South Carolina

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Makes Focused Appeal to Black Voters in South Carolina

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Can Nikki Haley Beat Trump?

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Kamala Harris Is Set to Visit South Carolina for Campaign Kickoff

      by

      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

    • 63 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Nikki Haley Is Gaining Ground

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Supreme court to review whether South Carolina map discriminated against Black voters

      by

      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

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Haley Heads Into Second G.O.P. Debate on the Rise, Making Her a Likely Target

      by

      After her breakout performance at the first debate, the former South Carolina governor has gained attention from Republican voters and donors and is moving up in the polls.At a campaign event at a scenic country club in Portsmouth, N.H, on Thursday, James Peterson, a businessman, thrilled an audience when he stunned Nikki Haley with a question she said she had never heard before, and which cut straight to the point: 100 years from now, how do you think history will remember Donald Trump?“I always say, ‘I’ve done over 80 town halls in New Hampshire and Iowa — that’s all the debate prep I need,’ but you take it to a whole new level,” Ms. Haley said to a roar of laughter from roughly 100 Rotary Club members and their guests.She then took a quick beat before diving into a measured, yet sharpened, critique of Mr. Trump and his administration — the good, the bad, and with some subtlety, the ugly.“Time does funny things. My thought will be that he was the right president at the right time,” she said, later making clear, “I don’t think he is the right president now.”Such a thorny question might be just the type of preparation Ms. Haley, 51, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, is looking for as she heads into the next Republican presidential debate on Wednesday with real momentum — and as the likely focus of political attacks.After her last performance on the national debate stage, in which she made a strong general election pitch and tangled with opponents on foreign policy, climate and abortion, Ms. Haley has seen gains in the polls, a rush of volunteers and swelling interest from early-state voters.Recent surveys have her running third in Iowa and New Hampshire and second in her home state of South Carolina. One CNN survey showed Ms. Haley beating President Biden in a hypothetical general-election matchup.Some of her top fund-raisers said donors who had been waiting on the sidelines for a Trump alternative to emerge were coalescing behind her. Former Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois, a top giver to her rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has transferred his allegiance to Ms. Haley.Another major backer, Eric J. Tanenblatt, an Atlanta businessman who has hosted three fund-raisers for Ms. Haley since March, said the excitement around her candidacy has increased significantly in recent weeks.“When she was here last week, we didn’t have to call people, people were calling us,” he said. He noted that the size of her events have grown, “each one bigger than the one before.” He added of his most recent gathering: “We had to turn people away — it is a good problem to have.”But even as Ms. Haley looks to replicate her debate success next week, the 2024 presidential race still appears to be Mr. Trump’s to lose. And with voters and donors starting to pay more attention, her rivals are likely to as well.Since the last debate, Ms. Haley has mostly split her time between New Hampshire and South Carolina while also making up ground in Iowa. She has continued to burnish her foreign policy credentials, criticize Republicans on spending — which played well in the first debate — and call for a change in generational leadership.On a farm last week in Grand Mound, Iowa, she drove a corn combine and spoke of the need to fix the legal immigration system to address farmers’ labor shortages against a backdrop of gleaming green tractors and American and Iowa flags. But she also pledged to defund sanctuary cities and send the military into Mexico to tackle drug cartels.In a packed auditorium at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., on Friday, Ms. Haley laid out her economic priorities, including eliminating the federal gas and diesel tax, ending green energy subsidies, overhauling social security and Medicare for younger people and withholding the pay of Congress members if they fail to pass a budget.She criticized both Republican and Democratic presidents for increasing the debt but reserved her toughest broadsides for China and Mr. Biden, whom she accused of plunging the nation into “socialism” and enlarging government, saying he was pouring money into social and corporate welfare programs that she argued were hurting the poor “in the name of helping the poor.”Ms. Haley rode a corn combine during a farm tour in Grand Mound, Iowa, last week.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHer appearances lately have drawn in moderates, independents and even some Democrats who say they like her fresh face and appeals to common sense and reason. “I like her fast thinking and proactive ideas,” said Nancy Wauters, 67, a retired medical office support staffer and an independent voter who went to see Ms. Haley speak at a Des Moines town hall last week after being impressed by her performance in the first debate.But swaying Trump die-hards who have continued to rally behind the former president has been more difficult. “I like Nikki Haley a lot,” said Barbara Miller, 64, a retired banker, at Ms. Haley’s event in Portsmouth. “But I just feel that Donald Trump is the stronger, more electable candidate.”When another voter at the country club in Portsmouth pressed Ms. Haley on how she would overcome his advantage, Ms. Haley said she expected the field to winnow after the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire and to come to a “head-to-head” matchup in her home state of South Carolina.Mr. Trump missing the first debate and now possibly the second was a mistake, she said.“You can’t win the American people by being absent,” she said. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson May Not Make the Next GOP Debate

      by

      Low poll numbers could keep the long-shot Republicans off the stage next Wednesday in the second presidential primary debate.After eking their way into the first Republican presidential debate last month, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, long-shot candidates, appear to be in jeopardy of failing to qualify for the party’s second debate next week.Both have been registering support in the low single digits in national polls and in the polls from early nominating states that the Republican National Committee uses to determine eligibility.The threshold is higher for this debate, happening on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Several better-known G.O.P. rivals are expected to make the cut — but the candidate who is perhaps best known, former President Donald J. Trump, is again planning to skip the debate.Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming front-runner for the party’s nomination despite a maelstrom of indictments against him, will instead give a speech to striking union autoworkers in Michigan.Who Has Qualified for the Second Republican Presidential Debate?Six candidates appear to have made the cut for the next debate. Donald J. Trump is not expected to attend.Some of Mr. Trump’s harshest critics in the G.O.P. have stepped up calls for the party’s bottom-tier candidates to leave the crowded race, consolidating support for a more viable alternative to the former president.Lance Trover, a spokesman for the Burgum campaign, contended in an email on Wednesday that Mr. Burgum was still positioned to qualify for the debate. Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said in an email on Wednesday that candidates have until 48 hours before the debate to qualify. She declined to comment further about which ones had already done so.Before the first debate on Aug. 23, the R.N.C. announced it was raising its polling and fund-raising thresholds to qualify for the second debate, which will be televised by Fox Business. Candidates must now register at least 3 percent support in a minimum of two national polls accepted by the R.N.C. The threshold for the first debate was 1 percent.Debate organizers will also recognize a combination of one national poll and polls from at least two of the following early nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.“While debate stages are nice, we know there is no such thing as a national primary,” Mr. Trover said in a statement, adding, “Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are the real people that narrow the field.”Mr. Burgum’s campaign has a plan to give him a boost just before the debate, Mr. Trover added, targeting certain Republicans and conservative-leaning independents through video text messages. A super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running a distant second to Mr. Trump in Republican polls, has used a similar text messaging strategy.Mr. Burgum, a former software executive, is also harnessing his wealth to introduce himself to Republicans through television — and at considerable expense. Since the first debate, a super PAC aligned with him has booked about $8 million in national broadcast, live sports and radio advertising, including a $2 million infusion last week, according to Mr. Burgum’s campaign, which is a separate entity. His TV ads appeared during Monday Night Football on ESPN.As of Wednesday, there were six Republicans who appeared to be meeting the national polling requirement, according to FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregation site.That list was led by Mr. Trump, who is ahead of Mr. DeSantis by an average of more than 40 percentage points. The list also includes the multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador; former Vice President Mike Pence; and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was averaging only 2.4 percent support nationally as of Wednesday, he is also expected to make the debate stage by relying on a combination of national and early nominating state polls to qualify.Mr. Scott has performed better in places like Iowa and his home state than in national polls, and his campaign has pressed the R.N.C. to place more emphasis on early nominating states.The R.N.C. also lifted its fund-raising benchmarks for the second debate. Only candidates who have received financial support from 50,000 donors will make the debate stage — 10,000 more than they needed for the first debate. They must also have at least 200 donors in 20 or more states or territories.While Mr. Burgum’s campaign said that it had reached the fund-raising threshold, it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Hutchinson had.Both candidates resorted to some unusual tactics to qualify for the first debate.Mr. Burgum offered $20 gift cards to anyone who gave at least $1 to his campaign, while Politico reported that Mr. Hutchinson had paid college students for each person they could persuade to contribute to his campaign.Candidates will still be required to sign a loyalty pledge promising to support the eventual Republican nominee, something that Mr. Trump refused to do before skipping the first debate.Shane Goldmacher More