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      Biden’s 2024 Playbook

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      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicYesterday, we went inside Donald Trump’s campaign for president, to understand how he’s trying to turn a mountain of legal trouble into a political advantage. Today, we turn to the re-election campaign of President Biden.Reid Epstein, who covers politics for The Times, explains why what looks on paper like a record of accomplishment is proving to be difficult to campaign on.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a politics correspondent for The New York Times.The president and his team have waved away Democrats’ worries about his bid for another term.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesBackground readingIn South Carolina, Democrats see a test of Biden’s appeal to Black voters.Political Memo: Should Biden really run again? He prolongs an awkward conversation.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein More

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      Nikki Haley, in Retreat, Says ‘Of Course the Civil War Was About Slavery’

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      A day after giving a stumbling answer about the conflict’s origin that did not mention slavery, Ms. Haley told an interviewer: “Yes, I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential hopeful, on Thursday walked back her stumbling answer about the cause of the Civil War, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”Her retreat came about 12 hours after a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, a state that is central to her presidential hopes, where she was asked what caused the Civil War. She stumbled through an answer about government overreach and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” after jokingly telling the questioner he had posed a tough one. He then noted she never uttered the word “slavery.”“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Ms. Haley replied. “Next question.”Speaking on a New Hampshire radio show on Thursday morning, Ms. Haley, who famously removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia, said: “Yes I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”But she also insinuated that the question had come not from a Republican voter but from a political detractor, accusing President Biden and Democrats of “sending plants” to her town-hall events.“Why are they hitting me? See this for what it is,” she said, adding, “They want to run against Trump.”In recent polls, Ms. Haley has surged into second place in New Hampshire, edging closer to striking distance of former President Donald J. Trump. To win the Granite State contest on Jan. 23, the first primary election of 2024, she will most likely need independent voters — and possibly Democrats who registered as independents. That is how Senator John McCain of Arizona upset George W. Bush in the state’s 2000 primary.But the Civil War gaffe may have put a crimp in that strategy.“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she said Wednesday night, “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”The answer echoed a century’s argument from segregationists that the Civil War was fundamentally about states’ rights and economics, not about ending slavery.Late Wednesday night, even Mr. Biden rebuked the answer: “It was about slavery,” he wrote on social media.She tried to walk back her comments on Thursday, asking: “What’s the lesson in all this? That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”The episode also undermined her appeal to moderates and independents seeking to thwart Mr. Trump’s return to the White House by portraying Ms. Haley as an agent of compromise.Her record as governor of South Carolina included blocking a bill to stop transgender youths from using bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity. Her push to lower the Confederate battle flag came after the mass shooting of Black worshipers at a Charleston church by a white supremacist. And she has recently called for a middle ground on abortion.“Haley’s refusal to talk honestly about slavery or race in America is a sad betrayal of her own story,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. More

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      Biden Makes Focused Appeal to Black Voters in South Carolina

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      The president’s campaign is putting money and staff into South Carolina ahead of its primary in an effort to energize Black voters, who are critical to his re-election effort.President Biden’s campaign and affiliated groups are amping up their efforts in South Carolina, pouring in money and staff ahead of the first Democratic primary in February in an effort to generate excitement for his campaign in the state.It seems, at first glance, to be a curious political strategy. Few incumbent presidents have invested so much in an early primary state — particularly one like South Carolina, where Mr. Biden faces no serious primary challenger, and where no Democratic presidential candidate has won in a general election since Jimmy Carter in 1976.But the Biden campaign sees the effort as more than just notching a big win in the state that helped revive his struggling campaign in 2020, putting him on the path to winning the nomination. It hopes to energize Black voters, who are crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election bid nationally, at a moment when his standing with Black Americans is particularly fraught.“One of the things that we have not done a good job of doing is showing the successes of this administration,” said Marvin Pendarvis, a state representative from North Charleston. He added that the campaign will need to curate a message “so that Black voters understand that this administration has done some of the most transformational things as it relates to Black communities, to minority communities.”Four years after Mr. Biden vowed to have the backs of the voters he said helped deliver him the White House, Black Americans in polls and focus groups are expressing frustration with Democrats for what they perceive as a failure to deliver on campaign promises. They also say that they have seen few improvements to their well-being under Mr. Biden’s presidency. Some are unsure whether they will vote at all.To counter that pessimism and boost Black turnout, Democrats are hitting the Palmetto State with a six-figure cash infusion from the Democratic National Committee, a slew of campaign events and an army of staffers and surrogates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley’s South Carolina Strategy Has a Donald Trump Problem

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      Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has won tough races in her home state. But as she vies for the 2024 Republican nomination, her state and party look different.In 2016, as Donald J. Trump was romping to victory in her home state, Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina backed Senator Marco Rubio as the fresh face of a “new conservative movement that’s going to change the country.”Now, Ms. Haley insists, she is that new generational leader, but even in her own state, she is finding Mr. Trump still standing in her way. If she is to make a real play for the Republican presidential nomination, South Carolina is where Ms. Haley needs to prove that the party’s voters want to turn the page on the Trump era — and where she has predicted that she will face him one-on-one after strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.“Then you’ll have me and Trump going into my home state of South Carolina — that’s how we win,” she told a crowd gathered inside a rustic banquet hall during a recent campaign stop in rural Wolfeboro, N.H.But Ms. Haley’s road to victory on her home turf will be steep. Ever since the state set Mr. Trump on a glide path to the G.O.P. nomination seven years ago, he has solidified a loyal base. The candidate who upended the state’s politics from outside the political system now has a tight hold on most of the Republican establishment, appearing recently with both Gov. Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham and boasting more than 80 endorsements from current and former officials across the state.“It is still clearly Trump’s party,” said Scott H. Huffmon, the director of the statewide Winthrop Poll, one of the few regular surveys of voter attitudes in the state. “That makes many Republican voters Trump supporters first. She has to remind them the party is bigger than one man.”Ms. Haley attempted to make that case on Wednesday on the national debate stage, where rivals intent on blunting her rise made her a target and put her on defense. She promised her approach would be different from Mr. Trump’s. “No drama, no vendettas, no whining,” she said. While Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has staked his bid on Iowa and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has gone all in on New Hampshire, Ms. Haley’s campaign officials say they have sought to spend equitable time and resources in all three early-voting states.Her campaign has its headquarters in Charleston, and is bolstered by what the campaign said was hundreds of volunteers. (The campaign declined to give specifics on staffing and volunteer efforts across all three states.)But Ms. Haley’s efforts have so far been less pronounced in South Carolina. She has spent 58 days campaigning almost evenly between Iowa and New Hampshire, but only 12 in her own backyard. Her campaign has not yet released a full list of endorsements within the state, though several key state legislators and donors are expected to back Ms. Haley in the coming days, according to her campaign. A $10 million advertising effort, more than $4 million of which has been reserved on television so far, is expected only in Iowa and New Hampshire.Ms. Haley’s campaign officials and allies argue she still has time to make up ground, even as Mr. Trump remains dominant nationwide and in all the early states, where surveys indicate he leads his nearest opponent by double digits. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian, have dropped out of the race, which has helped Ms. Haley with money and momentum and tightened the fight with Mr. DeSantis for second place.At an energetic town-hall event last week in Bluffton, S.C., Katon Dawson, an adviser for the Haley campaign in South Carolina and a former chairman of the state Republican Party, pointed to the audience of more than 2,500 people — her largest crowd yet in her home state — and said the mailing lists generated from such events would help elevate her ground game.“When South Carolina jumps into focus, it’s going to jump in the gutter, and we’ll be ready for it,” Mr. Dawson said, suggesting he expected the attacks on Ms. Haley to become uglier closer to the January contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.Plenty of the attendees at the Bluffton event were former Trump supporters. Michelle Handfield, 80, a volunteer at a correctional institute, and her husband, John, 81, a retired photographer, said they had been some of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic admirers. Ms. Handfield, a former Democrat, said he was the first Republican she had ever voted for in 2016.Now, however, they were planning to vote for Ms. Haley for reasons similar to what the former South Carolina governor has articulated: “Chaos follows him.”“I think he was a great president, but they were after him from the beginning — the Democrats — and then he didn’t help by what he says and does,” Ms. Handfield said. “I really wish he had won a second term, but I think now he would do more harm for the country than good.”Former President Donald J. Trump has solidified a loyal base in South Carolina, appearing recently with Gov. Henry McMaster at a University of South Carolina football game.Chris Carlson/Associated PressStill, many of the state’s Republican primary voters remain ardent supporters of Mr. Trump, even as he has so far kept a light campaign schedule.“It is fascinating that we see all of these campaigns in the various stages of grief as President Trump continues to dominate the primary field,” said Alex Latcham, Mr. Trump’s early states director. “Right now, Haley is in the bargaining stage.”Ms. Haley’s political base in the state remains the same as it was when she was governor: the affluent — and more moderate — Republicans along the coast and in Charleston.But her grip on the Midlands, honed by her years in government, has loosened with time, and whatever support she had in the much more conservative Upstate around Greenville has dissipated sharply. To prevail, she must win back some of those conservatives and soften enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, all while fending off attacks from other opponents.On the debate stage Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis took aim at her conservative record as governor, saying he had signed a bill criminalizing transgender people for using bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond to their sex at birth and argued she had not supported a similar measure. Ms. Haley countered that such legislation wasn’t necessary at the time, adding that she had not wanted to bring government into the issue. The South Carolina bill did not advance past its introduction in the State House.Last week, Mr. DeSantis also ripped into Ms. Haley as he campaigned in South Carolina. On Friday, he appeared with Tara Servatius, a popular radio broadcaster on the Greenville station WORD, who has been using her show for weeks to blast Ms. Haley as an untrustworthy moderate.“For the last 10 years, I have tried to get Nikki Haley to come answer unscripted questions,” Ms. Servatius said, to which Mr. DeSantis quipped, “Good luck with that.”Some Republican primary voters seem to be looking for a figure who embodies more drastic conservative change. Tim Branham, 73, of Columbia, could not recall much that Ms. Haley accomplished as governor. “In my opinion, the best thing you can say about Nikki was she’s a Republican,” he said.Still, Ms. Haley continues to pull in key endorsements along with a fresh wave of big-money donors looking for a Trump alternative, strengthening her finances as well as her field operations.Within a week of endorsing her campaign, Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network founded by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, had already poured $3.5 million into hiring door knockers, placing digital ads and producing door hangers and media in Iowa and South Carolina, according to federal spending filings. Within a day of its announcement, Americans for Prosperity Action had more than 140 volunteers and staffers already out in nearly half of South Carolina’s 46 counties spreading her message.Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Ms. Haley’s appeal, which appears greater among college-educated Republicans who do not think of themselves as particularly religious, better positioned her for success among Republican primary voters in New Hampshire.But he added that a more telling test of how her message might fare among Republican primary voters in South Carolina would be Iowa and its largely white and Christian evangelical Republican base — a group that is closely aligned with Mr. Trump.“If Haley loses South Carolina, that very well may be curtains,” Mr. Kondik said.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Can Nikki Haley Beat Trump?

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      It’s time to admit that I underestimated Nikki Haley.When she began her presidential campaign, she seemed caught betwixt and between: too much of a throwback to pre-Trump conservatism to challenge Ron DeSantis for the leadership of a Trumpified party, but also too entangled with Trump after her service in his administration to offer the fresh start that anti-Trump Republicans would be seeking.If you wanted someone to attack Trump head-on with relish, Chris Christie was probably your guy. If you wanted someone with pre-Trump Republican politics but without much Trump-era baggage, Tim Scott seemed like the fresher face.But now Scott is gone, Christie has a modest New Hampshire constituency and not much else, and Haley is having her moment. She’s in second place in New Hampshire, tied with DeSantis in the most recent Des Moines Register-led poll in Iowa, and leading Joe Biden by more than either DeSantis or Trump in national polls. Big donors are fluttering her way, and there’s an emerging media narrative about how she’s proving the DeSantis campaign theory wrong and showing that you can thrive as a Republican without surrendering to Trumpism.To be clear, I do not think Haley has proved the DeSantis theory wrong. She is not polling anywhere close to the highs DeSantis hit during his stint as the Trump-slayer, and if you use the Register-led poll to game out a future winnowing, you see that her own voters would mostly go to DeSantis if she were to drop out — but if DeSantis drops out, a lot of his voters would go to Trump.As long as that’s the case, Haley might be able to consolidate 30 or 35 percent of the party, but the path to actually winning would be closed. Which could make her ascent at DeSantis’s expense another study in the political futility of anti-Trump conservatism, its inability to wrestle successfully with the populism that might make Trump the nominee and the president again.But credit where it’s due: Haley has knocked out Scott, passed Christie and challenged DeSantis by succeeding at a core aspect of presidential politics — presenting yourself as an appealing and charismatic leader who can pick public fights and come out the winner (at least when Vivek Ramaswamy is your foil).So in the spirit of not underestimating her, let’s try to imagine a scenario where Haley actually wins the nomination.First, assume that ideological analysis of party politics is overrated, and that a candidate’s contingent success can yield irresistible momentum, stampeding voters in a way that polls alone cannot anticipate.For Haley, the stampede scenario requires winning outright in New Hampshire. The difficulty is that even on the upswing, she still trails Trump 46-19 in the current RealClearPolitics Average. But assume that Christie drops out and his support swings her way, assume that the current polling underestimates how many independents vote in the G.O.P. primary, assume a slight sag for Trump and a little last-moment Nikkimentum, and you can imagine your way to a screaming upset — Haley 42, Trump 40.Then assume that defeat forces Trump to actually debate in the long February lull (broken only by the Nevada caucus) between New Hampshire and the primary in Haley’s own South Carolina. Assume that the front-runner comes across as some combination of rusty and insane, Haley handles him coolly and then wins her home state primary. Assume that polls still show her beating Biden, Fox News has rallied to her fully, endorsements flood in — and finally, finally, enough voters who like Trump because he’s a winner swing her way to clear a path to the nomination.You’ll notice, though, that this story skips over Iowa. That’s because I’m not sure what Haley needs there. Victory seems implausible, but does she want to surge so impressively that it knocks DeSantis out of the race? Or, as the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio has suggested, does the fact that DeSantis’s voters mostly have Trump as a second choice mean that Haley actually needs DeSantis to stay in the race through the early states, so that Trump can’t consolidate his own potential support? In which case maybe Haley needs an Iowa result where both she and DeSantis overperform their current polling, setting her up for New Hampshire but also giving the Florida governor a reason to hang around.This dilemma connects to my earlier argument that beating Trump requires a joining of the Haley and DeSantis factions, an alliance of the kind contemplated by Trump’s opponents in 2016 but never operationalized. But I doubt Haley is interested in such an alliance at the moment; after all, people are talking about her path to victory — and here I am, doing it myself!Fundamentally, though, I still believe that Haley’s destiny is anticipated by the biting, “congrats, Nikki,” quote from a DeSantis ally in New York Magazine: “You won the Never Trump primary. Your prize is nothing.”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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      Kamala Harris Is Set to Visit South Carolina for Campaign Kickoff

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      The vice president is said to be planning a surprise Friday trip to file paperwork for the state’s primary, which will be the first party-approved voting of 2024.Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Columbia, S.C., on Friday to formally file President Biden’s paperwork to appear on the Democratic primary ballot in the state, according to two people familiar with her plans.Ms. Harris’s trip will punctuate the end of a tumultuous week for her and Mr. Biden. Democrats began the week in a panic over polls that showed Mr. Biden trailing his likely Republican challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, in five of six expected battleground states. Then they found their spirits lifted when Democrats performed well in Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, where a ballot measure enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution passed.The Biden campaign had said its South Carolina paperwork would be filed by Representative James Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat who helped resuscitate Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign by endorsing him three days before his state’s primary. Mr. Biden repaid the favor by pushing the Democratic National Committee to put South Carolina at the front of the party’s presidential nominating calendar.Ms. Harris and Mr. Clyburn will meet to file the primary paperwork at the South Carolina Democratic Party headquarters, said the people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the trip was supposed to be a surprise.After The New York Times asked about the trip on Thursday evening, Ms. Harris made a sly suggestion on social media that she may appear with Mr. Clyburn.The White House had intended to keep Ms. Harris’s trip secret until she arrived in South Carolina. Her official White House schedule for Friday reads: “The vice president is in Washington, D.C., and has no public events scheduled.”A Biden campaign spokesman and Ms. Harris’s White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the trip.Mr. Biden, at a fund-raising event Thursday night in Chicago, dismissed polls from The Times and CNN released this week that each showed him trailing Mr. Trump.“The press has been talking about two polls,” Mr. Biden said. “There are 10 other polls we’re winning.” Mr. Biden then told the assembled donors that their money was not wasted on him but joked that he could “screw up” during his re-election bid.Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who ran in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, have already filed paperwork to appear on South Carolina’s Democratic primary ballot.Nevada, the second state on the party’s calendar, had its deadline to file for the primary last month. Mr. Biden, Ms. Williamson and 11 other candidates filed to run in Nevada’s Democratic primary.Mr. Biden did not file for the primary in New Hampshire after officials there refused the D.N.C.’s request to move its primary after South Carolina’s. More

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      Nikki Haley Is Gaining Ground

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      A long time ago in South Carolina, as Nikki Haley recalls when she talks to voters in New Hampshire and Iowa, she ran campaigns that nobody thought much of until, unexpectedly, suddenly, she was winning them. Is that what’s happening here? Is this real?She is gaining in the places that matter. And she is running the campaign she’s run before: hard-core conservative on fiscal matters and immigration, kitchen-table pragmatic on basically everything else. A plaintive quality in Ms. Haley’s voice joins up well with the grim statistics she shares about kids’ reading and math proficiency post-pandemic, and about what happens to veterans after they come home. She spends a good deal of time talking about U.S. support for Ukraine (and Israel) as bulwarks against further deterioration of the world order, while also outlining a hawkish “peace through strength” approach toward China.There’s a hundred little switches that would need to flip from now, in a big mousetrap-style path, toward victory. If a bloc of Republican voters’ support for Mr. Trump is as soft as some polling indicates, and if Ms. Haley could somehow continue to elevate herself the rest of the way, the race for the G.O.P. nomination would turn brutal — and volatile confrontation with Mr. Trump would be inevitable. Survivors of such moments have been rare, but for those who do, like Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, survival becomes a position of strength. Maybe people forgot Ms. Haley’s early campaigns in favor of the easy relationship she had with Mr. Trump, but they might prove instructive.In person, her campaign feels different than Mr. Trump’s and those of the other challengers; if she agrees with them on immigration, the tone and emphasis on much of the rest differ. This includes her general impulse toward knocking Washington (both Republicans and Democrats) rather than the cultural Marxists that animate most Republican visions of what ails the country. You are, in general, unlikely to hear at another national Republican event answers about access to contraceptives, the importance of attracting and training more mental health counselors or even a slight openness to the idea of businesses transitioning to the use of electric vehicles (if on a longer time frame than the Biden administration’s, and only after Ms. Haley goes on a long riff about calling out China and India). In Nikki Haley, these things flow fluidly alongside outlines of her plan to raise the retirement age for the youngest generation, or extended and hard comments about the border, including a reactionary “it only takes one” warning about terrorism.Ms. Haley remains the governor who, after promising during a campaign to keep the Confederate flag on state grounds, later leaned on Republicans to take it down, who signed a state law requiring businesses to check the federal E-Verify immigration status program and who gave a State of the Union response about the value and honor of immigrants that doubled as a rebuke to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. She then served in Mr. Trump’s administration, where she pursued sanctions on Russia. Depending on how you view Ms. Haley, these are evidence of a lack of core, or the subtleties of a realist with a long game. Either way, it’s indisputable that her career runs toward brisk, business-friendly sobriety and that she hasn’t lost before.Winning is on the mind of this campaign. The strategy looks like: Ms. Haley walking slow, subtle figure eights encircled by voters on a Thursday evening in Nashua, N.H. She spoke for 33 minutes in a well-lit space inside a building that’s seen better days; answered questions for 23 minutes; shook hands; signed posters and posed for photos with older couples in puffy jackets gently touching her back for at least another half-hour; stood and worked the room again until, essentially, she was the last person in it, touching up her own makeup to do a TV interview in the near dark as staff members broke down and packed up the remaining gear. That’s the logistical play here: grinding out fractions of percentage points, voter by voter, event by event, with low overhead and a distinct tone, elevated here and there by pointed moments on television.Ms. Haley speaking at a diner in Londonderry, N.H., on Thursday.Jacob Hannah for The New York TimesMs. Haley has said that a presidential election is about relationships and trust.Jacob Hannah for The New York Times“Eight years ago, it was good to have a leader who broke things,” she told the Republican Jewish Coalition late last month, part of a highly pro-Israel speech that drew some attention. “But right now, we need a leader who also knows how to put things back together.”From here, Ms. Haley would need to continue accruing steady, modest gains; serious money would have to come through to pay for TV ads that really land; donors would have to give up their eternal dream of Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor who a number of Republican donors envision as the candidate to wait for. More current candidates, and especially Chris Christie, would need to drop out before, not after, the New Hampshire primary. She’d need to flip some senators, governors or conservative talk radio types — who knows who — into believers and for their belief to be persuasive with a real segment of Trump-leaning conservatives. Independents and, because every vote counts, the Romney-to-Biden crowd would need to prioritize her candidacy in states where they can vote in primaries like New Hampshire and South Carolina, and in many of the Super Tuesday states.She’d need to continue dominating debates; she’d need to not fade or completely lose it when Mr. Trump turns a real attack on her; and more than anything she’d need a substantive critique, even if gently delivered, of Mr. Trump to feel true and land with people. Maybe it’s that idea of putting things back together, which she did not repeat in New Hampshire last week, that has the virtue of matching Ms. Haley’s vibe, while also responding to the widespread feeling the earth is falling apart. A win in Iowa or New Hampshire for Ms. Haley would reset the entire primary.This, or some array of similar conditions, still seems very unlikely. But it’s a lot less unlikely than it was six months ago. And it’s more or less what happened, on a smaller scale, for Ms. Haley in 2004 and 2010 when she ran for the South Carolina Legislature and then for governor. Those campaigns started off seeming ridiculous and involved Ms. Haley, holding doughnuts, knocking on doors for votes (though that is what it looks like when someone runs against a longtime incumbent). Then those campaigns gradually caught on, brought in such disparate backers as Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, and — though she didn’t mention it when she talked about those campaigns last week — when they became competitive, the campaigns ended in brutal attacks on her, and Haley wins.Last winter, when she announced, a lot of people considered her campaign a waste of time. Even more, they argued that her glossy corporateness was out of touch with today’s G.O.P.; that she must be running for vice president. That response likely derived from the ridiculous period after Jan. 6, when Ms. Haley criticized Mr. Trump harshly, then seemed to dial it back. Part of it is the smooth, pain-free way Ms. Haley entered and extricated herself from the Trump administration, after criticizing him in 2016 and endorsing Marco Rubio. Some of it’s the fluid way she talks and the clothes, too, even if they likely harken back to a not-Ivy-League facet of her life: growing up working in a clothing store in the small-town South. This picture of Ms. Haley culminated in Vivek Ramaswamy congratulating her on her future on the Raytheon board.But the full Haley story has a lot of brutal moments in it; hers is not a soft career. She really brings something out in people: guys who used slurs to describe her; the former Democratic Party official who in 2013 compared her to Eva Braun and said she should go back where she came from, then clarified to say he meant “being an accountant in her parents’ dress shop”; Rex Tillerson, who used a sexist term to describe her, according to the writer Tim Alberta. There have been people who have said she lies about her religion. The political consultant Stuart Stevens recently told The New Yorker that the only difference between Ms. Haley and Marjorie Taylor Greene was “purely aesthetic.”In 2004, when she was running for the state legislature, people sent racist mailers about her parents, who had lived in South Carolina for 30 years, had painted an American flag on the ceiling of their clothing store and had organized a local international night and science programs in their small town. Except voters in the district felt as if they knew her. “By that point, Nikki had already met every single voter who got those mailers,” the former state party chairman Katon Dawson told Mr. Alberta. “They all had talked to her. It made a lot of those people angry on her behalf.”When she ran for governor, multiple men claimed to have had affairs with Ms. Haley, who denied this. Voters felt as if she got a bad shake. In this way, one consistency in the Haley story is the way pain can be transformed into a political weapon — used to prevail in elections, or push another Republican to vote to take the Confederate flag down.It’s a hypothetical on top of a hypothetical to think about what would happen if Mr. Trump attacked a candidate who’s polling, at best, 19 percent in New Hampshire right now. But there’s no total glide path to defeating Mr. Trump; he will force confrontation, and Ms. Haley’s campaign seems engineered to bring that about, but only at the end. Would it work the same way as before for her?There is the possibility that no matter what Ms. Haley does, this ends with an emphatic defeat, with voters primed to have their better impulses wrecked by Mr. Trump, with people in media and politics waiting to have every suspicion about her oscillations affirmed. Maybe this moment is the ceiling, and Ms. Haley fades. Maybe she’ll pull up stakes and endorse Mr. Trump in the end, accepting reality but invalidating the interest and trust people on one side of the party might have in her. Or it’s the others: Candidates won’t drop out; the money and endorsements don’t come through; voters won’t take the chance.But, perhaps, the alchemy works the same way: The candidate keeps gaining and doesn’t fold at the decisive moment, and people walk away more secure in their vote and even protective. That happened with Mr. Kemp in Georgia, and it’s happened with Ms. Haley before.And yes, this is all horse race — who’s up, who’s down, about winning the presidency over being president. But resolving the Trump candidacy through political, persuasive means is actually an important civic project, one that could end with an imitation of Mr. Trump, or someone else. Ms. Haley clearly thinks there’s a way to do this that combines enough of what hard-line and moderate conservatives care about in real life, that joins the hard-liners’ desire to win and the moderates’ desire to move on from Mr. Trump. The biggest enemy she will have to defeat is people’s idea of what other people want from politics now.In a diner in Londonderry, N.H., last week, a voter asked Ms. Haley for her help in his defending her against some specific claims. “Absolutely,” she said. “First of all, you need to think of a presidential election — at least the way I look at it — it’s about relationships and trust. Right?”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Supreme court to review whether South Carolina map discriminated against Black voters

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      When South Carolina Republicans set out to redraw the state’s seven congressional districts after the 2020 census, they had a clear goal in mind: make the state’s first congressional district more friendly for Republicans.In 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham won the seat in an upset. In 2020, Republican Nancy Mace barely won it back. Now, Republicans wanted to redraw the district, which includes Charleston and stretches along the south-eastern part of the state, to be much safer. There was an easy way to do this – change the lines to add reliably Republican areas in three different counties to the district.But there was a problem. The old district was about 17.8% Black and the new additions would make it 20% Black, enough to make it politically competitive. So the mapmaker Republicans tasked with coming up with a new plan began removing Black voters in Charleston from the first district, placing them in the neighboring sixth district, which is represented by Democrat Jim Clyburn. Ultimately, he removed more than 30,000 Black voters – 62% of Charleston’s Black population in the district – out of it. Mace comfortably won re-election in 2022.Whether or not that removal was constitutional is at the center of a case the supreme court is set to hear on Wednesday called Alexander v South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.A three-judge panel ruled in January that Republicans had undertaken an “effective bleaching” of the district, deliberately sorting Black voters based on their race. That kind of racial sorting violates the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law. It was “more than a coincidence” that the new, more-Republican configuration of the first district had the exact same percentage as Black voters as the old one. The court said Republicans had adopted a racial target of a 17% Black district and drawn the lines to meet it.Any decision striking down the lines is likely to make the first congressional district more competitive for Democrats, who are seeking to cut in to the razor-thin majority Republicans hold in the US House next fall.But South Carolina Republicans say their decision to move voters was based on partisan motivations, not racial ones. The mapmaker, Republicans say, didn’t even consider racial data when he was drawing the plans. The map South Carolina Republicans enacted is the only plan offered that increases the Republican vote share while all the ones proposed by the plaintiffs turned it into a majority-Democratic district, lawyers for the state wrote in their briefing to the supreme court.“If left uncorrected, the decision below will serve as a roadmap to invalidate commonplace districts designed with a political goal,” lawyers for the state wrote in their briefing to the supreme court.While the US supreme court has long prohibited racial gerrymandering – sorting voters into districts based on their race with no legitimate purpose – it said in 2019 that there is nothing the federal courts can do to stop gerrymandering for partisan aims.The South Carolina case is being closely watched because a ruling approving of the state’s redistricting approach could give lawmakers much more leeway to use partisanship as a pretext for unconstitutionally moving voters based on their race. That could be a boon to lawmakers in the US south, where voting is often racially polarized.While the current conservative court has been extremely hostile to voting rights in recent years, litigants have had some success in similar racial gerrymandering cases. In a 2017 case, for example, the court struck down two North Carolina congressional districts because Republicans in the state had relied too much on race with no legitimate purpose.“The sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a footnote in the majority opinion.“This case stands for the proposition that you cannot use partisanship as a guise to harm Black communities,” said Antonio Ingram II, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), which is representing the challengers in the case. “You cannot use political goals or interests in order to harm Black voters. Black voters cannot be collateral damage to craft partisan gerrymanders.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo bolster their argument, the challengers retained a statistical expert, Harvard professor Kosuke Imai, who produced 10,000 simulated maps that did not take race into account. None of those 10,000 simulations produced a Black voting age population in the first congressional district than the plan Republicans adopted.Another expert witness for the plaintiffs analyzed the areas that were moved from the first congressional district to the sixth to see if there was any correlation between race or partisanship and the likelihood it would be moved. The analysis found that the racial makeup of an area was a better predictor of whether it would be moved than its partisan composition.There are also allegations that Clyburn, one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, condoned adding Black voters to his district and assisted the legislature in coming up with a plan to do so. Clyburn has strongly disputed those allegations and filed a friend of the court brief urging the supreme court to uphold the lower court’s finding and strike down the first congressional district.The justice department also filed a brief urging the court to uphold the lower court’s ruling and strike down congressional district 1. “The court permissibly found that race predominated in the drawing of CD1 because mapmakers relied on race to achieve their partisan goals,” Elizabeth Prelogar, the solicitor general, wrote in a brief.Ingram, the LDF attorney, said that the map South Carolina Republicans had implemented would ultimately make it harder for Black voters along the coast of the state to get someone to advocate for them on issues like climate change. He noted that voters in Charleston, near the coast of South Carolina, who were being attached to CD-6, were being annexed into a largely inland district.“This is about Black voters not having champions in their own communities that are responsive to their needs that are influenced by their electoral power to really advocate for federal allocation of resources without things that will improve their quality of life.” More