new phenomenon and I would dispute this characterization. Issues of race and immigration have been significant partisan issues for at least the last 150 years. Trump has not created these issues in the G.O.P., but he has simply harnessed them more effectively than his co-partisan competitors.Trump, in Hutchings’s view, is more than a match for DeSantis:Trump — unlike DeSantis — can perhaps communicate more effectively with the average G.O.P. voter. Also, whatever else one thinks about the former president, as a onetime television personality he is also more telegenic than your typical politician. And, finally, Trump’s status as the primary target of liberals and progressives makes him all the more appealing to many G.O.P. supporters. In short, if the left hates him (Trump) so much, then he must be doing something right from the vantage point of these voters. DeSantis simply can’t match Trump on these various dimensions.Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at Berkeley, succinctly summed up DeSantis’s predicament. “The Republican primary electorate is not especially interested in candidates’ policy positions,” Grumbach wrote by email, citing a 2018 paper, “Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” by Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope.So, Grumbach continued, “it’s unlikely that an alternative policy platform would’ve had DeSantis in the lead at this point. Instead Republican voters see Trump as more effective at combating liberals and Democrats.”Finally, Grumbach added: “You don’t need research to tell you that Trump has charisma, wit, and humor (though it’s not always clear it’s intentional) in a way that DeSantis does not.”Not everybody thinks Trump has charisma, wit and humor, but many of his supporters remain captivated. They want the show to go on.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