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      ‘This Is Going to Be the Most Important Election Since 1860’

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      I recently sent out a list of questions about the 2024 elections to political operatives, pollsters and political scientists.How salient will abortion be?How damaging would a government shutdown be to Donald Trump and the Republican Party?Will the MAGA electorate turn out in high percentages?Will a Biden impeachment by the House, if it happens, help or hurt the G.O.P.?Will the cultural left wing of the Democratic Party undermine the party’s prospects?Will the key battleground states be Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin?How significant will Black and Hispanic shifts to the Republican Party be and where will these shifts have the potential to determine the outcome?Will Kamala Harris’s presence on the ticket cost Biden votes?Why hasn’t Biden gained politically from his legislative successes and from improvements in the economy? Will that change before the 2024 election?Why should Democrats be worrying?From 2016 to 2023, according to Morning Consult, the share of voters saying that the Democratic Party “cares about me” fell from 43 to 41 percent while rising for the Republican Party from 30 to 39 percent; the share saying the Democrats “care about the middle class” fell from 47 to 46 percent, while rising from 33 to 42 percent for the Republican Party.What’s more, the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is “too liberal” rose from 40 to 47 from 2020 to 2023, while the percentage saying the Republican Party was “too conservative” remained constant at 38 percent.Why should Republicans be worrying?Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice, responded to my question about MAGA turnout by email: “Turnout among MAGA supporters may be less important than how many MAGA voters there are in the 2024 election and in which states they are.”One of the most distinctive demographic characteristics of self-identified MAGA voters, Stein pointed out, “is their age: over half (56 percent) were over the age of 65 as of 2020. By 2024, the proportion of MAGA voters over 70 will be greater than 50 percent and will put these voters in the likely category of voters leaving the electorate, dying, ill and unable to vote.”Because of these trends, Stein continued, “it may be the case that the absolute number and share of the electorate that are MAGA voters is diluted in 2024 by their own exit from the electorate and the entry of new and younger and non-MAGA voters.”Along similar lines, Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, argued by email that generational change will be a key factor in the election.Between 2020 and 2024, “about 13 million adult citizens will have died” and “these lost voters favored Trump in 2020 by a substantial margin. My rough estimate is that removing these voters from the electorate will increase Biden’s national popular vote margin by about 1.2 million votes.”The aging of the electorate works to the advantage of Biden and his fellow Democrats. So too does what is happening with younger voters at the other end of the age distribution. Here, Democrats have an ace in the hole: the strong liberal and Democratic convictions of voters between the ages of 18 and 42, whose share of the electorate is steadily growing.Joe Trippi, a Democratic consultant, was exuberant on the subject:Don’t forget Gen Z. They are on fire. Unlike you and me who dove under our school desks in nuclear attack drills but never experienced a nuclear attack, this generation spent their entire school lives doing mass shooting drills and witnessing a mass shooting at a school in the news regularly.Young voters, Trippi continued, “are not going to vote G.O.P. and they are going to vote. Dobbs, climate, homophobia, gun violence are all driving this generation away from the G.O.P. — in much the same way that Dems lost the younger generation during the Reagan years.”Wattenberg was more cautious. He estimated that 15 million young people will become eligible to vote between 2020 and 2024.“How many of them will vote and how they will vote is a key uncertainty that could determine the election,” he wrote. “Given recent patterns, there is little doubt that those that vote will favor the Democratic nominee. But by how much?”There are some developments going into the next election that defy attempts to determine whether Democrats or Republicans will come out ahead.Take the case of all the criminal charges that have been filed against Trump.In more normal — that is, pre-Trump — days, the fact that the probable Republican nominee faced 91 felony counts would have shifted the scales in favor of the Democrats. But these are not normal times.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, pointed out that the 2024 election has no precedent.“How will the Trump prosecutions unfold amidst the primaries and the presidential campaign?” Lee asked in an email. “How will developments in these cases be received by Republicans and the public at large? We have little relevant precedent for even considering how these cases are likely to affect the race.”Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, agreed, noting in an email: “How will Trump’s trials evolve and how will people react to them? What happens if he is convicted and sentenced? What happens if he is acquitted?”Lee and Jacobson were joined in this line of thinking by Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, who emailed his view thatThe greatest uncertainty on the G.O.P. side is the potential impact of the Trump trials. An acquittal, especially in the first case to go to trial, would almost certainly strengthen him. But what about a conviction, especially if it involves jail time? That may be the greatest uncertainty in American politics in my lifetime.Some of those I contacted observed that the prospect of one or more third-party bids posed a significant threat to Biden’s chances.Paul Begala, a Democratic political operative and CNN contributor, wrote by email:Please allow me to start with what to me is the most critical variable in the 2024 presidential election: Will Dr. Cornel West’s Green Party candidacy swing the election to Donald Trump? If I were working for the Biden-Harris ticket, that’s what would keep me up at night.In Begala’s opinion, “Dr. West has more charisma, better communications skills, and greater potential appeal than Dr. Jill Stein did in 2016. If, in fact, he is able to garner even two to five percent, that could doom Biden and the country.”And that, Begala continued, does not “even take into account a potential centrist candidacy under the No Labels banner. Biden won moderates by a 30-point margin (64-34), and 38 percent of all voters described themselves as moderate in 2020. If No Labels were to field a viable, centrist candidate, that, too, would doom Biden.”Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed, arguing that third-party candidates are a “huge issue”:The role of No Labels and, secondarily, of Cornel West: They could be genuine spoilers here. And that is their goal. Harlan Crow and other right-wing billionaires did not give big bucks to No Labels to create more moderate politics and outcomes.Among those I contacted for this column, there was near unanimous agreement that abortion will continue to be a major issue — as it was in 2022, when abortion rights voters turned out in large numbers, lifting Democrats in key races.“It is the single most significant factor helping Democrats,” Ornstein declared, adding, “The fact that red states move more and more to extremes — including banning abortions for rape and incest, watching women bleed with untreated miscarriages, seeing doctors flee, criminalizing going to another state — will fire up suburban and young voters.”Justin Gest, a professor of policy and government at George Mason University, pointed out in an email thatDemocrats nationwide are taking a page out of the playbook of former President George W. Bush’s longtime adviser, Karl Rove. In those years, Republicans used state ballot measures and referendums on divisive culture war issues that split their way to mobilize conservative voters. In those days, the subject matter was often gay rights.Citing a June Ipsos poll that found “public opinion around the Dobbs decision and abortion remains mostly unchanged compared to six months ago,” Gest argued “that abortion remains salient more than a year after the revocation of abortion rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, but Democrats in many states will also use ballot measures to ensure it is top of mind.” Gest also noted that “supermajorities of the country favor preserving access to abortion to some extent.”Stein, however, wrote by email that while a majority of voters have remained in favor of abortion rights, they appear to be placing less importance on the issue than was the case immediately after the Dobbs decision.Stein pointed to a March Morning Consult survey that found “10 percent of voters in the most competitive congressional districts rank issues such as abortion as their top voting concern, down from 15 percent in November.”But, Stein added, Republican state legislators are not helping their own political fortunes by muting discussion of abortion; instead, they have been unrelenting in their efforts to elevate the prominence of abortion. “The recent sentencing of a mother in Nebraska who provided her daughter abortion pills,” he wrote, “puts a very real face on the consequences of Dobbs and restrictions on abortion rights,”There was some disagreement among those I contacted over the political consequences of a government shutdown, something that could well happen within days unless Speaker Kevin McCarthy can find a path to enactment of budget legislation.Frances Lee said that shewould probably discount the effects of a government shutdown. Their effects seem largely to be confined to the shutdown period itself. Once resolved, they quickly fade from memory. Trump presided over the longest government shutdown in history in 2018-19, and that fact played no role in the 2020 elections.Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, however, contended that it is “hard to imagine it won’t blow back on them — every previous shutdown has, and this one’s justifications seem nonexistent.”William Galston, a senior fellow at Bookings, agreed, writing by email:Evidence from past shutdowns suggests that it would be damaging, and this time Trump has chosen to get involved directly, which I think is a mistake. Republicans’ dysfunction in recent weeks has occurred in broad daylight, which increases the odds that they’ll get the lion’s share of the blame.Begala, in character, was the most outspoken:The G.O.P. is talking about shutting down the government, impeaching the president, removing the Speaker, and crippling the military by blocking vital promotions. Their brand is chaos. Like Clinton before him, Biden is well positioned to use a government shutdown to jujitsu the G.O.P. and win re-election.There was also some disagreement among those I queried over whether Kamala Harris would cost Biden votes.Begala dismissed the possibility:Nope. Democrats tried to make Spiro Agnew an issue; it failed. They tried to make Dan Quayle an issue; failed again. Harris has found her voice on abortion rights, which are a central issue.Ornstein was succinct: “Vice-presidential candidates do not cost votes.”Gest, however, argued against this idea:I think she will. Fairly or unfairly, she is viewed as more threatening to Republicans than Biden himself, which is why the DeSantis campaign has tried to bait her into conflict with his provocations. And because of President Biden’s advancing age, her profile holds more gravity than most running mates.There is one issue that has been increasingly troubling for Democrats: Will the modest but significant shifts among Black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party continue and will they increase?Gest wrote that “if Republicans suddenly make significant inroads with Latinos in the Southwest, they could change the dynamics” in states like Arizona and Nevada.But in order to do so, Gest cautioned, shifts to the Republican Party among minorities “would need to outnumber the pandemic-era arrival of left-leaning transplants from coastal urban cities. To the extent that these transplants have settled in their new homes, they can solidify Democratic support.”In a December 2022 Politico article, “How Demographic Shifts Fueled by Covid Delivered Midterm Wins for Democrats,” Gest made the case thatData from the U.S. Postal Service and Census Bureau shows how the pandemic drove urban professionals who were able to work remotely — disproportionately Democrats — out of coastal, progressive cities to seek more space or recreational amenities in the nation’s suburbs and Sun Belt. This moved liberals out of electoral districts where Democrats reliably won by large margins into many purple regions that had the potential to swing.Gest cited large population growth coinciding with much stronger than expected Democratic gains in places like Arizona’s Maricopa County — which, between 2018 and 2022, “gained nearly 100,000 people, and Democrats’ margins rose by 17 points since that year: and Pima County, including Tucson, gained 16,000 people and its margins in the gubernatorial race swung 16 points for Democrats.”One source of uncertainty is the media, which can, and often does, play a key role in setting the campaign agenda. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is a prime example.In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard conducted a study, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” It that found that reporting on Hillary Clinton was dominated “by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails.”According to the study, the press, television and online media devoted more space and time to Clinton’s emails than it did to the combined coverage of Trump’s taxes, his comments about women, his failed “university,” his foundation and his campaign’s dealings with Russia.Going into 2024, it is unlikely the media could inflict much more damage on Trump, given that the extensive coverage of the 91 felony counts against him does not seem to affect his favorable or unfavorable rating.Biden, in contrast, has much more to gain or lose from media coverage. Will it focus on his age or his legislative and policy achievements? On inflation and consumer costs or economic growth and high employment rates? On questions about Biden’s ability to complete a second term or the threats to democracy posed by the ascendant right wing of the Republican Party?Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, argued that matters of immense concern are at stake: “This is going to be the most important election since 1860, because it is going to be about the future of this country as a democracy.”It will be an election, he continued,about whether this country will preserve the rule of law in an independent justice system; whether women will be respected as autonomous decision makers or subjected again, step-by-step, by a religion-encoded male supremacy; whether this country will continue to hold free and fair elections or generalize to the entire realm a new version of what prevailed in the South before the civil rights legislation.The 2024 election, in Kitschelt’s view, “is the last stand of the nationalist ‘Christian’ white right, as their support is eroding in absolute and relative terms, and of all those who believe that white supremacy across all U.S. institutions needs to be protected, even at the cost of giving up on democracy.”But, on an even larger scale, he argued, “The 2024 election will also be about whether this country will preserve a universalist sense of citizenship or devolve into a polity of splintered identity pressure groups, rent-seeking for shares of the pie.”Unfortunately, Kitschelt concluded, “if the Democrats let the Republicans succeed in priming the identity issues that divide the potential Democratic coalition, the white Christian nationalists will have a greater chance to win.”And that, of course, is a central goal of Trump’s — and of his campaign.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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      Trump, Weighing In on Auto Strike, Has a Mixed Legacy on Unions

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      The former president will be making a campaign stop in Michigan on Wednesday amid the United Automobile Workers’ strike. He has both appeased unions and sought to circumvent them.As a businessman, Donald J. Trump at first tried to circumvent labor unions, then spent decades largely appeasing them to avoid costly strikes.During his first presidential campaign, he boiled down labor issues to a grievance about other countries taking advantage of the United States.As president, he made appointments and adopted policies often more antagonistic to organized labor than those of many other Republicans.When Mr. Trump arrives in the Detroit area on Wednesday to interject himself into the United Auto Workers strike, he will bring with him a record of interactions with organized labor that, whether out of pragmatism or opportunism, has few straight lines.What may resonate the loudest with the current and former factory workers whom Mr. Trump hopes to reach is his decades-long history of reducing a host of economic and labor issues to the complaint that America’s leaders have allowed other countries to “rip off” the United States. He used that line of reasoning in announcing the Michigan trip, arguing that “dumb” government programs to promote electric vehicles would push all automobile production to China. “The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.He deployed the same logic in criticizing Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers’ president, though what he thought Mr. Fain should do differently was not clear. “I think he’s not doing a good job in representing his union, because he’s not going to have a union in three years from now,” Mr. Trump said in a recent interview broadcast on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Those jobs are all going to be gone because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China.”In many ways, that argument is a replay of one of the greatest hits from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, when he aligned himself with workers at a Carrier furnace plant in Indianapolis who faced layoffs after the company announced plans to move the operation to Mexico. At rally after rally, he said it would be easy for him to stop such departures, a message that appealed to former factory workers and those who felt at risk. In Detroit, that approach would allow him to strike a note of support to both workers and companies without choosing sides in the most consequential labor dispute in years.Members of the United Auto Workers union at a rally in Detroit last week.Cydni Elledge for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s visit will serve other political purposes as well. He has scheduled a prime-time speech at an auto parts manufacturer as a distraction from the Republican primary debate he chose not to attend, much as his interview with Tucker Carlson was scheduled to be released during the last primary debate. And in the contest to win over blue-collar voters, the appearance pits him directly against President Biden, who on Tuesday took the unusual step of appearing with Mr. Fain and speaking out in support of the union’s contract demands.Mr. Trump’s early interactions with labor unions were based on less complex concerns. As a young real-estate developer in 1980, Mr. Trump hired a nonunion crew of 200 undocumented Polish workers to demolish the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, clearing the way for what would become Trump Tower, his signature building and the first new construction he pursued on his own. The men were paid as little as $4 an hour, less than half the union wage, and worked 12-hour shifts without safety gear. Though he saved money in the short term, the long-term costs were significant. The treatment of those workers led to 15 years of litigation. Mr. Trump paid $1.375 million to settle the case, including a $500,000 payment to a union benefits fund. The terms of the settlement remained sealed until Mr. Trump became president and a judge released them over his objections.For the rest of his building career, Mr. Trump generally hired large construction companies, allowing him to complete major projects with a minimum number of full-time employees. Those companies typically handled the hiring and management of union workers. It was an era when organized crime lorded over many of the building trade unions in New York.“We had very little, if anything, to do with the unions,” said Barbara Res, who oversaw the construction of Trump Tower for Mr. Trump and worked with him for years. “That’s one of the benefits of having a construction manager. They take care of that crap.”When Mr. Trump ran casinos in Atlantic City, the owners negotiated as an association with the local hotel and casino workers union. John R. O’Donnell, who managed the Trump Plaza casino for several years starting in the late 1980s, said Mr. Trump was so terrified by the threat of lost business during a strike that he would mine his fellow association members and their lawyers for details on the owners’ strategy and then surreptitiously pass that information along to local union leaders. He said Mr. Trump’s typical efforts to reduce costs “did not apply when it came to the union,” because he was adamant that a strike “cannot happen.”“He worked against the association to help the unions, to the detriment of the rest of the city,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “He was going to sign a contract regardless.”In New York City, Mr. Trump developed a professional relationship with Peter Ward, the longtime president of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, which had members working in Trump-owned or -operated hotels. In 2011, Mr. Ward led his union to support Mr. Trump’s brief effort to take over operation of the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park, which had been closed by a bankruptcy.“We have a long and good history with him,” Mr. Ward told The New York Post at the time of the Tavern on the Green agreement.During the transition after Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, Mr. Ward was among those on the president-elect’s official schedule for a face-to-face meeting at Trump Tower.Not all employees at Mr. Trump’s hotels and golf courses are unionized. Workers at the hotel that Mr. Trump co-owns in Las Vegas with the casino mogul Phillip Ruffin began a unionization drive in 2014. The owners pushed back against the effort, but ultimately signed a contract with the union the month after the 2016 election. In 2018, workers at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., told a reporter for The New York Times that many employees there were undocumented immigrants; one worker said a manager had directed her to someone to help her obtain fraudulent records.After decades taking a counterintuitive approach to organized labor as a business owner, Mr. Trump made a sharp turn to the right once elected. Two of his choices for top Labor Department posts had been reliable antagonists of organized labor throughout their careers: Andrew Puzder, who as chief executive of a fast-food company repeatedly argued that labor regulations stifled economic growth; and Patrick Pizzella, a conservative lobbyist and government official who had spent years promoting the interests of businesses against those of unions.Mr. Puzder withdrew his nomination because of a lack of congressional support. Mr. Pizzella served as deputy secretary and acting secretary under Mr. Trump. As a lobbyist in the 1990s, he had been hired by the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States where some workers earned less than $1 an hour, to ensure that Congress did not impose federal minimum wage and immigration laws there.As president, Mr. Trump signed executive orders that undid longstanding protections for two million unionized federal workers, including making it easier to fire and discipline government employees. His appointees demoted the senior civil servants who resolved most labor cases. Mr. Trump has said that if re-elected he will fire thousands of federal workers whom he considers part of a “deep state” filled with “villains.”His line of complaint about other countries taking advantage of the United States dates back to his earliest comments on national affairs. In September 1987, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Mr. Trump bought full-page advertisements in three major newspapers, including The Times, arguing that Japan, Saudi Arabia and other countries were “laughing at America’s politicians” because the United States paid their defense costs. “I was tired, and I think a lot of people are tired, of watching other countries ripping off the United States,” he said on CNN that night. “This is a great country. They laugh at us behind our backs. They laugh at us because of our own stupidity, and the leaders.”Nearly 30 years later, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump repeated almost those exact words after a video of Carrier managers announcing layoffs to employees in the Indiana plant gained wide attention. He said such moves would stop under his presidency because he would impose a 35 percent tariff on goods shipped from foreign factories that had replaced plants in the United States. “We’re going to make our products here,” he said. “Companies are taking advantage of us. And countries are abusing us. And the way you stop it is so easy.”The message resonated with voters at his rallies, as well as with Carrier employees. “I loved it,” Jennifer Shanklin-Hawkins, a worker at the company, told The Times. “I was so happy Trump noticed us.”Mr. Trump never instituted the sort of targeted tax threat he said would be so easy. He and Mike Pence, the vice president and former governor of Indiana, did help persuade Carrier to keep about 850 of those 1,400 jobs in Indiana, in exchange for $7 million in incentives from the state. The rest of the workers were laid off, and hundreds more workers at a nearby Carrier factory were also let go. Some said they ended up feeling like props for the Trump campaign.“There was still a layoff,” Ms. Shanklin-Hawkins told a reporter with The Indianapolis Star in 2020. “He lied completely.”Noam Scheiber More

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      What Polling After the First Debate Tells Us About Round 2

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      Nikki Haley received a small lift, but another good performance Wednesday may simply splinter the opposition to Donald Trump.Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley had a debate within the debate. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWith the benefit of hindsight, there was one big winner of the first Republican presidential debate: Donald J. Trump.He has gained more support in the post-debate polls than any other candidate, even though he didn’t appear onstage last month. He’s up 3.5 percentage points in a direct comparison between polls taken before and after the debate by the same pollsters. Only Nikki Haley — up 1.5 points across the seven national pollsters — can also claim to have gained a discernible amount of ground.This basic lesson from the first debate might just be the most important thing to keep in mind heading into the second Republican debate Wednesday night. Candidates might be flashy. They might be broadly appealing. They might hit MAGA notes. But after the last debate, there’s that much less reason to think this one will make a big difference in the race. It might even add up to helping Mr. Trump, by splintering his potential opposition.Here are some lessons from the last debate — and what they mean for the next one.Being center stage isn’t enoughNo one seemed to command more attention during the debate than Vivek Ramaswamy. Perhaps no one ought to be more disappointed in the post-debate polls.Despite gaining a fair share of the headlines, Mr. Ramaswamy failed to earn additional support. He has even lost ground in the FiveThirtyEight Republican polling average since the debate.Why didn’t he surge? Is it because he was “annoying,” as the Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg put it? Or maybe it’s because he mostly appealed to Trump supporters, who weren’t going to flip to the young upstart?Either way, his failure to turn a breakout performance into a polling breakthrough raises questions about his upside. It could also raise doubts about everyone else’s upside — at least as long as voters remain loyal to Mr. Trump.Standing up for a faction still paysIf any of the actual debaters “won” the debate, the polls say it was Ms. Haley.Her gains have been fairly modest nationwide, but they have been clearer in the early states. She has re-established herself as a relevant candidate by leapfrogging Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire and overtaking a fellow South Carolinian, Tim Scott, to move into third place in Iowa.Ms. Haley won the old-fashioned way: She vigorously defended the traditional, neoconservative foreign policy views of the Republican Party in a high-profile showdown with Mr. Ramaswamy. And she was modestly rewarded by the party’s moderate establishment voters — a group that is distinct for its committed opposition to Mr. Trump.It’s hard to see a moderate-establishment-type like Ms. Haley seriously contending for the Republican nomination in a populist-conservative party, let alone with a juggernaut like Mr. Trump in the race. But it is quite easy to imagine her adding to the challenges facing Mr. DeSantis or other mainstream conservatives, by winning over many moderate voters who might otherwise represent the natural base of a broad anti-Trump coalition.Her re-emergence as a relevant factional player was probably the most important thing that came out of the debate, and, at least for now, it helped Mr. Trump’s chances by further splitting his opposition. If she builds on her last performance in the next debate, Mr. Trump might count as the winner yet again.Broad appeal isn’t enoughThere’s a fairly strong case that Mr. DeSantis had a decent debate. He promoted a conservative message with fairly broad appeal throughout the party and stayed out of the fray. In the end, a plurality of Republican voters, as well as plenty of pundits, said he performed the best.Nonetheless, he has slipped another two points since then. Of course, he has been sliding in the polls for months, so there’s not necessarily any reason to assume that his debate performance was the cause. But at best, he failed to capitalize on a rare opportunity to regain his footing. At worst, the emergence of Ms. Haley created an additional threat to his left flank.There’s a lesson in Mr. DeSantis’s failure to turn a reasonable performance into gains in the polls: It’s hard to be a broadly appealing candidate in primary politics. Broad appeal, of course, is necessary to win the nomination. But it’s often easiest to build support by catering to the wishes of an important faction, as Ms. Haley did when she blasted Mr. Ramaswamy’s anti-interventionist foreign policy.Usually, broadly appealing candidates overcome this problem with brute force: superior name recognition, resources, media attention and so on. If Mr. Trump weren’t in the race, perhaps Mr. DeSantis would run a broadly conservative campaign and win the nomination by relying on many of these attributes. But right now, it’s Mr. Trump, not Mr. DeSantis, who has the traits of a winning conservative with broad appeal. Not only could Mr. Trump skate by with broadly appealing platitudes if he wanted — but he doesn’t even need to show up.Trump isn’t beating himselfIn August, someone could have plausibly wondered whether Mr. Trump might lose support because of the first debate. Maybe voters would have held his nonparticipation against him. Maybe his opponents would have gone after him. Maybe some voters might have decided they liked one of the other candidates after seeing that person for the first time.Maybe not. In the end, Mr. Trump emerged unscathed. No one really landed a punch on him, whether on the issues or for being too “chicken” to debate. More important, the candidates didn’t draw support away from the former president.After the last debate, we can probably cross “some voters might decide they liked one of the other candidates” off the list of “maybe this will hurt Trump” possibilities. But there’s still an opportunity for the candidates to try something new by attacking him vigorously on his recent abortion comments or for failing to show up. There’s no reason to expect either tactic to yield a huge shift in the race, but it would at least give some reason to wonder whether maybe, just maybe, Wednesday night’s debate will have a different outcome than the first. More

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      Trump and the 2024 Republican Primaries: 13 Voters Discuss

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      What’s going well in the United States? What’s going well in the United States? “The judicial system” Carrie, 55, Mich., white “Jobs” Andreia, 45, Va., Latina “Innovation” Reed, 37, S.C., white If opinion polls are to be believed, Donald Trump has the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in the bag. But in a recent Times Opinion […] More

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      Can the Next GOP Debate Amount to More Than a Race for Second Place?

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      The most important audience might be Republican donors who are waiting to put their money behind a candidate who can take on Donald Trump.The second Republican presidential debate without Donald J. Trump is missing the front-runner’s star power, but the performances of his rivals on Wednesday are still expected to be deeply consequential — forecasting whether the 2024 field of Republicans will consolidate around a single Trump alternative.For months, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has been the chief challenger to Mr. Trump. But the governor’s downward slope in the polls — some surveys in the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina have shown him dipping to third place, or worse — have provided a potential opening to wrest that title from him for the rest of the field at Wednesday night’s debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.Among those watching at home will be some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors who have so far held out from backing any of the candidates. Major contributors are planning to watch the second debate carefully, according to people in contact with several of them, in order to see who, if anyone, they might rally behind in the coming months.All seven candidates at the debate are facing the dual-track challenge of trying to emerge as a singular rival of Mr. Trump without letting the former president entirely run away with the contest before that happens. His criminal indictments — now at 91 counts across four jurisdictions — have not slowed his momentum, with each week bringing new surveys showing Mr. Trump above 50 percent nationally among Republicans, and no rival registering even half that level of support.Those who have qualified for Wednesday’s debate are: Mr. DeSantis; former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; former Vice President Mike Pence; former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey; the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy; and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. Mr. Trump is skipping the debate to travel to Michigan for an event with union workers.The most immediate stakes of the debate are likely financial. The last, major public fund-raising deadline before voting in the primary begins is at the end of September. Few events can generate waves of small donations — or help fence-sitting multimillionaires pick a candidate — quite like a powerful showing on the debate stage.After landing some lines at the first debate, Ms. Haley boasted of raising more than $1 million in the next 72 hours. Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in 24 hours, his campaign said. And Mr. Scott, who struggled for airtime, was among those not to say anything about his post-debate haul.Gov. Ron DeSantis has slipped in recent polling.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesFor Mr. DeSantis, a superlative showing could quiet the chorus of critics who worry he doesn’t have what it takes to stop Mr. Trump, despite a $130 million super PAC and his standing as the next-most-popular Republican candidate. For others, like Ms. Haley, whom some of the party’s most influential donors are said to be taking a fresh look at after the first debate, it is a chance to try to supplant Mr. DeSantis’s persistent second-place standing.“You need the field to narrow, so this debate and every debate is important because people are getting to see the options they have,” said Jay Zeidman, a DeSantis donor and fund-raiser in Texas who hosted a recent event for the governor.Mr. Zeidman’s father, Fred, a veteran fund-raiser in several presidential races, has been an early backer of Ms. Haley, underscoring the divide among donors who would like to see an alternative to Mr. Trump as the nominee.“Nobody really paid attention to her or knew who she was until the first debate,” said the elder Mr. Zeidman, a fixture in G.O.P. fund-raising circles who was appointed by President George W. Bush as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Museum.“I was with her in New York at a fund-raiser last week and it was a room packed with major New York donors who were really hearing her for the first time,” he added. “This is a pivotal week.”Still, there are questions about how much money will even matter in a race that Mr. Trump leads by so large a margin that many G.O.P. donors have grown fatalistic about the final result.Campaigning in South Carolina on Monday, Mr. Trump said his opponents “ought to stop wasting their time.” He added: “They’re wasting a lot of time with these ridiculous debates that nobody’s watching.”Donald Trump campaigning on Monday in South Carolina.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnother key factor in shaping the size of the field will be the Republican National Committee’s debate criteria. Candidates must hit a 3 percent polling threshold to be on the stage in California and have amassed 50,000 donors. One candidate at the last debate, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, failed to qualify on Wednesday.The debate thresholds will rise to 4 percent in polling and 70,000 donors for a Nov. 8 debate in Miami.Ms. Haley has ticked up in the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire in recent weeks but that rise could be as much about a television advertising blitz from her super PAC as her showing in the first debate. In the last two months, her super PAC was the biggest advertiser in both states, spending $6.5 million in Iowa and close to $5 million in New Hampshire — more than her closest competitors, according to data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.She capitalized on the perception of a rising candidate as she went on a fund-raising spree through New York, Florida and Texas, where she has made inroads with some of the same donors who backed Mr. Bush and his father, according to people who have attended her events and are familiar with her fund-raising. She has support from the state’s prosperous Indian American community and from major figures in the energy sector. Texans supporting her include members of the oil-rich Hunt family, the textiles magnate Arun Agarwal and the real estate developer Harlan Crow, who was revealed recently as a longtime benefactor of Justice Clarence Thomas.Such busy fund-raising trips, however, illustrate an unseen advantage that Mr. Trump holds: He raises all his money online — which requires virtually nothing from the candidate himself — while the rest of the field is making mad dashes across the nation to attend fund-raisers.Mr. Pence, according to an adviser, spent 15 days in September raising money — more than half the month. And Mr. DeSantis, who had multiple events across Texas last week, is following up the debate with a trip to Northern California to raise more money ahead of the crucial Sept. 30 deadline.Nikki Haley is looking to build on her momentum from the first debate.Travis Dove for The New York TimesStill, even if Ms. Haley delivers another donor-approved performance on Wednesday night, there’s little chance the field will narrow as much as Republican donors and leaders are hoping. And this is good news for Mr. Trump, who benefits from a large field dividing up the non-Trump vote.Campaigns have been lobbying aggressively for favorable rules in future debates both publicly and behind the scenes. Mr. Scott, for instance, has argued that stage placement should be determined by a candidate’s standing in early state polling, not national surveys. The DeSantis team has pressed for even higher polling thresholds — even 8 percent — to further narrow the stage as the primaries near.Debate rules can make a big impact in how television audiences perceive the candidates. In Milwaukee at the first debate, Mr. Christie faced audible boos in the audience after he was critical of Mr. Trump. But the crowd will be much different, and much smaller, in California. A person familiar with the event planning said around 700 people would attend on Wednesday.Mr. Christie has signaled to several people that he plans to make Mr. Trump more central to his argument at this debate. At the last one, he spent more time trading barbs with Mr. Ramaswamy when the moderators generally avoided mentioning Mr. Trump’s name, calling him “the elephant not in the room.”Tim Scott campaigning in New Hampshire in early September. His team said he intended to take a more aggressive approach at the next debate.Mel Musto for The New York TimesMr. Scott, who had an underwhelming first debate and is polling in the single digits in both national and early state polls, is still raising plenty of campaign cash, including from a New York fund-raising event last week hosted by the billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller. Mr. Scott will be saturating the airwaves over the fall — his super PAC has already reserved $40 million in advertising, the most of any candidate in the primary.Mr. Scott’s team has signaled he will take a more aggressive approach in the second debate. In the first debate, Mr. Scott declined to take shots at his competitors. Since then, he has called out Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis over their positions on abortion and has said that Mr. Ramaswamy has taken the “wrong” positions on U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and Taiwan.But a more confrontational posture would be out of character for Mr. Scott, who told the radio host Hugh Hewitt to expect the “same optimistic, positive approach to debating” in an interview last week. “If we’re going to have a food fight, someone has to bring us back to the issues that are germane to the American people,” Mr. Scott said.Anjali Huynh More

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      Why Biden and Trump Are Courting Striking Autoworkers

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      The president and his leading Republican rival are heading to Michigan to address members of the U.A.W., whose political clout is growing.The political stakes grow as the U.A.W. strike drags on.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesBiden and Trump bid for blue collar votes In an extraordinary show of support, President Biden plans to join striking autoworkers on the picket line in Michigan on Tuesday. It comes a day before Donald Trump is expected to speak to union members in Detroit instead of participating in the second Republican primary debate.The competing visits come as the two home in on battleground states ahead of next year’s election. But their appearances also reveal a political battle to become the voice of blue collar workers at a time when both candidates are struggling to win over mainstream voters and even some within their own parties.Bidenomics is a conundrum for the president. Biden says he is “the most pro-union president in American history” and has overseen one of the biggest industrial policy shifts in decades through the Inflation Reduction Act, offering billions of dollars in subsidies to create new manufacturing jobs in a push to greenify the economy.But the president is getting little credit from voters. Approval ratings for his economic management are at career lows. And the I.R.A. is somewhat troublesome for him: It includes incentives for automakers to make more electric vehicles, which labor leaders say will depend on non-union jobs and require fewer workers.The United Automobile Workers union has held back from endorsing Biden. The group was an early supporter of his economic road map but broke with other big unions. “The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, wrote to members in May.Trump sees an opportunity to hammer Biden and the U.A.W. Trump, whose track record as a businessman and president often backed business over labor, will speak directly to workers, aiming to project himself as a protector of jobs. He has called the federal push for electric vehicles a “catastrophe for Michigan” that would cost American jobs, benefit China and raise prices for consumers.Fain has said Trump would be a “disaster” if re-elected. But the former president’s rhetoric and policies like rewriting trade agreements have appealed to some union members.Union votes could prove decisive in 2024. Trump won Michigan in 2016, but Biden took the state by more than 150,000 votes in 2020. In crucial swing states, even wooing a relatively small portion could be crucial. “In a strike situation, they’re all going out because they’re supporting their own economic interests,” said Alexander Colvin, the dean of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “That doesn’t mean they all think the same thing politically.”HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The F.C.C. is reportedly set to reinstate net neutrality rules. The regulator will revive Obama-era limits on broadband providers’ ability to unfairly interfere with internet traffic, after Democrats finally gained a majority among its commissioners, according to Bloomberg. Companies including AT&T and Comcast are likely to push back, arguing that such rules would be a big burden.All eyes are on striking actors as screenwriters prepare for a vote on their labor deal. Leaders of the Writers Guild of America are to vote on their tentative pact with studios on Tuesday, with members set to weigh in soon. But there are few signs that an agreement with the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union is close, meaning that Hollywood will remain largely shut for now. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA members voted to authorize a strike against video game companies.Fossil fuel use needs to fall more quickly to contain global warming, the International Energy Agency says. Adoption of cleaner energy technologies like electric vehicles and solar is growing, but the use of fossil fuels must shrink faster to avoid a climate catastrophe, the agency said in its latest report. Some industry watchers said that the I.E.A. is still too optimistic about the decline in demand for oil and coal.Senator Bob Menendez says he won’t resign. The New Jersey Democrat, accused of taking bribes, said he’d fight the corruption charges leveled by federal prosecutors. He didn’t address questions about bars of gold found on his property, but asserted that the $550,000 in cash found stuffed around his home was merely part of an emergency fund.Growth concerns hit the bond market Alarm bells are ringing for markets on both sides of the Atlantic. Investors have again sold off their sovereign bond holdings, especially Treasury notes and German bunds, pushing yields to highs last seen in 2007 just before the housing crisis and in 2011 during the European debt crisis.Growth concerns appear to be the culprit. Global trade fell in July at its fastest pace since the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic snarled global markets. According to the newest World Trade Monitor report, the decline is the latest signal that global demand for goods is deteriorating, as inflation and high interest rates remain at multi-decade highs.Jamie Dimon added fuel to the pessimistic outlook. The C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase warned of a kind of worst-case scenario in which the Fed is forced to keep raising its benchmark lending rate to combat inflation, further blunting growth. “I am not sure if the world is prepared for 7 percent,” he said in an interview with The Times of India, referring to the federal funds rate.Fed policymakers themselves don’t see such a scenario playing out. They released a forecast last week suggesting that one more interest rate increase was in the cards this year, and possibly two cuts next year, which would keep interest rates at around 5 percent by the end of 2024. But since the Fed meeting, the futures market has been pricing in higher policy rates for longer, and that’s adding volatility to the bond market.A potential U.S. government shutdown is also unnerving investors. The prospect that lawmakers will fail to reach a deal by Saturday’s deadline to fund the government is weighing on stocks, with U.S. futures in the red this morning. On Monday, Moody’s, the ratings agency, said a shutdown could lead it to downgrade the country’s credit rating — a warning that the White House seized upon in hopes of compelling the warring Republican factions to break their impasse on spending cuts.The good news: The uncertainty has put a lid on the oil rally, with Brent crude falling below $91 a barrel this morning, a two-week low.1.5 trillion — Gallons of water used in fracking by oil and gas companies in the U.S. since 2011. That’s equivalent to the amount of tap water used by the state of Texas each year, according to a Times investigation. The boom in fracking to meet growing energy demand poses a threat to the country’s aquifers, researchers say.ChatGPT, can you take on Alexa? Hours after Amazon announced a big bet on an artificial intelligence start-up — and days after it revealed plans to make its Alexa digital assistant smarter — one of the most prominent names in the A.I. race unveiled its plan to surpass those advancements.OpenAI said its ChatGPT chatbot can now listen to users’ spoken requests and respond vocally, among other new capabilities. It’s a reminder of how fast the race to advance A.I. is moving — and how high the stakes are.Voice is a more natural way of interacting with ChatGPT, according to OpenAI executives, who also said that their chatbot will feature voices that sound more natural than those of existing digital assistants. (The Times says that the voices sound better, but still come across as a little robotic.)OpenAI is adding other features to ChatGPT, including image recognition. One example that OpenAI demonstrated: Share an image of a bicycle with the chatbot and it will instruct the user how to lower the seat.Amazon seems aware of the risks of being outpaced by rivals. Unlike Alexa or Siri, which require users to ask specific commands, the latest version of ChatGPT is capable of more conversational interactions, including follow-up questions and clarifications. Wider adoption of that chatbot could risk Amazon losing its longtime dominance in the market for personal assistants.The Alexa announcement last week, in which Amazon said that it was incorporating the large language model technology into its assistant, is meant to address that eventuality — though ChatGPT’s new capability will be available sooner.With new capabilities come worries about new dangers. OpenAI executives said that they won’t let ChatGPT identify faces, though the software will be able to talk at length about other pictures it’s asked to analyze. There’s also the risk that greater use of ChatGPT will lead to potential mishaps involving the well-known A.I. weakness of inventing facts, known as hallucinating.And Amazon, perhaps leery of the well-publicized hitches that Microsoft and Google suffered in rolling out advanced A.I. features to the wider public, is making the new Alexa features available initially only to some users in the U.S.In other A.I. news: Meet the human workers training A.I. systems. Spotify says it won’t ban A.I.-produced music, but it will work with OpenAI to clone podcasters’ voices to produce versions of their shows in other languages. And New York Magazine asks whether Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., is the Robert Oppenheimer of the digital age.THE SPEED READ DealsAmerican Airlines appealed a federal court ruling that blocked its planned alliance with JetBlue. (Reuters)Vista Equity Partners now oversees more than $100 billion in assets, reflecting investor interest in the big tech deals that are the firm’s stock in trade. (Axios)What’s at stake as Disney and Comcast prepare to negotiate over the value of the streaming service Hulu, which they jointly own. (FT)PolicyTesla is reportedly a focus of European regulators’ inquiry into state subsidies for electric vehicles made in China. (Bloomberg)The Commerce Department has hired veterans of Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs and KKR to help run its semiconductor funding program. (Bloomberg)Best of the restSan Francisco residents say that their city is being unfairly pilloried as a decaying, crime-ridden metropolis. (NYT)Microsoft is looking to power its A.I. and cloud data centers with small nuclear reactors. (CNBC)How companies are pulling off four-day workweeks. (WSJ)“The End of Privacy is a Taylor Swift Fan TikTok Account Armed with Facial Recognition Tech” (404 Media)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      J.D. Vance Is Not Your Usual Political Opportunist

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      J.D. Vance was trying to find his groove. I had just shown up at his office last week to interview the Ohio Republican about his first nine months in the Senate, where he has proved curiously hard to pigeonhole. As we sat down, Mr. Vance — at 39, one of the chamber’s youngest members — squirmed in his ornate leather arm chair, complaining that it was uncomfortable. Whoever used it previously, he explained, had created a “giant ass print” that made it a poor fit for him.Then the senator kicked a foot up on the low coffee table in front of him. This gave me a glorious view of his custom socks: a dark-red background covered with pictures of his 6-year-old son’s face. On the far end of the table was a Lego set of the U.S. Capitol that his wife had bought him on eBay for Father’s Day. With his crisp dark suit, casual manner and personal touches, Mr. Vance suddenly looked right at home. I suspected there was some grand metaphor in all this about the young conservative working to carve out his spot in this world of old leather and hidebound traditions.I asked what had been his most pleasant discovery about life in the Senate. “I’ve been surprised by how little people hate each other in private,” he offered, positing that much of the acrimony you see from lawmakers was “posturing” for TV. “There’s sort of an inherent falseness to the way that people present on American media,” he said.This may strike many people as rich coming from Mr. Vance, who is one of the Republican Party’s new breed of in-your-face, culture-warring, Trump-defending MAGA agitators. And indeed, Mr. Vance knows how to throw a partisan punch. Yet in these early days on the job, he has also adopted a somewhat more complicated political model, frequently championing legislation with Democrats, including progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin.Pragmatic bipartisan MAGA troll feels like a dizzying paradoxical line to toe. And it risks feeding into the larger critique of Mr. Vance as a political opportunist. This is, after all, the guy who won attention in the 2016 election cycle as a harsh conservative critic of Mr. Trump, only to undergo a stark MAGA makeover and spend much of his 2022 Senate race sucking up to the former president. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee, told his biographer about the party’s 2022 midterm contenders. “It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?”Mr. Vance is not one to ignore such swipes. “Mitt Romney is one to talk about changing his mind publicly. He’s been on every side of 35 different issues,” he clapped back to Breitbart News.But there seems to be something going on with Mr. Vance beyond the usual shape-shifting flip-floppery. He contends that his approach is the more honest, hopeful path to getting things done for the conservative grass roots. In his telling, he’s not the cynical operator; his critics are.In some respects — especially with his defense of Mr. Trump — the freshman senator is transparently full of bull. But when it comes to how to navigate and possibly even make progress in today’s fractious G.O.P., not to mention this dysfunctional Congress, he may well be onto something.Mr. Vance and I sat down on a morning when Congress was all a dither over a possible government shutdown being driven by a spending fight among House Republicans. While sympathetic to his colleagues’ concerns, Mr. Vance saw the battle as unfocused, unproductive and bad for the party.“My sense is this shutdown fight will go very poorly for us unless we’re very clear about what we’re asking for,” he told me. With different blocs of Republicans demanding different things, “that’s just going to get confused, and the American people are going to punish us for it.”He argued that if the conservatives would hunker down and focus, they could get one major concession. “And we should be fighting for that one thing,” he said. What did he think they should prioritize? “If we could get something real on border security, then that would be a deal worth taking.”Mr. Vance described himself less an ideological revolutionary than a principled pragmatist. He did not come to Washington to blow up the system or overhaul how the Senate operates. He said his outlook was, “There are things I need to get done, and I will do whatever I need to do to do them.”If this means making common cause with the political enemy now and again, so be it. “I am a populist in a lot of my economic convictions, and so that will lead to opportunities to working with Democrats,” he reasoned.Mr. Vance’s cross aisle endeavors include teaming up with Ms. Warren to push legislation that would claw back compensation from bank executives who were richly paid even as they were “crashing their banks into a mountain,” as Mr. Vance put it. He has joined forces with Ms. Baldwin on a bill that would ensure that technologies developed with taxpayer money are manufactured in the United States. He is working with Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden on a bill to reduce thefts of catalytic converters. And in the coming weeks, his focus will be on pushing through railway safety reform that he and Ohio’s senior senator, Sherrod Brown, introduced in the wake of the derailment disaster in East Palestine. That is the bill about which he was most optimistic. “We have 60 votes in private,” he said.Even if nothing makes it through this year, Mr. Vance is playing the long game. “Those productive personal relationships are quite valuable because they may not lead to an actual legislative package tomorrow, but they could two years from now,” he said.Squishy “relationship” talk can be dangerous in today’s G.O.P., even for members of the relatively genteel Senate. Being labeled a RINO — that is, a Republican in Name Only — generally earns one the sort of opprobrium normally reserved for child sex traffickers.But here’s where his MAGA antics may provide a bit of cover. In his brief time in Washington, the senator has proved himself an eager and a prolific culture warrior. The first bill he introduced — an important moment in any senator’s career — aimed to make English the nation’s official language. In July, after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in university admissions, he fired off a letter to the eight Ivy League schools, plus a couple of private colleges in Ohio, warning them to retain any records that might be needed for a Senate investigation of their practices. That same month, he introduced a bill to ban gender-affirming care for minors. He even waded into the hysteria last winter over the health risks of gas stoves. This month, he’s out hawking a bill that would ban federal mask mandates for domestic air travel, public transit systems and schools, and bar those institutions from denying service to the maskless.Perhaps most vitally, Mr. Vance remains steadfast in his support of Mr. Trump. In June, he announced he was putting a hold on all Justice Department nominees in protest of “the unprecedented political prosecution” of Mr. Trump. And he plans to work hard as a surrogate to return the MAGA king to the White House. “I’m thinking about trying to be as active a participant as possible.”J.D. Vance during a Trump campaign rally last year.Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis critique of Mr. Trump’s critics can be brutal.“Trump is extraordinarily clarifying on the right and extra confusing on the left,” he said. The hatred for Trump among progressives is so strong that people cannot see past it to acknowledge the former president’s “good parts,” he contended. While among conservatives, “Trump has this incredible capacity to identify really, who the good people are on the right and who the bad people are on the right.”Elaborating on the “bad” category, he points to former Representative Liz Cheney and the neoconservative writer Bill Kristol. “They say, ‘Donald Trump is an authoritarian’ — which I think is absurd. ‘Donald Trump is anti-democratic’ — which, again, in my view is absurd. I think they’re hiding their real ideological disagreements,” he argued.Mr. Vance is entitled to his view, of course. But glibly rejecting stated concerns about Mr. Trump’s anti-democratic inclinations — and characterizing his critics’ reactions as “obsessive” — would strike many as the real absurdity.Asked specifically about Mr. Trump’s election fraud lies, which Mr. Vance has at times promoted, the senator again shifted into slippery explainer mode. “I think it’s very easy for folks in the press to latch onto the zaniest election fraud or stolen election theories and say, ‘Oh this is totally debunked,’” he said. “But they ignore that there is this very clear set of institutional biases built into the election in 2020 that — from big tech censorship to the way in which financial interests really lined up behind Joe Biden.”“People aren’t stupid. They see what’s out there,” he said. “Most Republican grass roots voters are not sympathetic to the dumbest version of the election conspiracy. They are sympathetic to the version that is actually largely true.”Except that, as evidence of what is “actually largely true,” Mr. Vance pointed to a 2021 Time article detailing a bipartisan effort not to advance a particular candidate but to safeguard the electoral system. More important, the “dumbest” version of the stolen election conspiracy is precisely what Mr. Trump and his enablers have been aggressively spreading for years. It is what drove the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, landed many rioters in prison, led to Fox News paying a $787.5 million defamation settlement and prompted grand juries to indict Mr. Trump in federal and state courts. Mr. Vance may want to believe that most Republicans are too smart to buy such lunacy, but he is too smart not to recognize the damage to American democracy being wrought by that lunacy.As for those who criticize his approach, Mr. Vance saw them as out of sync with voters. The conservative grass roots are “extremely frustrated with Washington not doing anything,” he said. “I think if you are a critic of them — if you are a critic of the way they see the world — you see people who want to blow up the system. Who are just pissed off. And they want fighters.” And not necessarily fighters who are “directed” or strategic in their efforts, he said, so much as just anyone who channels that rage.By contrast, “if you’re sympathetic to them and you like them,” he continued, you understand that “the problem is not that people don’t bitch enough or complain enough on television.” Rather, it’s that voters are fed up that “nothing changes” even when they “elect successive waves of different people. So I actually think being a bridge builder and getting things done is totally consistent with this idea that people are pissed off at the government as do-nothing.”When I asked how Mr. Vance defined his political positioning, he abruptly popped out of his chair and hurried over to his desk. He returned with a yellow sticky note on which he drew a large grid. Along the bottom of the paper he scrawled “culture” and on the left side, “commerce.” He started drawing dots as he explained: “I think the Republican Party has tended to be here” — top right quadrant, indicating a mix of strong cultural and pro-business conservatism. He added, “I think the Democratic Party has tended to be here,” pointing to the bottom left quadrant, which in his telling represents a strong liberal take on both. “And I think the majority, certainly the plurality of American voters — and maybe I’m biased because this is my actual view — is somewhere around here,” he said, placing them on the grid to suggest that people are “more conservative on cultural issues but they are not instinctively pro-business.”Michelle CottleMr. Vance reminded me that he has always been critical of his party’s pro-business bias. And it is primarily in this space that he is playing nice with Democrats.Bridge builder. Deal Maker. MAGA maniac. Trump apologist. Call Mr. Vance whatever you want. And if you find it all confused or confusing, don’t fret. That may be part of the point. Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is something of a chaotic mess. Until it figures out where it is headed, a shape-shifting MAGA brawler who quietly works across the aisle on particular issues may be the best this party has to offer.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