Ramaswamy, Vivek (1985- )

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      A Majority of Americans Support Trump Indictments, Polls Show

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      Recent polls conducted before the Georgia indictment showed that most believed that the prosecutions of the former president were warranted.Former President Donald J. Trump’s blistering attacks on prosecutors and the federal government over the cascade of indictments he faces do not appear to be resonating much with voters in the latest polls, yet his grip on Republicans is further tightening.A majority of Americans, in four recent polls, said Mr. Trump’s criminal cases were warranted. Most were surveyed before a grand jury in Georgia indicted him over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election, but after the federal indictment related to Jan. 6.At the same time, Mr. Trump still holds a dominant lead over the crowded field of Republicans who are challenging him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who continues to slide.The polls — conducted by Quinnipiac University, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, ABC News/Ipsos and Fox News — showed that Americans remain divided along party lines over the dozens of criminal charges facing Mr. Trump.The takeaways aligned with the findings of a New York Times/Siena College poll last month, in which 22 percent of voters who believed that Mr. Trump had committed serious federal crimes said they still planned to support him in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with Mr. DeSantis.Here are key findings from the recent polling:Most say a felony conviction should be disqualifying.In the Quinnipiac poll, 54 percent of registered voters said Mr. Trump should be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election. And seven out of 10 voters said that anyone convicted of a felony should no longer be eligible to be president.Half of Americans, but only 20 percent of Republicans, said that Mr. Trump should suspend his presidential campaign, according to the ABC News/Ipsos poll. This poll, which surveyed American adults, was the only one of the four surveys conducted entirely after Mr. Trump’s indictment in Georgia.When specifically asked by ABC about the Georgia case, 63 percent said the latest criminal charges against Mr. Trump were “serious.”Republicans, by and large, haven’t wavered.The trends were mixed for Mr. Trump, who is a voracious consumer of polls and often mentions them on social media and during campaign speeches. He has continually argued that the indictments were politically motivated and intended to short-circuit his candidacy.In a hypothetical rematch of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump trailed President Biden by a single percentage point in the latest Quinnipiac poll, 47 to 46 percent. Mr. Biden’s advantage was 5 percentage points in July.At his campaign rallies, Mr. Trump has frequently boasted how the indictments have been a boon for his polling numbers — and that rang true when Republicans were surveyed about the primary race.In those polls that tracked the G.O.P. nominating contest, Mr. Trump widened his lead over his challengers, beating them by nearly 40 points. His nearest competitor, Mr. DeSantis, had fallen below 20 percent in both the Fox and Quinnipiac polls.Mr. DeSantis, who earlier this month replaced his campaign manager as he shifts his strategy, dropped by 6 to 7 percentage points in recent months in both polls.Trump participated in criminal conduct, Americans say.About half of Americans said that Mr. Trump’s interference in the election in Georgia was illegal, according to the AP/NORC poll.A similar share of Americans felt the same way after Mr. Trump’s indictments in the classified documents and the Jan. 6 cases, but the percentage was much lower when he was charged in New York in a case related to a hush-money payment to a porn star.Fewer than one in five Republicans said that Mr. Trump had committed a crime in Georgia or that he broke any laws in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.When asked by Fox News whether Mr. Trump had engaged in illegal activity to overturn the 2020 election, 53 percent of registered voters said yes.But just 13 percent of Republicans shared that view.A plurality of those surveyed by ABC (49 percent) believed that Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime in Georgia.Support for the Justice Department’s charges.Fifty-three percent of U.S. adults said that they approved of the Justice Department’s decision to bring charges against Mr. Trump for his attempts to reverse his electoral defeat in 2020, The A.P. found.At the same time, the public’s confidence in the Justice Department registered at 17 percent in the same poll. More

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      The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters

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      The Traditional Conservatives 26% of Republicans The Right Wing 26% of Republicans The Libertarian Conservatives 14% of Republicans The Moderate Establishment 14% of Republicans The Blue Collar Populists 12% of Republicans The Newcomers 8% of Republicans After eight years of Republican fealty to Donald J. Trump, few would argue that the party is still defined […] More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Projects Outsize Confidence at Iowa State Fair

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      Vivek Ramaswamy is not a man who wants for confidence.A long-shot candidate who remains at best in the mid-single digits in Republican primary polling, Mr. Ramaswamy said the odds he would become president were “over 50 percent.”Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy biotech mogul, made this prediction while riding in a Ferris wheel high above the Iowa State Fair with two reporters and a photographer. Former President Donald J. Trump was in view below, waving goodbye to a throng of supporters who had packed a beer hall to hear him speak for less than 10 minutes.“My crowd — was actually — might have been a little bigger,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, referring to when he spoke at the same spot the night before. “Usually he’ll pull multiples of what I brought, but hey, not bad this time.”He doesn’t try to be like a traditional politician. Earlier in the day, at the end of his chat with Gov. Kim Reynolds, Mr. Ramaswamy took the mic and the opportunity to rap along to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”The 38-year-old businessman presents himself as a true Trump acolyte — after all, bragging about crowd size is a trademark of the former president’s. The only gentle contrast he offered with Mr. Trump during the Ferris wheel interview was that he had “fresh legs.”“I’m very pro-Trump,” he said. “Not as a candidate, but just as a citizen.”Mr. Ramaswamy even dismissed the standard criticism of Trump for Republicans who want to avoid saying anything mean about him: that Mr. Trump can’t win the general election. Mr. Trump would win, he argues, but it would be a close race.“I’m the only candidate who can win in a landslide,” he said. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Has a Gimmick That Republicans Are Sure to Love

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      Vivek Ramaswamy is a 38-year-old investor and former pharmaceutical executive who wants to be the Republican nominee for president. He’s not ahead by any means, but he’s doing better than you might expect. If Donald Trump dominates the field and Ron DeSantis is the far runner-up, then Ramaswamy is the candidate poised to rise if the Florida governor falls further behind.Ramaswamy is “anti-woke,” condemns Juneteenth as a “useless” holiday and says that “diversity is not our strength.” He thinks climate activism is a “cult” and wants to send the military to the border with Mexico. He wants to unravel the so-called deep state, thinks the Trump indictments are politically motivated and won’t say whether, if he were in Mike Pence’s shoes, he would have refused the former president’s demand to overturn the 2020 election results.In other words, he’s preoccupied by most of the same concerns as his rivals. But he does have one gimmick that DeSantis and Trump don’t: “We are a constitutional republic. We need to revive civic duty among young Americans,” Ramaswamy said on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “That’s why I’m announcing my support for a constitutional amendment to raise the voting age from 18 to 25, but to still allow 18-year-olds to vote if they either pass the same civics test required of immigrants to become naturalized citizens, or else to perform 6 months of military or first responder service.”Ramaswamy has elaborated in interviews on his call to raise the voting age for most young people. “I think we have a loss of civic pride in our country. I think people, young people included, do not value a country that they simply inherit,” he told NPR. “I think we value a country that we have a stake in building. And I think that asking a young person, asking any citizen, to know something about the country before voting, I think is a perfectly reasonable condition.”Demanding a de facto literacy test for most young Americans to vote is not actually a “perfectly reasonable condition.” It is a direct assault on the basic democratic rights of millions of citizens.To begin, there’s the fundamental fact that no aspect of political equality hinges on the ability to memorize trivia. What’s more, you do not need a formal education of any sort to embrace the duties of citizenship or to understand yourself as a political actor with a right to self-government. You do not even need one to understand your political interests and to work, individually or with others, to pursue them through our democratic institutions.To think otherwise is to believe that Americans, from the yeoman farmers of the early Republic to the freedmen of the Reconstruction South to the urban industrial workers of the early 20th century, have never been equipped to govern themselves.There’s also the practical fact that most new requirements for voting in the United States are — in intent and purpose — new restrictions on voting.For example, these days we take the secret ballot for granted as the only rational way to conduct an election. Of course the state should produce uniform, standard ballots for all elections. Of course we should vote in private. But for much of the 19th century before the introduction of the secret ballot — also known as the “Australian” ballot — American voters obtained their ballots from their political parties. “Since the ballots generally contained only the names of an individual party’s candidates, literacy was not required,” notes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.” “All that a man had to do was drop a ballot in a box.”With a single, standardized ballot — cast in private without the assistance of a friend or relative or party representative — voters had to read to participate. That was the point. As one contemporaneous observer, George Gunton, an economist and social reformer, declared, “so obvious is the evil of ignorant voting that more stringent naturalization laws are being demanded, because too many of our foreign-born citizens vote ignorantly. It is to remedy this that the Australian ballot system has been adopted in so many states.” Its purpose, he continued, was “to eliminate the ignorant, illiterate voters.”We similarly take voter registration for granted — of course we should confirm our intention to vote with municipal authorities ahead of time. But that, too, was introduced to limit and restrict the electorate. “Beginning in the 1830s,” writes Keyssar, “the idea of registration became more popular, particularly among Whigs, who believed that ineligible transients and foreigners were casting their votes for the Democratic Party.” Sixty years later, Southern Democrats used highly discretionary registration laws to remove as many Republican-voting Blacks from the electorate as possible.“The key disfranchising features of the Southern registration laws were the amount of discretion granted to the registrars, the specificity of the information required of the registrant, the times and places set for registration, and the requirement that a voter bring his registration certificate to the polling place,” explained the political scientist J. Morgan Kousser in “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910.” “Registration laws were most efficiently used — as in South Carolina, Louisiana and North Carolina — to cut the electorate immediately before a referendum on constitutional disfranchisement.”We also can’t forget the actual literacy tests, introduced at the turn of the 20th century, that were designed to keep as many immigrants, Black Americans and laboring people from the polls as possible. The point was to limit, as much as possible, the political power of groups that might challenge the interests of those in power, from industrial barons in the North to large landowners in the South.Ramaswamy says that the goal of his proposal is to encourage civic pride and inculcate a deeper attachment to the country among the youngest American adults. But there are ways to do both without creating new obstacles to voting. There’s also no evidence or indication that a mandatory civics test would achieve the goal in question. When you consider, as well, the extent to which there are older adults — even elderly adults — who could use a little civic pride themselves, it appears that Ramaswamy’s proposal has less to do with fostering national cohesion and more to do with the Republican Party’s unenviable dilemma with young people.Democrats win most younger voters across all racial and ethnic groups. In the 2022 midterm elections, according to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of voters under 30 backed Democrats compared with 31 percent for Republicans. And soon, young people will represent a majority of potential voters in the country.Rather than try to appeal to or persuade this bloc, Ramaswamy’s proposal is to remove a vast majority from the electorate altogether.To be clear, this isn’t a serious plan. The American public is so polarized along partisan and ideological lines as to make the Constitution effectively unamendable. Ramaswamy’s call to raise the voting age is a novelty policy for a novelty candidate. And yet it tells us something about the Republican electorate, and thus the Republican Party, that the eye-catching gimmick of an ambitious politician is a plan to disenfranchise millions of American voters.In many ways, big and small, the Republican Party has turned against the bedrock “republican principles” of majority rule and popular sovereignty. We see it in a governor removing a duly-elected official because he disagrees with the views she represents, a state legislature gerrymandering itself into a permanent majority regardless of where the votes fall, an entire state Republican Party trying (and failing) to change the rules of constitutional amendment to keep the voters from affirming their rights and a former president who would rather end the American experiment in democracy than accept defeat at the ballot box.Ramaswamy is playing the same song. There’s almost no one in the Republican Party, at this point, who isn’t.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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      G.O.P. Contenders Feed Voter Distrust in Courts, Schools and Military

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      As Donald J. Trump has escalated his attacks on the justice system and other core institutions, his competitors for the Republican nomination have followed his lead.Ron DeSantis says the military is more interested in global warming and “gender ideology” initiatives than in national security.Tim Scott says the Justice Department “continues to hunt Republicans.”Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to “shut down the deep state,” borrowing former President Donald J. Trump’s conspiratorial shorthand for a federal bureaucracy he views as hostile.As Mr. Trump escalates his attacks on American institutions, focusing his fire on the Justice Department as he faces new criminal charges, his competitors for the Republican nomination have followed his lead.Several have adopted much of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric sowing broad suspicion about the courts, the F.B.I., the military and schools. As they vie for support in a primary dominated by Mr. Trump, they routinely blast these targets in ways that might have been considered extraordinary, not to mention unthinkably bad politics, just a few years ago.Yet there is little doubt about the political incentives behind the statements. Polls show that Americans’ trust in their institutions has fallen to historical lows, with Republicans exhibiting more doubt across a broad swath of public life.The proliferation of attacks has alarmed both Republicans and Democrats who worry about the long-term impact on American democracy. Public confidence in core institutions — from the justice system to voting systems — is fundamental to a durable democracy, particularly at a time of sharp political division. Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign says he is fighting “abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our country at levels never seen before.”Doug Mills/The New York Times“We’ve had these times of division before in our history, but we’ve always had leaders to bridge the gaps who have said we need to build respect, we need to restore confidence in our institutions — today we have just the opposite,” said Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas and a moderate whose campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has so far gained little traction.“That defines the course of 2024,” he added. “We’re going to have a leader that brings out the best of America, which is the first job of being president. Or you’re going to have somebody that increases distrust that we have in our institutions.”Mr. Trump is still the loudest voice. As he blames others for his defeat in 2020 and, now, after being charged in three separate criminal cases, he has characterized federal prosecutors as “henchmen” orchestrating a “cover-up.” After he was indicted last week on charges related to his attempts to overturn the election, his campaign cited “abuse, incompetence and corruption that is running through the veins of our country at levels never seen before.”Mr. DeSantis, however, has echoed that view, making criticisms of educators, health officials, the mainstream news media, “elites” and government employees central to his campaign, and even, at times, invoking violent imagery.“All of these deep-state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on Day 1,” Mr. DeSantis said during a New Hampshire campaign stop late last week. The governor, a Navy veteran, used similar language about the Department of Defense late last month, saying that if elected he would need a defense secretary who “may have to slit some throats.”Other candidates, too, have keyed into voters’ trust deficit. Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, wants to shut down the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. as part of his fight against the so-called deep state. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations, has said she opposes red-flag gun laws because “I don’t trust that they won’t take them away from people who rightfully deserve to have them.”Even Mike Pence, who has criticized Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election at the heart of the charges filed late week, has suggested the Justice Department is politically motivated in its prosecution, warning of a “two-tiered system of justice,” with “one set of rules for Republicans, and one set of rules for Democrats.”Running against the government is hardly new, especially for Republicans. For decades, the party called for shrinking the size and reach of some federal programs — with the exception of the military — and treated President Ronald Reagan’s declaration that “government is the problem” as a guiding principle.But even some Republicans, largely moderates who have rejected Trumpism, note the tenor of the campaign rhetoric has reached new and conspiratorial levels. Familiar complaints about government waste or regulatory overreach are now replaced with claims that government agencies are targeting citizens and that bureaucrats are busy enacting political agendas.“Does anyone believe the IRS won’t go after Middle America?” Nikki Haley tweeted in April.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted in April, “Does anyone believe the IRS won’t go after Middle America?” Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesNone of the candidates responded to requests for interviews about these statements.Casting doubt on the integrity of government is hardly limited to Republican candidates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, has made questioning public health officials on long-established science a focus of his campaign. In her quixotic bid for the nomination, Marianne Williamson has declared that she is “running to challenge the system.”And President Biden, whose resistance to institutional change has often frustrated the left wing of his party, has mused about his skepticism of the Supreme Court — “this is not a normal court,” he said after the court’s ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions.A Gallup poll released in July found that public confidence in major American institutions is at record low levels, with historic levels of distrust in the military, police, schools, big business and technology. Several other institutions — including the presidency, the Supreme Court and the criminal justice system as well as newspapers and broadcast news, are just slightly above the record low they hit last year.There is an unmistakable partisan divide: Republicans are far less likely to express confidence in a majority of institutions in the survey, including the presidency and public schools. Democrats have far more doubt about the Supreme Court and the police. (There is bipartisan distrust in the criminal justice system, with less than one in four voters expressing confidence in the system.)The military has seen an especially steep decline in trust from Republican voters, with 68 percent saying they have confidence in the armed forces, compared with 91 percent three years ago. Mr. DeSantis in particular has spoken to that shift on an institution that Republicans were once loath to criticize.“When revered institutions like our own military are more concerned with matters not central to the mission — from global warming to gender ideology and pronouns — morale declines and recruiting suffers,” he said when he announced his bid. “We need to eliminate these distractions and get focused on the core mission.”In a Fox News interview, he recently said, “The military that I see is different from the military I served in.”Feeding on voters’ already deeply embedded skepticism might have once been seen as politically risky, but social media and the right-wing media have helped change that, said Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who conducts weekly focus groups with her party’s voters.Ms. Longwell says these forces have created a “Republican triangle of doom,” with the party’s voter base, politicians and partisan media creating a feedback loop of complaints and conspiracy theories.“The lack of trust has become a defining feature of our politics,” she said. “Voters feel like there is an existential threat any time that someone who doesn’t share your politics is in charge of something. We’ve lost the sense that neutral is possible.”But that does not explain the whole picture. The public’s trust in government institutions has been slipping for decades, first declining in the wake of the Vietnam War and then again after Watergate and yet again after the war in Iraq and the Great Recession.Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, wants to shut down the F.B.I. and the I.R.S.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesFormer Gov. Jerry Brown of California noted that he ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1992 by attacking Washington institutions as corrupt, but the argument never caught fire in the way it has with Republicans, he said, in part because his party’s base generally trusted government.Today he sees the country as more polarized. Notions that would have once been seen as being on the fringe, such as Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, are mainstream. Many Republican voters expect to hear candidates attack election results routinely, undermining the system they depend on for power.“Democracy does depend on trust,” even if “politics depends on fear,” Mr. Brown said in a recent interview. “The world is getting more dangerous, and at home it’s getting less governable.”The impact of the lack of trust was particularly apparent in the pandemic, when many Americans blamed public authorities for inconsistent guidance and unpopular lockdowns. Ultimately, that distrust fed the anti-vaccination campaigns.Questioning public health officials has been essential to the rise of Mr. DeSantis, who more than two years ago wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal with the headline: “Don’t Trust the Elites.”Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, has also taken aim at the government. In another era, he might have been an unlikely hero for the anti-establishment — a Harvard-educated businessman who has lent more than $15 million to his own campaign.Still, as the disdain for the elites has metastasized deeper and further into the party, Mr. Ramaswamy has embraced the pugilistic language of Mr. Trump, frequently on social media.“Shut down the FBI & IRS,” he posted this month. “Pardon defendants of politicized prosecutions. Replace civil service protections with 8-year term limits. Punish bureaucrats who violate the law. Get aggressive.”Kitty Bennett More

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      Republican Attacks on ‘Woke’ Ideology Falling Flat With G.O.P. Voters

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      New polling shows national Republicans and Iowa Republican caucusgoers were more interested in “law and order” than battling “woke” schools, media and corporations.When it comes to the Republican primaries, attacks on “wokeness” may be losing their punch.For Republican candidates, no word has hijacked political discourse quite like “woke,” a term few can define but many have used to capture what they see as left-wing views on race, gender and sexuality that have strayed far beyond the norms of American society.Gov. Ron DeSantis last year used the word five times in 19 seconds, substituting “woke” for Nazis as he cribbed from Winston Churchill’s famous vow to battle a threatened German invasion in 1940. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”The term has become quick a way for candidates to flash their conservative credentials, but battling “woke” may have less political potency than they think. Though conservative voters might be irked at modern liberalism, successive New York Times/Siena College polls of Republican voters nationally and then in Iowa found that candidates were unlikely to win votes by narrowly focusing on rooting out left-wing ideology in schools, media, culture and business.Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hand’s off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.The findings hint why Mr. DeSantis, who has made his battles with “woke” schools and corporations central to his campaign, is struggling and again show off Mr. Trump’s keen understanding of part of the Republican electorate. Campaigning in Iowa in June, Mr. Trump was blunt: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”It was clearly a jab at Mr. DeSantis, but the Times’s polls suggest Mr. Trump may be right. Social issues like gay rights and once-obscure jargon like “woke” may not be having the effect many Republicans had hoped“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” explained Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md., who retired from a successful career in Hollywood where he said he saw his share of political correctness and liberal group think. Mr. Boyer said he didn’t like holding his tongue about his views on transgender athletes, but, he added, he does not want politicians to intervene. “I am a laissez-faire capitalist: Let the pocketbook decide,” he said.“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” said Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesWhen presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for a “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”Around 65 percent said they would choose the law and order candidate.Among those 65 and older, often the most likely age bracket to vote, only 17 percent signed on to the “anti-woke” crusade. Those numbers were nearly identical in Iowa, where the first ballots for the Republican nominee will be cast on Jan. 15.Mr. DeSantis’s famous fight against the Walt Disney Company over what he saw as the corporation’s liberal agenda exemplified the kind of economic warfare that seems to fare only modestly better. About 38 percent of Republican voters said they would back a candidate who promised to fight corporations that promote “woke” left ideology, versus the 52 percent who preferred “a candidate who says that the government should stay out of deciding what corporations should support.”Christy Boyd, 55, in Ligonier, Pa., made it clear she was no fan of the culture of tolerance that she said pervaded her region around Pittsburgh. As the perfect distillation of “woke” ideology, she mentioned “time blindness,” a phrase she views as simply an excuse for perpetual tardiness.But such aggravations do not drive her political desires.“If you don’t like what Bud Light did, don’t buy it,” she added, referring to the brand’s hiring of a transgender influencer, which contributed to a sharp drop in sales. “If you don’t like what Disney is doing, don’t go. That’s not the government’s responsibility.”Indeed, some Republican voters seemed to feel pandered to by candidates like Mr. DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, whose book “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” launched his political career.Lynda Croft, 82, said she was watching a rise in murders in her hometown Winston-Salem, N.C., and that has her scared. Overly liberal policies in culture and schools will course-correct on their own, she said.“If anyone actually believes in woke ideology, they are not in tune with the rest of society,” she said, “and parents will step in to deal with that.”In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said the evolving views of the electorate were important, and he had adapted to them. “Woke” corporate governance and school systems are a symptom of what he calls “a deeper void” in a society that needs a religious and nationalist renewal. The stickers that read “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek” are gone from his campaign stops, he said, replaced by hats that read “Truth.”“At the time I came to be focused on this issue, no one knew what the word was,” he said. “Now that they have caught up, the puck has moved. It’s in my rearview mirror as well.”Law and order and border security have become stand-ins for “fortitude,” he said, and that is clearly what Republican voters are craving.(The day after the interview, the Ramaswamy campaign blasted out a fund-raising appeal entitled “Wokeness killing the American Dream.”)DeSantis campaign officials emphasized that the governor in recent days had laid out policies on border security, the military and the economy. Foreign policy is coming, they say. But they also pointed to an interview on Fox News in which Mr. DeSantis did not back away from his social-policy focus.Along with several other Republican-led states, Florida passed a string of laws restricting what G.O.P. lawmakers considered evidence of “wokeness,” such as gender transition care for minors and diversity initiatives. Mr. DeSantis handily won re-election in November.“I totally reject, being in Iowa, New Hampshire, that people don’t think those are important,” he said of his social policy fights. “These families with children are thanking me for taking stands in Florida.”For candidates trying to break Mr. Trump’s hold on a Republican electorate that sees the former president as the embodiment of strength, the problem may be broader than ditching the term “woke.”As it turns out, social issues like gender, race and sexuality are politically complicated and may be less dominant than Mr. Trump’s rivals thought. The fact that Mr. Trump has been indicted three times and found legally liable for sexual abuse has not hurt him. Only 37 percent of Republican voters nationally described Mr. Trump as more moral than Mr. DeSantis (45 percent sided with Mr. DeSantis on the personality trait), yet in a head-to-head matchup between the two candidates, national Republican voters backed Mr. Trump by 31 percentage points, 62 percent to 31 percent.The Times/Siena poll did find real reluctance among Republican voters to accept transgender people. Only 30 percent said society should accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, compared with 58 percent who said society should not accept such identities.But half of Republican voters still support the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, against the 41 percent who oppose same-sex marriage. Fifty-one percent of Republican voters said they would choose a candidate promising to protect individual freedom over one guarding “traditional values.” The “traditional values” candidate would be the choice of 40 percent of Republicans.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, responded simply: “Americans want to return to a prosperous nation, and there’s only one person who can do that — President Trump.”Mr. Boyer, who played Robert E. Lee in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” bristled at having to make a choice: “It’s hardly an either-or: Why wouldn’t I want someone to fight for law and order and against this corrupt infiltration in our school systems?” he asked.But given a choice, he said, “the primary job of government is the protection of our country and there’s a tangible failure of that at our border.” More

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      After Indictment, DeSantis Suggests Trump Can’t Get a Fair Trial in D.C.

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raced to respond to news that former President Donald J. Trump had been indicted a third time not by opining one way or the other on the new federal charges, but by leveling an unusual attack at residents of the District of Columbia, where the case is being prosecuted.Suggesting that Mr. Trump could not get a fair trial if the jurors were residents of the nation’s capital, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Mr. DeSantis called for enacting reforms to let Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, D.C. to their home districts.“Washington, D.C. is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” Mr. DeSantis wrote on Twitter. “One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses — I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”The judge assigned to Mr. Trump, who was indicted on charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is Tanya S. Chutkan, a D.C. District Court judge who has routinely issued harsh penalties in Jan. 6-related cases against people who stormed the Capitol.The Republican candidates, who have sought to overtake the former president’s substantial lead in early polls with little success, have campaigned amid a backdrop of Mr. Trump’s legal battles that have sucked up valuable airtime and dominated media coverage. Here’s what the others said on Tuesday: Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was present at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack and was the target of some rioters — and whom the indictment describes as a key target of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election — said that the indictment “serves as an important reminder: Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, in a statement to The Times, echoed a common refrain among Republicans: that the Justice Department, under the Biden administration, had been weaponized against Mr. Biden’s political opponents. He referenced the case against Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son, and said, “We’re watching Biden’s D.O.J. continue to hunt Republicans while protecting Democrats.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur and one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders in the 2024 field, called the indictment “un-American.” He sought to absolve Mr. Trump of any responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and reiterated his previous promise that, if elected, he would pardon Mr. Trump. “The corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump,” he said, and added: “Trump isn’t responsible for what happened on Jan 6. The real cause was systematic and pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it.”Former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, who has refused to pledge his support to Mr. Trump if he is the eventual nominee, was the first candidate to respond to the new indictment. “Let me be crystal clear: Trump’s presidential bid is driven by an attempt to stay out of prison and scam his supporters into footing his legal bills,” Mr. Hurd wrote. “His denial of the 2020 election results and actions on Jan. 6 show he’s unfit for office.”Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who is running an explicitly anti-Trump campaign, reiterated his earlier calls for Mr. Trump to quit his campaign, calling him “morally responsible for the attack on our democracy.” Mr. Hutchinson said that if Mr. Trump does not drop out of the race, “voters must choose a different path.” More

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      The Republicans Who Could Qualify for the First Presidential Debate

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      At least seven candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the first Republican presidential debate on Aug. 23. Trump(may not attend) Trump(may not attend) The latest polling and fund-raising data show that the playing field is narrowing for the Republican presidential debate scheduled for later this month. Although former President Donald J. […] More