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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

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      Covid Hero or ‘Lockdown Ron’? DeSantis and Trump Renew Pandemic Politics

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      The Florida governor has recently highlighted his state’s response to the coronavirus in hopes of striking some distance from Donald Trump.Hank Miller, a 64-year-old Iowa farmer, started paying attention to Gov. Ron DeSantis during the coronavirus pandemic, when the Florida governor was a constant presence on Fox News highlighting the reopening of his state.While Mr. Miller voted for former President Donald J. Trump in 2016 and 2020, he now plans to support Mr. DeSantis, in part, he said, because he was “disappointed” with Mr. Trump for following the advice of the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, whom Mr. DeSantis has said should be prosecuted.“I liked how DeSantis responded to the pandemic,” Mr. Miller said at a coffee shop in Grundy Center, Iowa, where Mr. DeSantis campaigned on Saturday. “He didn’t just shut things down.”Mr. DeSantis, far behind Mr. Trump in the polls in Iowa and nationally, is clearly hoping that such feelings are widespread among Republican primary voters. The governor’s record on Covid-19 provides perhaps his strongest contrast with the former president, whose administration spearheaded the development of the coronavirus vaccines that are now deeply unpopular with the Republican base.The virus could be an important wedge issue for Mr. DeSantis, who at times has struggled to provide voters with a clear case for why he would be a better president than Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner. But there are questions about whether a pandemic that many Americans see as long over will resonate with the electorate in 2024.Now, a recent resurgence of Covid-19 cases is giving Mr. DeSantis a chance to press the argument. In response to the uptick, a small number of schools, universities and hospitals have told students, patients and employees to wear masks again. Mr. DeSantis and other Republicans have seized on that as evidence that the Covid-19 debate, which they frame as a civil rights battle, is far from over.Mr. DeSantis emphasized that point during his swing through Iowa on Saturday. “When you have people going back to restrictions and mandates, this shows that this issue has not died,” he told reporters outside the coffee shop in Grundy Center. “This shows that if we don’t bring accountability with my administration, they are going to keep trying to do this.”Since returning to the campaign trail after Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida last month, Mr. DeSantis has seemingly made the virus his No. 1 issue. He has appeared repeatedly this past week on Fox News and other conservative media outlets lauding his pandemic policies, and has done interviews with local news media outlets in Iowa and New Hampshire. He even held a news conference in Jacksonville — in his role as governor — to promote the way he handled the virus.“I can tell you here in Florida, we did not and we will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs to control our health policies, let alone our state,” Mr. DeSantis said on Thursday at the event in Jacksonville, which, in the absence of formal policy announcements, had the feel of a campaign rally.Mr. DeSantis is taking advantage of an apparent shift in the national mood on the virus, even among Democrats. Only 12 percent of Americans say they typically wear a mask in public, according to a poll conducted in August by Yahoo News and YouGov.President Biden joked with reporters at the White House about the fact that he was not wearing a mask days after the first lady, Jill Biden, was diagnosed with Covid-19.Al Drago for The New York TimesAfter the first lady, Jill Biden, was recently diagnosed with Covid-19, President Biden joked with reporters at the White House about the fact that he was not wearing a mask. Although he had tested negative, Mr. Biden said he was told he needed to continue masking for 10 days.“Don’t tell them I didn’t have it on when I walked in,” Mr. Biden said, holding up his mask.As Mr. DeSantis has elevated the issue of Covid-19 once more, the Trump campaign has responded by accusing Mr. DeSantis of hypocrisy, pointing out that he did issue shut down orders and at one point praised Dr. Fauci.“Lockdown Ron should take a look in the mirror and ask himself why he’s trying to gaslight voters,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement.But while many Republican governors shut down their states at the pandemic’s start, Mr. DeSantis was early to fully reopen.Mr. Trump, who was always skeptical of masking and other public health measures, has also begun talking about Covid-19 restrictions on the trail.“The radical Democrats are trying hard to restart Covid hysteria,” Mr. Trump said on Friday at a rally in Rapid City, S.D. He has also downplayed the role Dr. Fauci played in his administration.Still, as Republican candidates try to resuscitate the pandemic as a political issue, they may face virus weariness.During Mr. DeSantis’s Saturday bus tour through Iowa, several voters said in interviews that the pandemic was not a top concern for them going into 2024, even if they admired the governor’s record.“We don’t need to hear about it,” said Dave Sweeney, a retired farmer who said he was trying to decide between supporting Mr. DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. “It’s not really an issue anymore.”It’s possible that audiences in places like New Hampshire, which imposed more stringent public health measures than Iowa, may be more receptive.In the run-up to his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis signed a series of public health laws in Florida that he often points to on the trail, including ones banning mask and vaccine mandates. He also instigated a state grand jury investigation into possible “misconduct” by scientists and vaccine manufacturers. (No charges have been brought.)While Mr. DeSantis says his Covid-19 policies protected Floridians from government overreach and kept the economy going, the state suffered a disproportionate number of coronavirus deaths during the Delta wave of the virus in 2021, after Mr. DeSantis stopped preaching the virtues of vaccines, a New York Times investigation found.During Mr. DeSantis’s recent bus tour through Iowa, several voters said in interviews that the pandemic was not a top concern for them going into 2024.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesStill, such criticisms are unlikely to matter in a Republican primary where many voters discount the severity of a virus that has killed more than a million Americans since 2020.“I think it’s a common cold,” said Roger Hibdon, 32, an engineer from Grundy Center. “I’m not worried about it.”Michael Gold More

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      Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?

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      Joe Biden is an unpopular president, and without some recovery, he could easily lose to Donald Trump in 2024.By itself, this is no great wonder: His two predecessors were also unpopular at this stage of their presidencies, also endangered in their re-election bids.But with Trump and Barack Obama, there were reasonably simple explanations. For Obama, it was the unemployment rate, 9.1 percent in September 2011, and the bruising battles over Obamacare. For Trump, it was the fact that he had never been popular, making bad approval ratings his presidency’s natural default.For Biden, though, there was a normal honeymoon, months of reasonably high approval ratings that ended only with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. And since then, it’s been hard to distill a singular explanation for what’s kept his numbers lousy.The economy is better than in Obama’s first term, inflation is ebbing, and the feared recession hasn’t materialized. The woke wars and Covid battles that disadvantaged Democrats are no longer central, and the post-Roe culture wars seem like friendlier terrain. Biden’s foreign policy team has defended Ukraine without (so far) a dangerous escalation with the Russians, and Biden has even delivered legislative bipartisanship, co-opting Trumpian promises about industrial policy along the way.This has created mystification among Democratic partisans as to why all this isn’t enough to give the president a decent polling lead. I don’t share that mystification. But I do think there’s real uncertainty about which of the forces dragging on Biden’s approval ratings matter most.Start with the theory that Biden’s troubles are mostly still about inflation — that people just hate rising prices and he isn’t credited with avoiding a recession because wage increases have been eaten up by inflation until recently.If this is the master issue, then the White House doesn’t have many options beyond patience. The administration’s original inflationary sin, the overspending in the American Rescue Plan Act, isn’t going to be repeated, and apart from the possibility of an armistice in Ukraine relieving some pressure on gas prices, there aren’t a lot of policy levers to pull. The hope has to be that inflation continues to drift down, real wages rise consistently and in November 2024, Biden gets the economic credit he isn’t getting now.But maybe it’s not just the economy. Across multiple polls, Biden seems to be losing support from minority voters, continuing a Trump-era trend. This raises the possibility that there’s a social-issues undertow for Democrats, in which even when wokeness isn’t front and center, the fact that the party’s activist core is so far left gradually pushes culturally conservative African Americans and Hispanics toward the G.O.P. — much as culturally conservative white Democrats drifted slowly into the Republican coalition between the 1960s and the 2000s.Bill Clinton temporarily arrested that rightward drift by deliberately picking public fights with factions to his left. But this has not been Biden’s strategy. He’s moved somewhat rightward on issues like immigration, in which progressivism’s policy vision hit the rocks. But he doesn’t make a big deal about his differences with his progressive flank. I don’t expect that to change — but it might be costing him in ways somewhat invisible to liberals at the moment.Or maybe the big problem is just simmering anxiety about Biden’s age. Maybe his poll numbers dipped first in the Afghanistan crisis because it showcased the public absenteeism that often characterizes his presidency. Maybe some voters now just assume that a vote for Biden is a vote for the hapless Kamala Harris. Maybe there’s just a vigor premium in presidential campaigns that gives Trump an advantage.In which case a different leader with the same policies might be more popular. Lacking any way to elevate such a leader, however, all Democrats can do is ask Biden to show more public vigor, with all the risks that may entail.But this is at least a strategy, of sorts. The hardest problem for the incumbent to address may be the pall of private depression and general pessimism hanging over Americans, especially younger Americans, which has been worsened by Covid but seems rooted in deeper social trends.I don’t see any obvious way for Biden to address this issue through normal presidential positioning. I would not recommend updating Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech with the therapy-speak of contemporary progressivism. I also don’t think the president is suited to be a crusader against digital derangement or a herald of religious revival.Biden got elected, in part, by casting himself as a transitional figure, a bridge to a more youthful and optimistic future. Now he needs some general belief in that brighter future to help carry him to re-election.But wherever Americans might find such optimism, we are probably well past the point that a decrepit-seeming president can hope to generate it himself.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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      In Post-Roe America, Nikki Haley Seeks a New Path on Abortion for G.O.P.

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      In crafting an anti-abortion message that doesn’t alienate moderate Republicans and swing voters, her approach has won both supporters and detractors.In May 2016, Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina walked down the aisle of the statehouse, beaming and shaking hands, after signing legislation that would largely outlaw abortion in the state after 20 weeks of pregnancy.Still, she wanted to be sure social conservatives knew where she stood. So her office arranged a second, entirely ceremonial signing a few weeks later at Hidden Treasure Christian School, an evangelical academy for children with disabilities in the heart of South Carolina’s conservative Upstate region.Standing alongside the staunchly anti-abortion lawmakers who sponsored the bill, and flanked by dozens of children, Ms. Haley made clear that her support for their cause was not just political, but also personal.“I am not pro-life because the Republican Party tells me to be,” she said, promoting her support for the ban, which prohibited abortion even in cases of rape or incest. “I’m pro-life because all of us have had experiences of what it means to have one of these special little ones in our life, to lose one, to know what it takes and how hard it is to get one.”Seven years later, Ms. Haley’s abortion politics have not changed much. The same cannot be said for the country.As governor of South Carolina in 2016, Ms. Haley signed a law banning abortion after 20 weeks. She held a ceremonial signing a few weeks later at a Christian school, surrounded by children. Lauren Petracca/Greenville News, via USA Today NetworkAt campaign events, in speeches before anti-abortion groups and from the primary debate stage, Ms. Haley has cast herself as an empathetic seeker of compassionate “consensus” on one of the nation’s most divisive social issues.“We need to stop demonizing this issue,” she said at the first Republican debate in Milwaukee last month. “It’s personal for every woman and man. Now, it’s been put in the hands of the people. That’s great.”The Supreme Court’s overturning of federal abortion rights transformed an issue long considered settled by broad swaths of the American public into a political hammer for Democrats. The rapid shift has forced Ms. Haley and other Republicans to thread the needle between what she calls her “unapologetically pro-life” record and the broad majorities of American voters who support some form of abortion rights.Some Republicans see Ms. Haley as pioneering a path forward on what’s become a damaging issue for their party since the 2022 decision. They believe her message could be acceptable to their party’s conservative, anti-abortion base without alienating moderate Republicans and swing voters. For Ms. Haley, the approach is part of a larger strategy to position herself as a more electable alternative to Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for governor in Michigan last year, warned that Republicans would lose the messaging fight over abortion again in 2024 unless they adopted a stance similar to Ms. Haley’s that is more focused on compassion and finding common ground. Ms. Dixon lost her own race after facing a barrage of Democratic attacks over her opposition to abortion, including in cases of rape or incest.“Democrats are trying to make anybody who is pro-life the enemy of women,” Ms. Dixon said in an interview. “It felt so good to see a strong, caring woman come at this message from a personal and loving perspective.”Ms. Haley’s approach to abortion is part of a broader campaign strategy to cast herself as a more electable alternative to some of her Republican rivals. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIn a closed-door meeting this week that was first reported by NBC News, Senate Republicans discussed new polling indicating that voters now saw the term “pro-life” as synonymous with being against abortion with no exceptions, according to a person who attended.The polling, conducted by a super PAC tied to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, also found that female politicians such as Ms. Haley were better received as messengers for the Republican position on the issue. The group urged Republican senators to do a better job of explaining more nuanced and broadly popular positions, including supporting exceptions to restrictions for rape, incest and the health of the mother.Mr. Trump, the front-runner in the 2024 G.O.P. primary race, has also urged Republicans to embrace less stringent restrictions, while resisting pressure from anti-abortion activists to embrace a 15-week federal ban. Such a ban is widely unpopular: Polling conducted last month by The New York Times/Siena College found that 64 percent of independent voters and 57 percent of female voters oppose it.While she offers little in the way of policy specifics, Ms. Haley flatly dismisses the push for a 15-week federal ban as unrealistic, given that Republicans fall short of the margin needed to pass such a proposal through the Senate. Instead, Ms. Haley stakes out broad areas of what she sees as national agreement, including a ban on “late term” abortions, encouraging adoption, providing contraception and not criminalizing women who have the procedure.Those efforts by Ms. Haley and others to soften their approach face opposition from more strident anti-abortion activists, who view the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe as a starting point on the issue, not the end of it.“We need a national defender of life who will boldly articulate their pro-life position,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion political group. “The pro-life movement must have a nominee who will boldly advocate for consensus in Congress, and as president will work to gather the votes necessary in Congress. Dismissing this task as unrealistic is not acceptable.”Supporters and campaign strategists say Ms. Haley’s approach reflects her personal experiences. In college, she watched a friend worry that her rape would result in an unwanted pregnancy. She later struggled with infertility, and underwent fertility treatments to have her two children. Her husband, Michael Haley, was adopted as a young child, an experience that made him, she said, “reason No. 1” for her opposition to abortion.“I don’t know if any of the others on that debate stage or Trump can do what she has done, and go out there and talk about this in this way where it’s understanding and compassionate and empathic and it’s coming from a position of real knowledge,” said Jennifer Nassour, the former head of the Massachusetts Republican Party, who is backing Ms. Haley. “She’s the only leader who can take such a divisive issue and bring everyone together on it.”Ms. Haley’s record tells a slightly more complicated story. During her time in South Carolina, Ms. Haley pushed her conservative state to restrict and limit abortion access.As a state legislator, she backed bills mandating ultrasound tests and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion could be performed. In 2005, she voted for a bill granting constitutional rights of due process and equal protection to a zygote, the fertilized egg cell that forms after conception. And, four years later, she co-sponsored legislation mandating that a “right to life” begins at the point when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg, several weeks before a pregnancy can generally be detected.Such bills have been used by opponents of abortion to try to grant constitutional rights to embryos and fetuses. Those fetal personhood laws, as they are broadly known, could provide a legal framework not just for banning abortion but for limiting access to in vitro fertilization and contraception.“My record on abortion is long and clear,” Ms. Haley said in an April speech to the Susan B. Anthony anti-abortion group. “I voted for every pro-life bill that came before me.”After she became governor in 2011, Ms. Haley backed legislation granting a fetus that survives a failed abortion — a rare occurrence — the same medical treatment rights as a person. She signed a law prohibiting private insurance companies from covering an abortion procedure without the purchase of a separate policy rider. And she signed the 20-week ban in 2016.In 2016, Wendy Nanny, the sponsor of the 20-week ban in the state legislature, saw the legislation as a step toward the ultimate goal of ending abortion rights in America. Ms. Haley, she said, backed that effort.“She was always supportive of anything we tried to do that was pro-life,” Ms. Nanny said. “I never had any kind of pushback from her office.”That anti-abortion record could be hard for Ms. Haley — and other Republicans who supported similar legislation across the country for years — to outrun in a general election. In the decade before Roe was overturned, Republican legislators enacted roughly 600 laws restricting abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights. Voters view those records differently in the post-Roe world, in which abortion is now all but banned in 18 states, including South Carolina.Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster, doubted whether Ms. Haley could square her “respectful and middle-ground, compromise approach” with a decade-long record of “actually not doing that when in office.” Republicans, she said, have far to go before voters will give them the benefit of the doubt on the issue.“Those candidates trying to walk back their previous positions on abortion look incredibly political and non-trustworthy,” Ms. Murphy said. “Their credibility is so low on this issue that voters just fundamentally believe Republicans want to ban abortion.”But for now, as she tries to win a Republican primary, Ms. Haley’s message is finding an audience among voters seeking an alternative to Mr. Trump. As she waited for Ms. Haley to speak in Manchester, N.H., on Wednesday, Betty Gay, a Republican former state representative, praised her approach.“I think abortion is a horrible form of birth control, but there are some circumstances that require it,” said Ms. Gay, who was still undecided about the primary but does not plan on backing Mr. Trump. “I don’t want either of the extremes.” More