Trump, Donald J

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      Democrats Fret That Biden’s Power Players Are Not at His Campaign Base

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      President Biden has a re-election campaign with two distinct centers of gravity — the White House and his Delaware headquarters — and advisers who are juggling two jobs at once.With less than 10 months to go until the 2024 election, the nerve center of President Biden’s bid for a second term is stationed not at his campaign’s headquarters in Delaware but within feet of the Oval Office.The president and his chief strategist, Mike Donilon, have repeatedly discussed when to move him over to the campaign — perhaps after the 2022 midterm elections, then after the 2023 off-year elections and again at the end of 2023. Each time, no move happened after the president told aides he wanted to keep Mr. Donilon within walking distance.Anita Dunn, the longtime Democratic operative who stepped in to help revive Mr. Biden’s fledging operation four years ago, is devising the re-election message again, even as she oversees communications at the White House. Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s deputy White House chief of staff and former campaign manager, is also splitting her day job with her role as one of the most powerful voices in the campaign.So far, almost none of the people in the president’s inner circle have left for campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., prompting some donors and strategists to worry that too much of Mr. Biden’s team remains cloistered inside the White House. Less than a year before Election Day, the president has a campaign with two distinct centers of gravity, advisers juggling two jobs at once, and months of internal debate about when to consolidate everyone in one place.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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      Trump Has Made Claims About Caucus Fraud. What if He Underperforms?

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      The last time Donald J. Trump participated in competitive Iowa caucuses, he lost narrowly, accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of stealing the contest, claimed fraud, demanded that Iowa Republicans nullify the results, and called for a rerun.While Iowa has a history of troubles with its caucus results, there’s been no evidence of fraud. The 2016 Republican contest was, in fact, the only one since 2008 that had gone off without a hitch.And yet if Monday night ends with Mr. Trump underperforming expectations, both his history and his rhetoric during this year’s campaign suggest he won’t hesitate to cry foul and refuse to accept the result.Mr. Trump has already accused Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida of “trying to rig” the caucuses. Laura Loomer, a far-right and anti-Muslim activist whom Mr. Trump last year considered hiring for a campaign post, suggested on social media that “the deep state” was engaging in “weather manipulation” to instigate Iowa’s Friday snowstorm and subzero temperatures to depress Trump turnout on Monday. And Donald Trump Jr. suggested in a Telegram video that “we can’t take anything for granted, or assume that everything is going to be on the up and up. We’ve seen this rodeo before.”Those claims are not likely to be met with much support from Iowa Republicans and the party volunteers who will operate the 1,657 caucus sites across the state.“If Trump says it’s fraud, he’s full of crap,” said A.J. Spiker, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa who is backing Mr. DeSantis.Still, Iowa Republicans aim to protect themselves from campaigns claiming foul play at the caucuses.At each site, caucusgoers mark their presidential preferences on paper slips. Those slips are then counted in full view of whoever wants to watch. Typically a representative from each campaign watches the counting, and recording is allowed.“It’s the most transparent straw vote you could possibly do,” Mr. Spiker said.The Trump campaign’s headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa, on Saturday.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s pre-emptive Iowa fraud claims last month followed a flub by Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis. She called on supporters to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” she said.That earned Ms. DeSantis a rebuke from the state Republican Party.Only Iowans can participate in the caucuses. Republican volunteers are supposed to check for photo identification at the caucus sites. Still, Mr. Trump’s campaign suggested then that the DeSantis campaign had professed a “plot to rig the caucus through fraud.”Another candidate who has trafficked in conspiracies and has been sowing doubt about Iowa’s caucuses is Vivek Ramaswamy, who failed to qualify for recent debates.“The mainstream media is trying to rig the Iowa G.O.P. caucus in favor of the corporate candidates who they can control,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in a campaign video this week. “Don’t fall for their trick. They don’t want you to hear from me about the truth.”Voting rights groups and disinformation experts say the pre-emptive cries about fraud and rigged elections have become something of a new normal.“This follows the general playbook, the election denier playbook of just pre-emptively laying the groundwork for claims of fraud in the event of a loss,” said Emma Steiner, the Information Accountability Project Manager at Common Cause, a left-leaning voting rights organization. “It’s sort of future-proofing.”Indeed, Mr. Trump has long trumpeted baseless claims of fraud or rigging before an election. In 2016, weeks before Election Day, Mr. Trump started questioning the veracity of mail ballots in Colorado, citing little evidence. After he won the 2016 election, Mr. Trump claimed that widespread fraud cost him the popular vote (it did not), and he launched a commission to investigate voter fraud in the country (it folded without any significant findings).The Trump team has called elections rigged even when he is not participating in them. When the 2020 Democratic caucuses melted down because of a faulty app and a disorganized state party, Mr. Trump’s campaign questioned whether the results were “being rigged against Bernie Sanders.” His sons went further.“Mark my words, they are rigging this thing,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter the night of the 2020 caucuses. “What a mess.” More

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      The Appeal of an All-American Strongman

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      Cheryl Sharp, a 47-year-old sales associate who was among the many Iowans turned away from a filled-to-capacity Trump rally last month, sounded pretty confident she knew why Donald Trump was so appealing to many voters. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along.“You want someone strong, globally, so that it creates mutual respect with other countries, and maybe a little bit of fear,” she told me. “Yes, it’s true, not everyone likes him. It’s good not to be liked. Being strong is better.” Sharp readily conceded that not everything Trump said was great, but she saw that as part of the right personality to be president. “You gotta be a little crazy, maybe, to make sure other countries respect and fear us,” she said. “And he can run the country like a business, and they will leave him alone.”Three days later, inside a Trump rally in New Hampshire, Scott Bobbitt and his wife, Heather, also brought up Trump’s strength. “He commands respect and fear around the world,” Scott Bobbitt told me. “Many people may be driven by fear of him because he’ll do what he says he’s going to do, and he’s not afraid to talk about it. And I think that that’s very powerful. That does protect our country, and he’ll stand up instead of rolling over.”I first began attending Trump rallies eight years ago, to try to better understand a candidate who was then being described as a joke — someone with little to no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency — and came away struck by his mix of charisma and powerful command of audiences.Rather than the bumbling celebrity I expected, I encountered a politician laying the groundwork for a powerful political realignment around subjects too readily brushed aside by the bipartisan establishment in Washington, such as the loss of manufacturing in the United States; those left behind by globalization and trade, especially trade with China; the legacy of the Iraq war and U.S. involvement in foreign wars in general; and, of course, immigration.I recently started going to Trump rallies and following his supporters’ online political conversations once again, to try to better understand something else: his base, and specifically the question of authoritarianism and the American voter.The authoritarian label has been attached to Trump by critics for years, especially after he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. I have studied and written about authoritarianism for years, and I think it’s important to pay attention to the views and motivations of voters who support authoritarian politicians, even when these politicians are seen by many as threats to the democratic order.My curiosity isn’t merely intellectual. Around the world, these politicians are not just getting elected democratically; they are often retaining enough popular support after a term — or two or three — to get re-elected. Polls strongly suggest that Trump has a reasonable chance of winning another term in November. And he has clearly retained his hold on the Republican Party base: His Republican challengers either seem to be angling to be his vice president or are struggling to climb in the polls.What I wanted to understand was, why? Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?Barb Rice stands for the pledge of allegiance in Waterloo, Iowa.A Trump supporter at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa.In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.Authoritarian leaders project qualities that many voters — not just Trump voters — admire: strength, a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style. Our movie-hero presidents, Top Gun pilots and crusading lawyers often take matters into their own hands or break the rules in ways that we cheer. No, they are not classic authoritarians jailing opponents, but they have something in common with Trump: They are seen as having special or singular strengths, an “I alone can fix it” power.What I heard from voters drawn to Trump was that he had a special strength in making the economy work better for them than Biden has, and that he was a tough, “don’t mess with me” absolutist, which they see as helping to prevent new wars. His supporters also see him as an authentic strongman who is not a typical politician, and Trump sells that message very well to his base.In New Hampshire, Jackie Fashjian made the case to me that during Trump’s presidency, “there weren’t any active wars going on except for Afghanistan, which he did not start. He started no new wars. Our economy was great. Our gas prices were under 2 bucks a gallon. It’s just common sense to me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”At the same rally, Debbie Finch leaped to her feet when Trump walked into the arena, and like many around us, she started filming. Finch defies stereotypes of Trump supporters: She’s Black and is concerned with racism, which she says greatly affects her life and that of her children. She doesn’t deny there are racists among Trump’s supporters, but as far as she’s concerned, that goes for Democrats, too. She told me she supports Trump because the economy was better under him. She doesn’t care about Trump’s indictments; the justice system has been derailing Black men forever, she says, and she predicts more and more minority voters will cast their ballots for him. (Trump does poll higher among minorities than past Republican presidents in the modern era and his current competitors for the nomination.)Debbie Finch.Vanessa Leroy for The New York TimesDebbie Finch shows off a photo of her and Donald Trump.Vanessa Leroy for The New York TimesTrump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters. All the politicians say things like that in private, countless Trump supporters asserted to me and argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.Voter after voter told me that they think Biden is too weak and too old to be president. They talk about him with attack lines frequently used by Trump, saying that he’s senile, falling down stairs, losing his train of thought while talking and so on. Biden, Trump grimly warned the crowd in Iowa, “can’t put two sentences together and he’s responsible for negotiations on nuclear weapons in World War III.”Nationally, polls show that voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s. If 2024 comes down to Biden versus Trump, the politicians will be 81 and 78, respectively, the oldest matchup ever.Polls also show that voters believe that Trump would do a better job than Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration. It was Trump’s perceived strength, in contrast with Biden’s perceived weakness, that was the common theme that tied it all together for his supporters.Take foreign policy. Many Trump supporters told me that had Trump been president, the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened because he would have been strong enough to be feared by Vladimir Putin or smart enough to make a deal with him, if necessary. Neither would Hamas have dared attack Israel, a few added. Their proof was that during Trump’s presidency, these wars indeed did not happen. Of course, the more relevant question is whether these wars would have happened during a second Trump term — a counterfactual that can’t be proved or disproved.Projecting strength and being seen as authentic are common themes among other leaders whom political scientists would call “competitive authoritarians.” In their regimes, many of the basic tenets of liberal democracy are violated, but elections, largely free of widespread fraud, are regularly held. Many political scientists place Narendra Modi of India (his party recently won major victories in state elections, and a third term is possible), Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (on his third term as president, after three stints as prime minister) and Viktor Orban of Hungary (in his fourth consecutive term) in this category.Like many of these right-wing populists, Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world. Right after his recent landslide re-election, Orban said his party had won despite everyone being against them, and now he would ensure that Hungary would be “strong, rich and green.” In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: “For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.”As he spoke such words at various rallies, the crowds often interrupted him with applause and cheering. From another politician, such claims might have sounded so implausibly grandiose as to fall flat. But from Trump, these statements often resulted in the crowds leaping to their feet (actually, some rallygoers never sat down) and interrupting him with applause and cheering.That’s charisma. Charisma is an underrated aspect of political success — and it’s not necessarily a function of political viewpoint. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama oozed it, for example, and so does Trump.Charisma is so central to politics that Max Weber, a founder of sociology, included charismatic authority (along with legal authority, as in republics and democracies; and traditional authority, as in feudalism or monarchy) as one of three types of power people see as legitimate. Charismatic leaders, Weber wrote, “have a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men,” and is sought as a leader, especially when people feel the times are troubled.So what about democracy, then? I pressed many Trump supporters about the events around Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol. I didn’t encounter a single outright supporter of what happened, but many people explained the events away. Increasingly separate information environments and our fractured media ecology shape the way people view that day.Some Trump supporters told me that whatever happened was carried out by a fringe faction that did not represent Trump’s base. Didn’t some Black Lives Matter protesters get carried away and even damage small businesses owned by Black people?, Jackie Fashjian said to me. Debbie Finch asked me whether Kamala Harris should be responsible for everything bad done during Black Lives Matter protests.Many also didn’t trust the government or traditional media’s telling of what happened on Jan. 6. “I’m not concerned with Jan. 6,” Finch said. “I don’t trust our government. I don’t trust anything they’re saying. They’ve been doing this to Black people for so long, railroading them, so they have zero credibility. So I don’t even care about it, and I don’t want to hear about Jan. 6.”Others, like Hunter Larkner, a young man who said he was a great fan of Elon Musk and used Twitter and YouTube for doing his research, said he was shocked when he first heard about the events of Jan. 6. But as he looked into it, he decided it must have been entrapment — that authorities deliberately allowed the rampage in the Capitol to happen.Cheryl Sharp, too, told me that she doesn’t worry about all the talk of Trump being a dictator. For her, biased mainstream media is misrepresenting him. “He was making the point that he’d use executive orders on Day 1, like the others do — executive orders bypass Congress, but that’s how it’s done these days,” she said. “He was being sarcastic, not saying he’d be a real dictator.”It’s easy to see why Trump’s political message can override concerns about the process of democracy for many. What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      The Iowa Caucuses Are Not a Delightful Game

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      Ah, the Iowa caucuses. So much drama. So much antici … pation. So much money and energy spent on an antidemocratic process in a state with a pretty dismal track record of picking presidential nominees.And yet! Just because the system is flawed doesn’t mean the stakes aren’t real — and brutal. The outcome of Monday night’s Republican vote will be pounced on by the political world and instantly shredded, devoured and digested like a rump roast tossed into a gator pond. It might not change anything. But it also might turbocharge or deflate this or that candidacy as the whole primary pageant barrels toward New Hampshire and beyond.Even before the official results start being reported, the campaigns and their allies will crank the spin energy up to 11. Because Iowa is never really about who wins the actual caucuses so much as about who wins the Expectations Game. And that game comes with a host of ultra-fuzzy question cards: How many “tickets” are there out of the state — meaning, should the third-place finisher be taken seriously? What counts as a second-place victory? What if the first-place finisher wildly underperforms? What if a blizzard or minus 30-degree wind chills keep most people home? (Someone remind me why a state like Arizona can’t go first.)As you can imagine, this is not a lighthearted game like, say, charades or Hungry Hungry Hippos. It is complicated and grinding, the rules shift, and victory is highly subjective, relying on the savvy of the players’ pre- and postgame spinning. And this election, with Donald Trump dominating the race as a quasi-incumbent cult-of-personality leader, the known unknowns are even knottier.What if Mr. Trump cracks 50 percent? (I’m guessing he will but am hoping to be wrong.) If so, is the race basically over? What if he pulls only 45 percent? 40? If Nikki Haley squeaks past Ron DeSantis, should he drop out? What if she smokes him? Could any third-place showing count as a win for Ms. Haley? And my obsession: What degree of belly flop could persuade Vivek Ramaswamy to leave politics forever?The top contenders have approached the expectations game differently. Heading into the final stretch, Mr. DeSantis has been all sass and swagger, predicting total victory. “We’re going to win here in Iowa,” he assured Fox News shortly before Christmas. Bold strategy, but bluffing is perhaps his only hope. The guy has bet everything on the caucuses. If he goes down hard, and certainly if Ms. Haley bests him, you will hear the sound of pundits, political opponents and quite possibly the rest of his disgusted party pounding nails into the coffin of his candidacy. Even so, raising the bar leaves him even less wiggle room to recover from anything other than a first-place showing — which pretty much no one expects.Mr. Trump has been a bit cagier. He has been crowing about crushing it in the polling, pushing the expectations bar ever higher. “The poll numbers are scary because we’re leading by so much,” he bragged at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, last month.But the man is no idiot. He has been hedging his boasts, telling Iowa fans he is a little nervous that he is so overwhelmingly popular that they might feel comfortable skipping the caucuses. “You got to show up,” he urged supporters at the Waterloo event. “Even if you think we’re going to win by a lot.” In case things go sideways, he has laid the groundwork for a quintessentially Trumpian message: I am such a huge winner that I (almost) lost!Ms. Haley is attempting a more complicated game plan. Her politics aren’t well suited for Iowa, where the G.O.P. is dominated by white evangelicals. She hasn’t spent as much time in the state as Mr. DeSantis or built a ground game anywhere nearly as elaborate. Instead, she has gone with a classic Iowa move: making clear that she expects to lose the race. That way, no one expects much from her, and even a lackluster showing can be brushed off or even spun as a win. Thus, we see her spreading the word that she is looking beyond Iowa to the broader playing field — at times perhaps a bit too aggressively, as when she quipped to a crowd in New Hampshire that their job was to “correct” Iowa’s vote.Note: A candidate needs to keep a tight grip on her spin machine at all times lest it bite her on the butt.This is not a new strategy, and Team Haley isn’t lowering the Iowa bar as far as some past campaigns. In the 2000 Republican contest, Senator John McCain, with his maverick brand, opted to officially skip Iowa altogether and insisted that it would be a miracle if he got any support there at all. I still have fond memories from that race (my first presidential campaign) of tracking down Team McCain’s quasi-official point person in Iowa, who was clearly nervous that I might get the impression the senator actually cared about the state.It’s not just the candidates who have a lot riding on Iowa this year. As usual, Mr. Trump is disrupting all the norms and rules, and a Trump blowout would be an embarrassment for some of the state’s traditional power brokers. Notably, Mr. DeSantis worked his boots off to score the backing of the state’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds. He won over Steve Deace, a prominent conservative radio host there. And he went hard after the evangelical kingmakers, securing the endorsement of the most prominent, Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader. But the party faithful, especially the evangelical grass roots, may very well go all in for Mr. Trump, dismissing the influence of their usual influencers.A Trump rout would also raise questions about the fetishization of Iowa’s retail politics. Iowa trumpets its image as a state that expects personal attention from presidential wannabes, big and small. Witness Mr. DeSantis boasting endlessly about how he has been to “all 99 counties.”But Mr. Trump? He has spent little time in the state, mostly headlining the big, impersonal pep rallies his ego so craves. He has relied heavily on surrogates, and his team didn’t bother fielding a big door-knocking operation. Indeed, it didn’t focus on its ground game much at all until relatively late. Like any entitled celebrity, the MAGA king jetted in and out of the state, in between his courthouse visits and Mar-a-Lago conclaves, leaving the tedious unglamorous stuff to his courtiers.Although it’s not as specifically Iowa-focused, the notion that political debates matter will suffer further decline if Mr. Trump steamrolls the field. It was painful enough watching the non-Trump contenders tear into one another through five debates and 10 hours. The very real possibility that it was all for naught is enough to make one question the entire system.This could be a bad, even dangerous year for the Iowa caucuses in general. Why should Republican presidential contenders lavish all that love on the state just to get thrown over for a guy who couldn’t be bothered to do more than the minimum? The caucuses already have faced criticism in recent years because of operational glitches, the unrepresentativeness of Iowa’s electorate (too white, too old, too rural …) and the exclusionary nature of the process. The Democrats got fed up enough to kill their caucuses this election. What if Republicans start thinking along the same lines?As someone who doesn’t care for the caucuses, I won’t shed any tears if that happens. But I’m guessing plenty of other folks feel differently — especially in Iowa.And so here we go, with so very much at stake. Once more unto the breach.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      It’s Dangerously Cold in Iowa. What Does That Mean for Voting?

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      Vishakha Darbha and Iowa is in a deep freeze. Subzero temperatures — and a blizzard — have thrown many of the weekend’s highly choreographed events into question, leaving observers wondering if the weather could alter the election results. In this audio report from the frozen Hawkeye state, Opinion writer Katherine Miller describes what it’s like to cover the historic caucus and considers how the inclement weather might affect voting.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 48 hours on the Times website.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Maksym Kapliuk/Getty ImagesThe 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, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha and Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. More

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      Republican Presidential Primary: 7 Numbers That Tell the Story

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      There’s $46,499,124.63. There’s 3 percent. Here are five other figures that shed light on the dynamics at play before Monday’s caucuses.The only numbers that will truly matter in the Iowa caucuses on Monday will be the number of votes tallied for Donald J. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.But there are a number of, well, numbers that help explain the Republican nominating contest. In most polls, Mr. Trump holds a solid lead, while Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are battling it out far behind in a fight for second place.Here are seven numbers that show how we got here — and what comes next.28 percentage pointsMr. Trump’s lead in the Iowa Poll The bar has been set.In the Iowa Poll released on Saturday evening by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, Mr. Trump was winning 48 percent of likely caucusgoers. It’s a dominant showing that’s more than the total support measured for Ms. Haley (20 percent) and Mr. DeSantis (16 percent) combined.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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      How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again

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      Blue-collar white voters make up Donald Trump’s base. But his political resurgence has been fueled largely by Republicans from the other end of the socioeconomic scale.Working-class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump. College-educated conservatives may ensure that he keeps it.Often overlooked in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with a college degree remain at the heart of the lingering Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy and cultural issues.These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Mr. Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.Even as Mr. Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, it was only a year ago that he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination.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