Trump, Donald J

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Sununu on Trump: ‘He’s Not Scaring Anyone Out of the Race’

      by

      In a wide-ranging interview, Chris Sununu, the New Hampshire governor, called the Republican presidential primary a tossup. As for Trump? “He’s not clearing the field.”Confident and even brash, Chris Sununu is one of the most popular governors in America. In a year when many Republicans struggled, he was re-elected in New Hampshire by more than 15 percentage points. The way to win, he says, is not “ranting and raving” about cultural topics but the old-fashioned way: listening carefully to voters and talking about solutions to their most pressing problems.Sununu thinks Republicans need to relearn the “basic tenets of politics.” He’s no fan of Donald Trump, and he thinks the former president will be eminently beatable in the Republican primary. He also says it’s “insulting” of Democrats to demand that New Hampshire give up its traditional place in the presidential calendar to suit the “personal whims” of President Biden, who he predicts will eventually be pushed aside by Democratic power brokers in Washington or bow out on his own.The New Hampshire governor, who is often discussed as a possible presidential contender in 2024, had a lot to say over the course of a 40-minute interview. Here’s a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Let’s talk about what happened in the midterm elections. A lot of people are blaming Donald Trump for choosing candidates in primaries who struggled in November. Is it that simple?No, no, no, no. Look, there’s a lot of different pieces here. It’s not just about former President Trump. It’s about the candidates themselves. They were bad candidates because they had a bad message, right? Often they made Trump a part of their message. And that just isn’t what voters wanted.A lot of candidates forgot the most basic tenets of politics: I need more votes than the other side. And it isn’t just about catering to a base or firing up your base. You need to listen to independents. You need to listen to all of the voting constituencies to see what the issues are for voters.There was also a little bit of manipulation of the primary process by Democrats. We saw it right here in New Hampshire with our U.S. Senate race. You effectively had the opposing party trying to pick your party’s candidate. Democrats were good at defining our candidates for us.Some Republicans say that candidates were too focused on hot-button cultural topics like transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, or books in school libraries. Do you agree with that critique?Yes. I agree that candidates focused on the wrong issues. I don’t mind addressing cultural issues; of course we need to. But it’s how you as a candidate stand up for it — not just ranting and raving, but hopefully inspiring folks to really believe in you as the person who can be a positive agent of change for those issues.Democrats talk about how abortion was a really powerful issue for them. You supported a 24-week ban, right?Yeah, I signed that. The Legislature put it in the budget. I’m pro-choice, but it’s a provision that I think most Americans would support. It’s very late — the third trimester.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Donald Trump Is Weak. And Powerful. Now What?

      by

      Everyone knows by now how many Trump candidates lost this year, especially the higher-profile, more hard-core ones who claimed the 2020 election was stolen. Kari Lake lost in Arizona. Doug Mastriano lost in Pennsylvania. Most of the notable pro-Trump secretary of state candidates lost. The Senate candidates, too. The Democrats even added on in Georgia on Tuesday, with the same, central animating force behind each development: that Donald Trump forced his party to run a candidate, Herschel Walker, who lost, weakening Mr. Trump and the party — a mutual descent.What everyone does not know by now is what to do with Mr. Trump’s third candidacy for president. What is this campaign? He’s a candidate without opponents, who has made less frequent public appearances since his announcement than he did before, whose party’s other notable members seem to want to move on but often still don’t really say so publicly. The 2022 incarnation of Mr. Trump is like some kind of trap: He keeps losing and forcing others to go with him, in part because of his and their nature and in part because without him, Republicans might not quite be able to win, either.Looming over every aspect of Mr. Trump’s current campaign is the simple question: Will this be like before? That has a technical, outcome-driven dimension (will he win and become president?) and a more cultural, psychological one (will he dominate American life, and will each day’s news turn on the actions and emotions of one person cascading through society?). Politics is about a lot more than just the outcomes of elections; a long time separates us from the 2024 election, and each day has the potential to influence the ones after. Something can be weak and a considerable force in politics or culture at the same time; someone can be losing and influential at the same time. These things are compatible.The country spent nearly two years hearing about voting machine conspiracies and the possibility of subversion in future elections. Voters rejected all that in many cases. What did the last two years mean for Mr. Trump and these candidates? For all of us? Nobody got anything of real value out of conspiracy theories and Trump recriminations. Not the Republicans, certainly, and that’s been the tenor of much post-election coverage and conversation — the way Mr. Trump’s choices produced certain outcomes that hurt the Republican Party.“The people that were on the crazy side, they’ve kind of been sent off to the frontier,” Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, told Semafor this week. “If you’re denying the last election or any election, I think that balloon has been popped.” Even so, it’s no great gift to the country as a whole that candidates ran for two years on suspicion about normal election practices or advancing conspiracy theories, which people heard and internalized — a more intangible result with effects harder to measure.Since Mr. Trump’s announcement for president, as you have also heard by now, he’s repeatedly demanded that the 2020 election be redone, even straight up saying that there could be a “termination” of the Constitution. Two nights before Thanksgiving, he ate dinner with a white supremacist and Kanye West, who can’t stop saying antisemitic things. These events can also be viewed through this dual dynamic of weakness and influence. In the most basic horse race political sense, Mr. Trump’s actions almost certainly hurt him; more Republicans have criticized him, and we have multiple election cycles of results suggesting that people reject his choices. This weakens him. But he still has influence, and through this one dinner, for instance, many, many people heard about an extreme racist they probably never heard about before.In 2022, even when Mr. Trump seems to be fading politically, nobody has conclusively resolved the question of how to deal with him — when to step in and when to ignore, how to measure one action against another. The central issue flows from an understanding that most people in this country seem to share, however they feel about him: Mr. Trump will not be stopped from endlessly wanting things. And he will not confine himself to the ways in which a president or public person is supposed to behave, in pursuit of this endless array of wants and needs.Faced with this uncontrollability, people fall into complex emotional dynamics of how to react to Mr. Trump — to care or not care, how to demonstrate caring, to ignore him or this or that, to never ignore it, how far to go, when to walk away, when to stay, when someone else’s silence becomes unacceptable. How is a person supposed to be? What can a single person do? What are our duties and obligations? These questions animate centuries of literature and philosophy, but Mr. Trump’s chemical mix of emotion and power turns them into an hourly concern. He will not change; you can. This is an exhausting texture of American life in this era, even now.It’s almost hard to remember what the first campaign was like, though it, too, started with a weak hand. Mr. Trump defeated a splintered field with, initially, mere pluralities of votes. And you were constantly finding out how weak American institutions were: the thinness of political belief among Republican politicians, the inability of different institutions to do anything about Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the true incentives of cable news, how game people were to go along with, for instance, an attack on Mexicans or Gold Star parents. Practically overnight, Republican and conservative groups went from opposing Mr. Trump to caving in to the reality of his candidacy to emphatically supporting him. This general dynamic repeated again and again for years.Seven years in, one of the more disorienting aspects of the Trump era is the way there’s never any sense of resolution. The entire population hangs in a kind of eternal suspense, without past or future. Since the week of Jan. 6, 2021, without Mr. Trump’s ceaseless presence on the major social platforms, things have been somewhat different. But who knows where he goes from here? He might return to Twitter. He might really be fading. He might lose to Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. He might not accept a loss to anyone, at any point. He might be president again. Could we really revert to the full chaotic, exhausting, late-2010s immersion in Mr. Trump’s emotions?The need to know how it ends with Mr. Trump, what will happen next and how people respond to him, can obscure the current situation. And over the past year, it’s become clearer how power and weakness and influence can exist in one space and in one person. In this dark environment, Mr. Trump can lose an election and still change American life indefinitely.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Is the Supreme Court About to Upend American Election Laws?

      by

      Here’s what to know about a court case that could change the way Americans vote — and who decides how they do.For months, my inbox has been bombarded by anxious Democrats and election experts wanting to talk about a once-obscure legal theory that could fundamentally alter the way Americans vote.Known as the independent state legislature doctrine, it holds, in its purest form, that state constitutions have little to no ability to constrain state legislatures. The doctrine emerged from a novel interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause, which grants states the authority to set the “time, places and manner” of federal elections.At the core of the dispute is whether the framers intended the word “legislature” in the document to be understood strictly, or whether they meant that other institutions — like state courts, governors and secretaries of state — also had important roles to play in setting and interpreting the rules around elections and voting.A fringe version of the doctrine entered the public discussion last year when it emerged that one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, John Eastman, had written a memo arguing that it even allowed state lawmakers to send their own slate of presidential electors to Washington.The Supreme Court has traditionally been gun-shy about encroaching on state courts, especially when they are interpreting their own constitutions.But a more mainstream conservative position, embraced by the Republican Party and rejected by Democrats, started gaining support on the right amid legal battles over the accommodations some states made for voters during the pandemic, like the expansion of mail voting.If adopted, the doctrine would, among other things, bar state courts from ensuring that state laws comply with a requirement, common in many state constitutions, that elections be “free and fair” — with potentially vast implications for rules on redistricting, citizen-led commissions and voting. Understand the U.S. Supreme Court’s New TermCard 1 of 6A race to the right. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Brian Kemp, the Georgia Republican Who Emerged Stronger From Walker’s Defeat

      by

      Gov. Brian P. Kemp of Georgia — once derided by some of his fellow Republicans — has emerged in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Senate runoff as a savvy political operator.ATLANTA — As Republicans smarting from Herschel Walker’s defeat in Georgia continue the process of assigning blame, one man seems to be conspicuously above reproach: Gov. Brian P. Kemp.The state’s Republican governor — once derided as an unhinged far-right disrupter following a series of wildly provocative 2018 campaign ads — has emerged in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Senate runoff as one of his party’s savvier political operators.On Nov. 8, Mr. Kemp won re-election by a resounding eight-point margin — a remarkable transformation for a politician who went from being booed by conservatives at his own events in the May primary to defeating a national Democratic star, Stacey Abrams. His ability to deftly walk a fine line of providing just enough support to Mr. Walker without being damaged by his defeat was proof of Mr. Kemp’s formidable political instincts, Republicans inside and outside the state said. He has survived and even thrived in the face of Donald J. Trump’s mercurial opposition. Mr. Kemp started out earning Mr. Trump’s endorsement, then became the former president’s political enemy, overcoming a primary challenge that Mr. Trump had orchestrated. Just before last month’s general election, Mr. Trump suddenly switched gears and encouraged his followers to support the Georgia governor.Mr. Kemp has helped create a template for Republicans, showing them how to use Mr. Trump’s attacks to strengthen an independent political brand and not sacrifice support from the former president’s loyal base. His navigation of the Republican Party’s crosscurrents, along with an election performance that saw him outperform Mr. Trump in crucial suburban swing districts, has raised his national profile and heightened speculation about his future ambitions and a potential run for president in 2024. “The ceiling is extremely high for Brian Kemp right now,” said Stephen Lawson, a Georgia-based Republican strategist who ran a pro-Walker super PAC. “Whether that for him is the U.S. Senate in four years, whether that’s potentially looking at ’24 stuff or whether that’s just being a really good governor and a voice for your party, he is going to have a huge platform moving forward.”Mr. Kemp, a former homebuilder from Athens, Ga., has built his two-decade political career on a mix of luck, skill and occasional provocations — in one 2018 TV ad, he pointed a shotgun at an actor playing a suitor to one of his daughters. He speaks with a slow, deep Southern drawl that he sometimes plays up for the cameras, and as an alumnus of the University of Georgia, he has positioned himself as the fan-in-chief of its football team, which Mr. Walker helped lead to a national championship in 1980.The governor’s Democratic critics say that Mr. Kemp’s allegiance to far-right orthodoxy has harmed the state. He signed a restrictive 2019 abortion law that effectively bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy and refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a decision that has caused the state to forgo billions of dollars in federal health care money.Mr. Kemp, in Bremen, Ga., in November, said that his kind of outreach and willingness to campaign helped him win re-election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesYet even his critics acknowledge his knack for presenting himself as an aw-shucks Georgian and making his case in small rural communities, handshake to handshake. In the eight years that he served as secretary of state, he built relationships with many of the local shot-callers — coroners, tax assessors, sheriffs — in Georgia’s 159 counties. Those ties likely helped insulate him from Mr. Trump’s attacks after the 2020 election among local Republican officials. “His success now really is a result of all these touches over the years — that ‘How’s your mama? How’s your daddy?’ kind of thing,” State Senator Jen Jordan, a Democrat and vocal Kemp critic, said. Such a face-to-face style may work locally and statewide, Ms. Jordan said, but may not translate beyond that. “Is that something you can do at the national level, like running for president?” she added.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Analysis: A Very Bad 3 Weeks for Trump After Losses and Legal Setbacks

      by

      For the former president, who raced to announce his third run for the White House in hopes of clearing the Republican field, the losses, legal setbacks and embarrassments are rapidly piling up.Donald J. Trump’s unusually early announcement of a third presidential campaign was aimed in part at clearing the Republican field for 2024, but his first three weeks as a candidate have undercut that goal, highlighting his vulnerabilities and giving considerable ammunition to those in the G.O.P. arguing to turn the page on him.Since emerging from the November election with a string of humiliating losses to show for his pretensions to be a midterm kingmaker, Mr. Trump has entertained a leading white supremacist and a celebrity antisemite at his South Florida mansion.He has suggested terminating the Constitution — the one that a president swears to preserve, protect and defend — in furtherance of his long-running lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.His business was just convicted on all 17 counts in a tax-fraud case in New York City.And his handpicked candidate for the Senate in Georgia — Herschel Walker, the football star Mr. Trump employed in a brief stint as a pro football team owner in the 1980s — went down to defeat Tuesday night after a campaign that will be remembered as a string of scandals and self-inflicted wounds.Extending his streak of self-sabotage, Mr. Trump himself spent Tuesday night entertaining yet another fringe character, posing for thumbs-up photos at his club with an adherent of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, ABC News reported.For Mr. Trump, the losses and embarrassments are rapidly piling up, aggravating longstanding concerns among his fellow Republicans that his 2016 victory may have been an aberration — and that his persistence with a comeback attempt could sink the party’s hopes of reclaiming the White House in 2024.“I know a lot of people in our party love the former president,” Senator Mitt Romney said on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, responding to Mr. Walker’s defeat. “But he’s, if you will, the kiss of death for somebody who wants to win a general election. And at some point, we’ve got to move on and look for new leaders that will lead us to win.”Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist and former top adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called the last three weeks “devastating for Trump’s future viability.”“His rushed announcement, serious legal setbacks and the defeat of his handpicked Senate candidates — which once again cost the G.O.P. control of the Senate — have raised serious concerns with his donors and supporters,” Mr. Reed said.“Abandonment,” he added, “has begun.”It is too soon to weigh the long-term effects on Mr. Trump’s latest candidacy of the current run of defeats and denunciations, especially given his long track record of weathering controversies.His rise reflected, and accelerated, the ascendancy of the right wing of the Republican Party, and with a solid one-fourth or more of the G.O.P. still solidly in his corner, he remains a clear favorite in polls of potential Republican contenders. But it is not clear that Mr. Trump will be able to replicate his appeal to the much broader coalition that delivered him an unexpected victory in 2016.A Trump rally in Texas in October.Jordan Vonderhaar For The New York Times/Getty Images North AmericaIt has been an inauspicious beginning for Mr. Trump, who has now led Republicans to defeat or disappointment in three straight election cycles.Ignoring most of his advisers, Mr. Trump chose to announce his campaign a week after the midterm election, counting on a strong result for Republicans. Instead, the G.O.P. barely captured the House and failed to take the Senate, prompting many in the party to assign blame to Mr. Trump, for endorsing flawed candidates and pressuring them to embrace his lies about the 2020 election.“If we would have taken the Senate, and the House by a good majority instead of a slim margin, then that would have paved the way for Trump to get the nomination and wrap it up quickly,” said Lori Klein Corbin, an Arizona member of the Republican National Committee. “Now, we just don’t know.”Mr. Trump has held no campaign events since he got into the race, has yet to name people to key campaign posts and has not established a campaign headquarters. He has largely kept to Mar-a-Lago, participating remotely in just a few public events, like a rally by telephone for Mr. Walker in Georgia.Yet Mr. Trump found time to dine on Nov. 22 with Kanye West, the rap artist whose approval Mr. Trump had repeatedly sought as president, and who had been widely denounced for a series of antisemitic comments, and with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, a notorious racist and Holocaust denier. (And when his former ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman, was among those to chastise him, Mr. Trump responded by privately complaining that Mr. Friedman had shown disloyalty.)In a statement, Steven Cheung, a senior communications adviser to Mr. Trump, dismissed questions about the start of the campaign, calling Mr. Trump “the single, most dominant force in politics” and insisting that all was going according to plan.“We’re focused on building out the operation and putting in place a foundation to wage an overwhelming campaign that’s never been seen before,” Mr. Cheung said. “We’re building out teams in early voting states and making sure we are positioned to win on all levels.”Mr. Trump’s losing streak includes serious legal setbacks.His four-year effort to block congressional Democrats from obtaining his tax returns ended in defeat at the Supreme Court, and the House Ways and Means Committee said on Nov. 30 that it had obtained access to six years of his returns. A federal appeals court on Dec. 1 shut down a lawsuit by Mr. Trump that had, for nearly three months, slowed the inquiry into whether he illegally kept national security records at Mar-a-Lago.Trump supporters at his 2024 campaign announcement in Florida in November.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesOutside Trump Tower in Manhattan after the 2024 announcement.Adam Pape for The New York TimesThen, in New York on Tuesday, a jury returned guilty verdicts against Mr. Trump’s family business on all 17 counts related to a tax-fraud scheme, detailing what prosecutors called a “culture of fraud and deception” at the company that bears his name.A hardware store Bath County, Va., showing its 2024 allegiance.Eze Amos for The New York TimesMr. Walker’s defeat Tuesday night in his runoff with Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, came as a final blow capping Mr. Trump’s miserable year as a political mastermind.Mr. Trump had pressed Mr. Walker to run and endorsed him early on, disregarding Republicans in Washington who urged caution before anointing Mr. Walker given the allegations of domestic violence in his past. Mr. Trump was adamant that Mr. Walker would prevail, just as Mr. Trump himself had weathered his own scandals.But while Mr. Walker kept the race surprisingly close, given the crush of headlines about the previously undisclosed children he had fathered and abortions he had reportedly urged romantic partners to get, he lost by nearly 100,000 votes — and Democrats gained an invaluable 51st seat in the Senate.Julianne Thompson, a Republican consultant in Atlanta and former spokeswoman for the state G.O.P., said the overall midterm results in Georgia — where voters rejected Trump-endorsed candidates for Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general — showed that “a lot of people are questioning the direction of the party.”“There is a big part of the Republican Party that is ready to move on,” she said.More broadly, Mr. Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad three weeks appear to have called into question whether his seeming imperviousness to the normal rules of political gravity may have worn off at long last.“People see what’s been happening, and will interpret that as weakness and as an opportunity to challenge President Trump,” said Michael Barnett, the Republican chairman in Palm Beach County, Fla. “I don’t think his influence has dropped that much — if at all — but he’s going to have opponents.”Emily Cochrane More

    • 50 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Wait! Wait! Georgia’s Over?

      by

      As the sun sinks over Georgia, we bid adieu to the Senate runoff election that seems to have been contested since the beginning of time.Yes, dinosaurs once ruled the earth and Senate candidate Herschel Walker probably has a theory about how they could be killed by a werewolf. Or maybe a vampire.This certainly was a race to remember. But now it’s over; Georgia very rightly decided that Senator Raphael Warnock, an estimable candidate, was better for the job than a guy who couldn’t seem to be clear about how many children he’d fathered or abortions he’d paid for.But … Wait! Wait! Warnock got only a little more than 51 percent of the vote. That means more than 1.7 million Georgians thought it’d be a better plan to have a senator whose theory on global warming is: “Don’t we have enough trees?”And who had his legal address in Texas for tax-saving purposes.Let’s face it: Warnock was running against one of the worst candidates in modern American history. Who once referred to the upcoming election as an “erection.” It was one of the most expensive races of all time, during which the Warnock folks were able to buy about $54 million in TV ads — more than twice what Walker could afford.Warnock, a much-respected minister at Martin Luther King’s old church, had served in the Senate with dignity. (His maiden speech was a call for — what could be more daring? — making it easier for people to exercise the right to vote.) His campaign was as dignified as Walker’s was … not. You’d think he’d at least win by four or five points.Georgia’s election is part of the “Wait! Wait! There’s More!” theme that’s been dominating our politics lately.Good news always seems to have a disturbing downside. And it’s never just one weird/bad/unnerving thing. You think this is all because of Donald Trump?Well, the Herschel Walker candidacy sure was. How many times have we heard the stirring story about Trump first noticing Walker’s great gifts when the young man joined the United States Football League, of which Trump was, of course, a great team owner?Walker played for three seasons with the U.S.F.L., and really impressed Trump, who was also otherwise engaged in running the whole league into the ground.OK, forget the football stuff. That’s hardly core to Trump’s identity, which he’s always assured us is that of a great businessman.Wait! Wait! (You knew that was coming, right?) This week the Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud and other assorted crimes. Seventeen counts in all, including giving free off-the-books-don’t-tell-the-I.R.S. cars and apartments and cash to top employees.Yep. However, Trump wasn’t really on trial himself. It was just his people.But wait, wait … there are other potential crimes under investigation. What about the whole Mar-a-Lago classified records thing?Well, it’s hardly the same as that mean old New York court case. Our former president probably feels he deserves kudos for personally hiring people to search his golf course and Trump Tower and the storage closet at Mar-a-Lago to make sure there weren’t any overlooked official documents there.But wait, wait, wait, wait … Those papers were all supposed to go to the National Archives, right?Yeah, but the Trumpians will assure you that we’ve moved far away from the central matter of the Donald’s identity as a wealth-building genius. Snatching up official presidential documents and stashing them in your private home has nothing to do with bad business practices whatsoever.We certainly are living in a time of wait-wait. Whatever we thought yesterday turns out to be way less interesting and less awful than what we learn today. Imagine all those stolid Republican politicians who’ve spent years finding ways to express support for their former president when he says something … scary.You know, you just get used to smiling vaguely when a reporter asks you whether you think it’s strange that the former president was hanging out with an antisemitic rapper and an antisemitic white supremacist. Or why he was telling the nation nobody would be able to get a turkey for Thanksgiving. And you’re feeling you’ve got things pretty well in hand and then — wait, wait! He just called for terminating the Constitution.We’ve been going down this road a long time, folks, and things are the way they are. I don’t know about you, but I just want to forget about Georgia and Senate races and get back to thinking about a future when we’ll have different stuff to talk about.Wait, wait — stuff like the next presidential election? Trump tooting his horn a trillion times a day while folks like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, try to help you really get to know them. You’re going to see so much of those folks, Herschel Walker will begin to seem like an old pal you should have invited on a trip to the Catskills.OK, maybe not. But I hear Joe Biden’s pretty much got his hat in the ring. How many times a day are we going to have to hear Republicans mention the possibility of an 86-year-old in the White House?Gee, at this very moment, that doesn’t sound terrible at all.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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      After Georgia Senate Loss, Republicans Stare Down Their Trump Dilemma

      by

      ATLANTA — The Democrats’ capstone re-election victory of Senator Raphael Warnock forced Republicans to reckon on Wednesday with the red wave that wasn’t, as they turned with trepidation to 2024 and the intensifying divisions in the party over former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Warnock’s two-and-a-half percentage point win over Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff left Democrats with a 51-49 seat majority in the upper chamber, a one-seat gain. That came despite dire predictions for a blood bath for President Biden’s party.It quickly had Republican fingers pointing every which way: at Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader accused by detractors of abandoning or belittling embattled Republican Senate candidates; at Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who many feel badly mismanaged the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm; and at Mr. Walker himself, for hiding and lying about his past, only to see the details stream out steadily over the course of his campaign.But for a handful of Republicans, newly emboldened by re-election or retirement to say so aloud, the biggest culprit was Mr. Trump. In increasingly biting terms, they slammed him for promoting flawed candidates, including Mr. Walker, dividing his party and turning many swing voters against the G.O.P. for the third election cycle in a row.“I think he’s less relevant all the time,” Senator John Cornyn, a Republican of Texas, said of the former president, who has begun a third bid for the White House.“It’s just one more data point in an overwhelming body of data that the Trump obsession is very bad for Republicans,” said Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, a retiring Republican whose seat was flipped to Democrats by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.Trump campaign aides responded with defiance, in a back-and-forth likely to be on repeat for the foreseeable future. Steven Cheung, a senior communications adviser for the former president, said they “are not going to be lectured by political swamp creatures who are already looking to find ways to make a quick buck in 2024 by running to the media and providing cowardly quotes.”The midterm losses like Mr. Walker’s not only squashed the G.O.P.’s high hopes of retaking control of the Senate but also signaled the party’s steep climb ahead. Voters in several presidential battleground states resoundingly rejected candidates aligned with the former president, handing Republicans losses in winnable races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire and, finally, Georgia.Mr. Trump’s influence was indisputable in the suburbs, said Rusty Paul, the Republican mayor of Sandy Springs, a booming suburban city on Atlanta’s northern edge.Mr. Paul allowed that the once almost-wholly affluent, almost-wholly white community had become more diverse ethnically, racially and economically, tipping it in Democrats’ favor.Herschel Walker giving his concession speech on Tuesday night.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesA scorecard with election results left at Mr. Walker’s election night party.Nicole Buchanan for The New York Times“All of those are factors, but the greatest factor is Trumpism,” he said.“There’s a very strong conservative streak in the northern suburbs, Cobb, North Fulton — if Trump’s not engaged, they’ll still vote Republican,” he continued, speaking of the northern edge of Atlanta’s main county and Cobb County, just to the west. “But if they feel Trump’s influence, they’ll vote against him.”Trump loyalists in Georgia and beyond disputed that assessment. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who represented many of those suburbs for years as a House Republican, blamed a list of factors beside Mr. Trump, down to the mockery by “Saturday Night Live” of Mr. Walker three days before the runoff election. It’s the G.O.P. versus the media, Big Tech, Hollywood and the nation’s social power structures, he said.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.“We underestimate how big the mountain is that we’re trying to climb,” he said.But Mr. Gingrich also raised the prospects of a disastrous 2024, as Trump’s supporters split acrimoniously with its anti-Trump wing of the party the way conservatives in 1964 backed Barry Goldwater and moderates sided with Nelson Rockefeller.“My greatest fear is that we’re going to end up in a 1964 division” that left Republicans crippled in Congress, he said in an interview Wednesday. “I can imagine a Trump-anti-Trump war over the next two years that just guarantees Biden’s re-election in a landslide and guarantees that Democrats control everything.”Senator Raphael Warnock visited students at Georgia Tech on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Warnock speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Norcross, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesEmerging from the midterms, the anti-Trump wing has plenty of ammunition to make its case for a break. Two of Mr. Trump’s most prominent Republican foils in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, won re-election easily, in part because of their refusal to back the former president’s lie that the state had been stolen from him in 2020. Their resistance confirmed to Republican-leaning swing voters that they were not in Mr. Trump’s thrall.In contrast, Mr. Walker, who was urged to run by the former president and has already said he intends to vote for Mr. Trump for president, lost ground among almost every type of precinct in the four weeks between Election Day on Nov. 8 and runoff day on Tuesday, according to a New York Times analysis.The Republican fared worse in the runoff at precincts that initially backed Mr. Warnock and Mr. Kemp, at precincts dominated by college graduates, at urban and suburban precincts, affluent precincts and at Black precincts and Hispanic precincts. The only precincts where he held his own were in rural areas and areas with white, noncollege voters.Mr. Walker, a first-time candidate and former football star, had plenty of troubles that had nothing to do with Mr. Trump. His campaign was repeatedly hit with damaging revelations that might have knocked other candidates out of the race, including accusations of domestic violence, unacknowledged children and hypocrisy on abortion.And beyond Mr. Trump, there are other factors changing Georgia’s political hue: the in-migration of voters of color from around the country, the movement of politically active Black voters from central Atlanta to suburbs near and far, where they carried on their organizational activities, and the activation of white women like Jennifer Haggard, a real estate agent and lifelong Sandy Springer, who cast aside reflexive conservatism for a more open-minded politics.“I’m the white Republican who turned swing voter for sure,” Ms. Haggard said after voting for Mr. Warnock. She cited Mr. Trump as easily the biggest factor, but happily voted for Mr. Warnock.In the face of trends favoring Democrats, Georgia Republicans failed to nominate a Senate candidate who could galvanize both the party’s hyper-conservative base and its moderate factions — a group that many in the G.O.P. believe still makes up a majority of the state’s electorate.That failure extended beyond Georgia. Republican candidates in the primary season reached into Mr. Trump’s ideological milieu to capture his voters, moving so far that they could not credibly swing to win back the center in the general election.“Even if you capture all of the Trump voters, you may be able to win a primary but you’re not necessarily going to win a general election and in this business, you have to win an election before you can actually govern,” said Mr. Cornyn, who for years dodged questions about Mr. Trump. “It’s not like coming in second and getting a trophy like you did in junior high school for participation.”For many Trump-loyal voters, the question may come down to whether they are willing to make a cold-eyed assessment of electability or follow their hearts. The chorus of Republican voices arguing for electability is growing louder.“More strings of defeats delivered to us clearly by Donald Trump is enough for our party to realize we’ve got to move on if we want to win,” Paul D. Ryan, the former Republican Speaker of the House, said in a SiriusXM interview. “We should not just concede the country to the left by nominating an unelectable candidate like Donald Trump.”Even Mr. Walker’s team seemed to acknowledge Mr. Trump was a drag on the candidate in the final weeks of the race. As the former president teased a visit to Georgia, Trump aides worked with the Walker campaign to agree to scrap an in-person rally and instead hold the event via phone. Mr. Walker did not frequently mention Mr. Trump in his campaign speeches. And in his final concession speech, he did not say the former president’s name.Jack Kingston, a former House Republican from the Savannah area, argued that Mr. Trump’s influence was overblown. In 2021, as two Georgia Senate races headed to a runoff, Mr. Trump, then the president, was railing against a rigged election, signaling to Republicans that their vote wouldn’t count, he noted. This time around, he was far less present.“I would not say the invisible hand of Donald Trump was telling Herschel Walker what to do,” Mr. Kingston said on Wednesday. “He was his own man.”Stephanie Lai More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Where Trump Stands in Early (Very Early) 2024 Polls

      by

      The former president’s support has not collapsed. But Republican voters appear strikingly open to another Florida-based politician.Donald Trump’s support in the Republican Party has not collapsed, and perhaps it never will. But a look at the major polls taken since Election Day suggests that the ice is shifting beneath his feet.The data also shows Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida gaining ground in hypothetical 2024 matchups, even though he has yet to declare his intentions.And it underscores the careful line any presidential hopeful must walk with Republican voters; whatever they might think about Trump’s third bid for the White House, there’s little evidence of a clear anti-Trump majority that wants to repudiate him altogether.One of the sharpest articulations of this point I’ve seen came from Nate Hochman, a conservative writer. “If DeSantis allows himself to be defined as the Never Trump — or even the anti-Trump — candidate, he will be permanently discredited in the eyes of many of the voters he needs to win,” Hochman wrote in an essay for Unherd. “If he can convince those voters that he is the next step in the MAGA movement, he may just have a chance.”As Hochman noted in an interview, that will be a far harder trick to pull off when DeSantis actually enters the arena against Trump and the attacks start flying. And he won’t be facing the former president alone, or at least not right away.“In some ways, Trump is in a stronger position now than he was in 2015,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio.A methodological note: Keep in mind that the margin of error goes up whenever you’re looking at smaller subsamples like this. So don’t take the numbers themselves as definitive; focus on the overall trend lines.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More