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      In New Hampshire, Chris Christie Still Sees a Path to Beat Trump

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      As he stakes his candidacy on the state, Chris Christie is promising to find new ways to confront Donald Trump. “I’m not going to let him get away with being a coward,” he said in an interview.An upset victory over Donald Trump in New Hampshire could be a knockout blow, according to Chris Christie. He is staking his presidential campaign on winning the state.Emily Rhyne/The New York TimesIn his against-all-odds pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has campaigned almost exclusively in New Hampshire: More than 90 percent of his events since February have been in the Granite State, according to a New York Times analysis.To hear Mr. Christie tell it, New Hampshire is his do-or-die state. If he doesn’t perform well here, that will probably be it.“I can’t see myself leaving the race under any circumstances before New Hampshire,” he said in an interview. “If I don’t do well in New Hampshire, then I’ll leave.”Much as he did during his White House bid in 2016, Mr. Christie is betting on the independent streak of New Hampshire voters to validate his candidacy and catapult him into contention. (Mr. Christie ultimately finished sixth in New Hampshire that year and dropped out a day later.)But while he blended into the crowd in the 2016 Republican primary contest, Mr. Christie occupies a nearly solitary position in this race: as the candidate offering the harshest criticisms of the runaway front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Christie’s central pitch to Republicans in New Hampshire is that they must vote with a sense of responsibility and urgency, because defeating Mr. Trump in the first-in-the-nation primary may be the only way to halt his march to the nomination.“The future of this country is going to be determined here,” Mr. Christie told a crowd this week at a local brewery, clutching an I.P.A. “If Donald Trump wins here, he will be our nominee. Everything that happens after that is going to be on our party and on our country. It’s up to you.”Though Mr. Christie has improved in recent polls, he still trails Mr. Trump in New Hampshire by double digits, and by much more in national polls and surveys of Iowa, the first nominating state.Mr. Christie signed autographs for supporters at an event on Monday in Rye, N.H.Sophie Park for The New York TimesYet in the interview, Mr. Christie said he still saw a path in New Hampshire. He pointed to numerous past candidates who “broke late” in the state, including Senator John McCain of Arizona during his 2000 campaign. Mr. Christie noted that Mr. McCain, who ended up winning New Hampshire, had driven around the state “basically riding around in a Suburban with two aides.”Mr. Christie is apparently trying to emulate that style. This week, he cruised around New Hampshire with only a driver and two staff members. His campaign does not have staff members on the ground in New Hampshire, and in all, he has only 11 staff members on the payroll, according to his campaign.In the trip to New Hampshire, his first since the opening Republican primary debate last month, Mr. Christie ratcheted up his criticisms of the former president.He now goes so far as to liken Mr. Trump to an autocratic leader, arguing that his conduct is beneath the office of the presidency. Mr. Christie tiptoes toward predicting how the former president’s criminal indictments will unfold, declaring that the country cannot have a “convicted felon” as its leader. And he needles Mr. Trump with subtle jabs at his idiosyncratic tendencies, taunting the former president for his love of cable television and apparent preference for well-done hamburgers.But despite his willingness to take on Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie has been denied his best shot at confronting the former president directly on the debate stage. Mr. Trump skipped the first debate and seems unlikely to attend the second one, which will be held in California at the end of the month.Mr. Christie, who has qualified for the second debate, said he had been drawing up contingency plans.“I’m not going to let him get away with being a coward and running away,” Mr. Christie said in the interview. “It could be meeting him out in front of his event as he’s making his way in. It could be confronting him on his way out. It could be actually going to the event. It could be a whole bunch of options that we’re going to try. I’m not going to tell them exactly which one I’m going to do, because then he would have his staff prepared for it and try to stop me.”Tell It Like It Is PAC, the super PAC supporting Mr. Christie’s bid, latched onto the New Hampshire-or-bust approach early on. Ninety-six percent of the roughly $1 million the group has spent on radio and television advertising has been in New Hampshire markets, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm.Mr. Christie’s events grew more crowded as his swing through New Hampshire progressed, culminating with more than 150 people packed in a gym without air-conditioning in Bedford. Audiences at his events tended to applaud his anti-Trump broadsides.Mr. Christie was greeted with applause at an event in a crowded gymnasium in Bedford, N.H.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHis voters are holding out hope, but they acknowledge his path is tough.“You have to believe he’s got a chance,” said Irene Bonner, 75, of Meredith, N.H., who said she was normally apolitical but had been inspired to come to an event by Mr. Christie’s tough talk against Mr. Trump.“The party is so completely blinded by Trump, it just boggles my mind,” said John Bonner, her husband. “After everything’s gone down and the things he’s said and done. But at least Christie is speaking up.” He added, “The rest of them really aren’t.”If Mr. Trump does emerge as the nominee, Mr. Christie said, he will not back off in his criticism.“I can’t imagine that I’ll ever keep quiet,” he said in the interview. “I don’t think it’s in my personality, so I’ll continue to say what I believe is the truth.”He added: “But I’ll also be critical of Joe Biden, I’m certain, because I have been since he became president, and I suspect he is not going to do some sort of miraculous turnaround that’s going to win my support. So I think I probably have difficult things to say about both of them if I was not the nominee.”Asked if he would make an endorsement in a Trump-Biden rematch, the rarely pithy Mr. Christie was succinct: “No.” More

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      Biden Plans Democracy-Focused Speech After Next Republican Primary Debate

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      One location under consideration for the remarks is the democracy-focused McCain Institute in Arizona.President Biden is planning to deliver a major speech on the ongoing threats to democracy in Arizona later this month, with the address scheduled the day after the next Republican presidential primary debate. One location for the speech that has been under discussion is the McCain Institute, according to a person familiar with the planning. The institute, which is devoted to “fighting for democracy,” is named for Senator John McCain, a Republican who served for more than 20 years in the Senate with Mr. Biden and who sparred repeatedly with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party’s front-runner in 2024.Mr. Biden has made the perils facing American democracy a central theme of his 2020 campaign and also his 2024 re-election bid. He also made the case ahead of the 2022 midterms that Mr. Trump and his allies posed a threat to the “soul of the nation.”Anita Dunn, a top White House adviser, told Democratic donors about the upcoming speech on Wednesday in Chicago, the site of the party’s 2024 convention, according to people familiar with her remarks.The White House and Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee invited major contributors to a preview of the party’s convention this week in Chicago. The Biden Victory Fund, which includes the Biden campaign, the national party and all state parties, can collect contributions as large as $929,600 from big donors.Mr. Biden was close to Mr. McCain, who died in 2018, and during his recent trip to Hanoi in Vietnam he visited a memorial there for the late senator, who was held captive as a prisoner of war. “I miss him, I miss him,” Mr. Biden said.The speech would underscore previous efforts by Mr. Biden to focus attention on the cause of democracy. He delivered speech in Philadelphia last September that attempted to frame the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of this nation,” an echo of his 2020 campaign slogan and another speech in Washington days before the midterm elections.Mr. Biden also briefly pushed for a package of federal voting rights laws last January before dropping the issue after it became clear there was not support among Senate Democrats to change the chamber’s rules to advance the legislation. More

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      Ramaswamy Says He Would Fire 75 Percent of the Federal Work Force if Elected

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, whose campaign for the Republican nomination has gained attention in recent months, has vowed to dismantle much of the federal government and shutter key agencies.Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate whose strident and sometimes unrealistic proposals have helped him stand out in the crowded primary field, said in a policy speech on Wednesday that he would fire more than 75 percent of the federal work force and shutter several major agencies.Among the government organizations that Mr. Ramaswamy vowed to disband are the Department of Education, the F.B.I., the Food and Nutrition Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He said he would move some of their functions to other agencies and departments.Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, also claimed he could make the changes unilaterally if he were to be elected president, putting forward a sweeping theory that the executive wields the power to restructure the federal government on his own and does not need to submit such proposals to Congress for approval.His pitch was another echo of former President Donald J. Trump, whom he has modeled himself after and who sought to expand political control over the federal work force near the end of his term. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Ramaswamy has also attacked parts of the federal government as a “deep state.” “We will use executive authority to shut down the deep state,” Mr. Ramaswamy said on Wednesday at the America First Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. He flipped through posters displaying government organizational charts as well as what he claimed were common “myths” about the limitations of presidential authority.But legal experts on the separation of powers and administrative law said the legal theories behind his proposal — detailed in an accompanying campaign white paper — were wrong and would not stand up to a court challenge.Peter M. Shane, a scholar in residence at New York University and a specialist in separation-of-powers law, said the paper was “fantastical.” Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University, said it took bits of statutory law “out of context” while “totally ignoring the Constitution,” which mandates that the U.S. Congress create the government departments and agencies that the president then supervises.Mr. Ramaswamy’s vow to shutter large parts of the government and fire most of its workers would also unravel significant parts of the civil service and disrupt government services that are central to the operation of modern American society, including law enforcement, background checks for firearm purchases, student financial aid and special education programs.About 2.25 million people work for the federal government in civilian roles. Cutting more than 75 percent of that work force would result in more than 1.6 million people being fired, saving billions of dollars in the federal budget but also shutting down critical functions of the government.Mr. Ramaswamy did not make clear where all those eliminated jobs could come from.The Congressional Budget Office has said that nearly 60 percent of federal civilian workers are in the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security — but Mr. Ramaswamy did not mention cuts for any of them in his remarks on Wednesday or in additional materials from his campaign discussing the proposals.And while Mr. Ramaswamy named several agencies he said he would abolish, he added that he would move many of their functions to other organizations — suggesting that many of the same jobs would still exist elsewhere.Mr. Ramaswamy also said he would abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which became a frequent target of Trump-style Republicans after it investigated ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.Mr. Ramaswamy, who has less than 10 percent support in primary polls, has pitched himself as the future of the Republican Party — a radical conservative in the image of Mr. Trump.His proposals on Wednesday reinforced the similarities between the former president and the political newcomer. They have both previously attacked specific agencies like the F.B.I. and large swaths of the civil service. Mr. Trump had also planned in a hypothetical second term to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, bring independent agencies under direct presidential control and purge officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”But Mr. Ramaswamy’s proposals went even further, envisioning a wholesale dismantling. He took a moment during his speech to revel in the incendiary nature of his proposals.“We’re going to get a lot of pushback to this speech,” he said. “I have no doubt about it.” More

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      Biden, Trump and the 2024 Field of Nightmares

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      In the bottom of the 10th inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, with the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 5-3, Red Sox manager John McNamara sent Bill Buckner — a great hitter dealing with terrible leg problems that made him gimp his way around first base — back out to play the infield instead of putting in Dave Stapleton, Buckner’s defensive replacement. A half-dozen at-bats later, a Mookie Wilson ground ball went through Buckner’s wobbly legs, sending the World Series to Game 7 and a certain 6-year-old Red Sox fan to bed in desperate tears.Those tears were my first acquaintance with the harsh truth of a baseball aphorism: The ball will always find you. Meaning that if you place a player where he shouldn’t be, or try to disguise a player’s incapacity by shifting him away from the likely action, or give a player you love a chance to stay on the field too long for sentimental reasons, the risk you take will eventually catch up to you, probably at the worst possible moment.Obviously, this is a column about President Biden’s age. But not only about Biden, because America has been running a lot of Buckner experiments of late. Consider the dreadful-for-liberals denouement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career, where nobody could tell a lifetime-tenured Supreme Court justice who had survived cancer that it was time to step aside and Democrats were left to talk hopefully about her workout regimen as she tried to outlast Donald Trump. And she almost did — but in the end, her legacy was reshaped and even unmade by a decision to stay too long on the political field.Or consider the Trump presidency itself, in which voters handed a manifestly unfit leader the powers of the presidency and for his entire term, various Republicans tried to manage him and position him and keep him out of trouble, while Dave Stapleton — I mean, Mike Pence — warmed the bench.This managerial effort met with enough success that by the start of 2020, Trump seemed potentially headed for re-election. But like a series of line drives at an amateur third baseman, the final year of his presidency left him ruthlessly exposed — by the pandemic (whether you think he was too libertarian or too Faucian, he was obviously overmastered), by a progressive cultural revolution (which he opposed but was helpless to impede), by Biden’s presidential campaign and finally by his own vices, which yielded Jan. 6.Naturally, Republicans are ready to put him on the field again.These experiences set my expectations for what’s happening with Democrats and Biden now. The increasing anxiety over Biden’s lousy poll numbers, which I discussed in last weekend’s column, has yielded a defensive response from Biden partisans. Their argument is that the president’s decline is overstated, that his administration is going well and he deserves more credit than he’s getting and that, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser suggests, the press is repeating its mistake with Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and making the age issue seem awful when it’s merely, well, “suboptimal.”I do not think Biden’s decline is overstated by the media; by some Republicans, maybe, but the mainstream press is, if anything, treading gingerly around the evident reality. But I do think Biden’s defenders are correct that the effect of his age on his presidency has been, at most, only mildly negative. It’s limited his use of the bully pulpit and hurt his poll numbers, but his administration has passed major legislation, managed a foreign policy crisis and run a tighter ship than Trump.Where I have criticisms of Bidenism, they’re mostly the normal ones a conservative would have of any liberal president, not special ones associated with chaos or incompetence created by cognitive decline.But in running Biden for re-election, Democrats are making a fateful bet that this successful management can simply continue through two sets of risks: the high stakes of the next election, in which a health crisis or just more slippage might be the thing that puts Trump back in the White House, and the different but also substantial stakes of another four-year term.“The ball will always find you” is not, of course, an invariable truth. It’s entirely possible that Biden can limp to another victory, that his second term will yield no worse consequences than, say, Ronald Reagan’s did, that having managed things thus far, his aides, spouse and cabinet can see the next five years through.But the Trump era has been one of those periods when providence or fate revenges itself more swiftly than usual on hubris — when the longstanding freedom that American parties and leaders have enjoyed, by virtue of our power and pre-eminence, to skate around our weak spots and mistakes has been substantially curtailed.Even Millhiser’s proposed analogy for the fixation on Biden’s age, the Clinton email scandal, fits this pattern. “Her emails” hurt Clinton at the last because they became briefly entangled with the Anthony Weiner sex scandal. This was substantively unfair, since nothing came of the Clinton emails found on Weiner’s laptop. But it was dramatically fitting, a near-Shakespearean twist, that after surviving all of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals the Clinton dynasty would be unmade at its hour of near triumph by a different, more pathetic predator.So whether it’s certain or not, I can’t help expecting a similarly dramatic punishment for trying to keep Biden in the White House notwithstanding his decline.That I also expect some kind of punishment from the Republicans renominating Trump notwithstanding his unfitness doesn’t make me inconsistent, because presidential politics isn’t quite the same as baseball. Unlike in a World Series, there need not be a simple victor: All can be punished; all of us can lose.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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      Is the Electoral College Becoming Fairer?

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      The Republican Party’s advantage is shrinking in the Electoral College. The Electoral College has been very kind to Republicans in the 21st century. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, and Donald Trump did the same in 2016.But over the past few years the Republican advantage in the Electoral College seems to have shrunk, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out in his newsletter. Republicans are no longer faring significantly better in the states likely to decide the presidential election — like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — than they are nationwide. Instead, a 2024 race between Biden and Trump looks extremely close, with a tiny lead for Biden both nationally and in the swing states.A Shrinking Electoral Advance More

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      Second G.O.P Debate: Who Has Qualified So Far?

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      At least six candidates appear to have made the cut so far for the second Republican presidential debate on Sept. 27. Former President Donald J. Trump, the clear front-runner in polling, did not attend the first debate. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will take part in the second, in part because he has not […] More

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      State House Candidate in Virginia Condemns Leak of Sex Tapes

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      Susanna Gibson, a Democrat running in one of seven tossup House seats in the closely divided legislature, denounced the “illegal invasion of my privacy.”A Democratic candidate in a crucial race for the Virginia General Assembly denounced reports on Monday that she and her husband had performed live on a sexually explicit streaming site.Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running in her first election cycle, said in a statement that the leaks about the online activity were “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.”The Washington Post and The Associated Press reported on Monday that tapes of live-streamed sexual activity had been recorded from a pornographic site and archived on another site. The New York Times has not independently verified the content of the videos. The Democratic Party of Virginia did not respond to a request for comment.Ms. Gibson, 40, who appears on her campaign website in hospital scrubs as well as at home with her husband and two young children, is running for the House of Delegates in one of only a handful of competitive races that will determine control of the General Assembly. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, and Democrats narrowly control the State Senate, but both chambers are up for grabs in November.Ms. Gibson’s district, which is outside Richmond and primarily in Henrico County, is one of seven tossup seats in the 100-member House, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.Releasing damaging information about candidates of the opposing party into the heat of a campaign is an age-old political practice, but the sensational nature of the disclosure of sex tapes — reportedly featuring Ms. Gibson and her husband, a lawyer — is highly unusual. Ms. Gibson called the release of the tapes “the worst gutter politics.” The Post said it learned of the material from a “Republican operative” who denied a connection to Ms. Gibson’s opponent, David Owen, or to other political groups in Virginia.Daniel P. Watkins, a lawyer for Ms. Gibson, said it was unlawful in the state to record someone in a state of undress and distribute it to a third party without that person’s consent.“It’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material, and we’re working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice,” Mr. Watkins said.Ms. Gibson gave no indication she was considering dropping out of the race.“It won’t intimidate me and it won’t silence me,” she said in her statement. “My political opponents and their Republican allies have proven they’re willing to commit a sex crime to attack me and my family because there’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up.”Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has raised record sums for his party in an effort to take full control of the Legislature, which, if successful, would cap a remarkable swing from two years ago when Democrats fully controlled state government. More

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      The Authors of ‘How Democracies Die’ Overestimated the Republicans

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      One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal. “Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places,” they wrote.Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.A disturbing part of the answer, Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, lies in our Constitution, the very document Americans rely on to defend us from autocracy. “Designed in a predemocratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them,” they write. The Constitution’s countermajoritarian provisions, combined with profound geographic polarization, have locked us into a crisis of minority rule.Liberals — myself very much included — have been preoccupied by minority rule for years now, and you’re probably aware of the ways it manifests. Republicans have won the popular vote in only one out of the last eight presidential elections, and yet have had three Electoral College victories. The Senate gives far more power to small, rural states than large, urbanized ones, and it’s made even less democratic by the filibuster. An unaccountable Supreme Court, given its right-wing majority by the two-time popular-vote loser Trump, has gutted the Voting Rights Act. One reason Republicans keep radicalizing is that, unlike Democrats, they don’t need to win over the majority of voters.All liberal democracies have some countermajoritarian institutions to stop popular passions from running roughshod over minority rights. But as “Tyranny of the Minority” shows, our system is unique in the way it empowers a minority ideological faction at the expense of everyone else. And while conservatives like to pretend that their structural advantages arise from the judicious wisdom of the founders, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how many of the least democratic aspects of American governance are the result of accident, contingency and, not least, capitulation to the slaveholding South.It’s worth remembering that in 2000, when many thought George W. Bush might win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College, Republicans did not intend to quietly accept the results. “I think there would be outrage,” Representative Ray LaHood, a Republican from Illinois, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Bush camp planned to stoke a “popular uprising,” in the words of The Daily News, quoting a Bush aide: “The one thing we don’t do is roll over. We fight.”Most Democrats, however, feel little choice but to acquiesce to a system tilted against them. Depending on the Constitution for protection from the worst abuses of the right, they’re reluctant to delegitimize it. Besides, America’s Constitution is among the hardest in the world to change, another of its countermajoritarian qualities.Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any shortcuts for emerging from the straitjacket of minority rule. Rather, they call on readers to engage in the glacial slog of constitutional reform. Some people, Ziblatt told me, might think that working toward institutional reforms is naïve. “But the thing that I think is really naïve is to think that we can just sort of keep going down this path and that things will just work out,” he said.Personally, I don’t know anyone who is confident that things will just work out. It’s possible that, as The New York Times reports, Trump’s Electoral College edge is fading because of his relative weakness in battleground states, but he could still, running on a nakedly authoritarian platform, be re-elected with a minority of the vote. I asked Levitsky and Ziblatt how, given their work on democracy, they imagine a second Trump term unfolding.“I think the United States faces a high risk of serious and repeated constitutional crisis, what I would call regime instability, quite possibly accompanied by some violence,” said Levitsky. “I’m not as worried about the consolidation of autocracy, Hungary or Russia-style. I think that the opposition forces, civil society forces, are probably too strong for that.” Let’s hope that this time he’s not being too optimistic.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