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      Donald Trump Tests Pro-Life America

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      On Sunday, Donald Trump sent shock waves through the Republican primary when an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” aired in which he said that Ron DeSantis did a “terrible thing” and made a “terrible mistake” when he signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban. It’s the kind of statement that could end virtually any other Republican presidential campaign. Opposition to abortion rights, after all, is every bit as fundamental to Republican identity as support for abortion rights is to Democratic identity. Breaking with the party on that issue is the kind of heresy that no national politician can survive.Or is it? When it comes to Republican identity, is support for Trump, the person, now more central than any other issue, including abortion?My colleague Michelle Goldberg speaks often of the distinction between movements that seek converts and movements that hunt heretics. It’s an extremely helpful one. Cultural and political projects centered around winning converts tend to be healthier. They’re outward-facing and bridge-building. Heretic hunters, by contrast, tend to be angrier. They turn movements inward. They believe in addition by subtraction.The G.O.P. under Trump hunts heretics. Oddly enough, it has grown more intolerant even as it has become less ideological. The reason is simple: Trump is ideologically erratic but personally relentless. He demands absolute loyalty and support. He relishes driving dissenters out of the party or, ideally, into political retirement.Trump presents the pro-life movement with multiple heresy-hunting problems. First, and most obviously, if support for Trump is the central plank of the new G.O.P. orthodoxy, then the pro-life movement will find its cause subordinated to Trump’s ambitions as long as he reigns. If he believes the pro-life movement helps him, the movement will enjoy the substantial benefits of his largess — for example, the nomination of pro-life judges, including the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. But if he perceives the movement to be hurting his political ambitions — as his comments to Welker suggest he feels now — then its members will be cast as the heretics and will stand outside, in the cold, complaining about their lost influence to a Republican public that will not care.Second, as long as the Trumpian right shapes the pro-life movement more than the other way around, the movement will adopt many of the same tactics. It won’t merely serve Trump, it will also imitate Trump. Every movement adopts the character of its leaders, and if Trump is the leader of the G.O.P. and by extension the pro-life movement, then his manners and methods will dominate the discourse.Finally, and more important, if the backlash to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision teaches us anything, it’s that the pro-life movement cannot be hunting heretics. As a strategy, heretic hunting is far less costly to the side with the more popular position, which can afford its purity, at least for a time. The same impulse can be utterly destructive to those in the minority, as the pro-life movement clearly is now.As I discussed in a Times Opinion Audio short last week, the Guttmacher Institute published new research suggesting that the number of legal abortions has actually increased after Dobbs. Even though abortion is illegal or sharply restricted in 14 states, there were roughly 10 percent more abortions in the remaining 36 states and Washington, D.C., in the first six months of 2023 than there were when abortion was legal across the country in 2020.At the same time that abortion numbers rise, the electoral results for the pro-life movement have been exceedingly grim. When abortion referendums have been placed on statewide ballots, the pro-choice movement has won. Every time. Even in states as red as Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The general polling numbers, moreover, are disastrous. There has been a marked increase in support for abortion rights positions, and there’s evidence that the pro-life movement began its sharp decline during the Trump administration. After years of stability in abortion polling, support for the pro-life cause is at an extraordinarily low ebb.In this context, heretic hunting is disastrous. The pro-life movement has to seek converts. Its first three priorities should be to persuade, persuade and, yes, persuade. Donald Trump is not the man for that job, not only because he’s a bully and a heretic hunter but also because it is quite clear that he is not convictionally pro-life. He is conveniently pro-life, and the moment it stops being convenient, he stops having a meaningful opinion either way.How would someone who is convictionally pro-life and also eager to persuade have responded to Kristen Welker’s questions? Such a person wouldn’t condemn pro-life laws unless those laws were poorly written or had glaring flaws. Instead, he or she would use a challenging question from Welker as an opportunity to persuade, in terms that even skeptics could understand.For example, when speaking of so-called heartbeat bills that ban abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy, one could connect the concept to one of the happiest moments in parents’ lives — the first moment they heard their child’s heartbeat. Parents feel that joy because it is tangible evidence of life and health. Even for a parent who is anxious, or financially stressed, or caught in a terrible relationship, that heartbeat still signals a life that is precious.If a politician is challenged to describe the kind of pro-life legislation he’d seek in a nation or state that increasingly favors abortion rights, he could emphasize how a holistic pro-life movement can work with pro-choice allies on legislation that would improve the lives of mothers and children. It turns out that our nation can reduce abortions without banning abortions, and it did so for decades before the abortion rate rose under Trump.To take one example, in 2021, Mitt Romney advanced a child allowance proposal that would provide families with $4,200 per year per child for each child up to age 6, and $3,000 per year per child between the ages of 6 and 17. Crucially, benefits would begin before birth, helping financially distressed families to prepare to care for their new children.Not only would the plan cut childhood poverty (while paying for itself through cuts elsewhere), it would almost certainly also reduce the number of abortions. Writing in Public Discourse, the Institute for Family Studies fellow Lyman Stone analyzed the impact of financial support for mothers on abortion rates and found that not only does financial support decrease abortion, that decrease is also most pronounced in jurisdictions with the fewest restrictions on abortion.That’s what persuasion can look like — defending the source of your convictions by explaining and demonstrating love for kids and moms while also looking for areas of agreement and common purpose. But does any of that sound like Donald Trump to you?Despite generating interest from conservatives and progressives, Romney’s proposal went nowhere. An astute analysis by Peter Nicholas in The Atlantic noted that the Biden administration had a competing child tax credit plan and Romney himself was an “isolated figure” in his party. While some Republicans reject direct cash transfers, it’s also true that working with Romney meant crossing Trump, and that, of course, would be heresy.In the days after the Dobbs decision, I wrote a piece arguing that when Roe was reversed, the right wasn’t ready. A Trump movement animated by rage and fear wasn’t prepared to embrace life and love. And now the pro-life movement is forced to ponder: Is Donald Trump more important to the G.O.P. than even the cause of life itself? Is he under any circumstances the best ambassador for a cause that’s already losing ground?For a generation, the pro-life movement was powerful enough to hunt heretics right out of the Republican Party. Now, if it clashes with Trump, it might find itself the heretic. And if the movement is that weak — if it is that beholden to such a corrupt and cruel man — then we might look back at the Dobbs decision not as a great victory for the pro-life cause, but rather as the beginning of a long defeat, one of a movement that forgot how to persuade. More

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      Discontent With Party Politics Reaches New Heights

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      Americans tend to agree on what is wrong with the political system, and majorities of voters from both parties are unhappy with the quality of the candidates. But there also seems to be little appetite for third-party candidates.Close to one year away from the 2024 presidential election, most Americans say they are discontent with their candidate choices, and 28 percent of Americans say they do not like either political party, quadruple the share that said the same thing 30 years ago.But the question remains whether voters will hold their noses and vote for a candidate they dislike or sit out this election.Americans are less satisfied than they were even five years ago with the quality of candidates running for office, according to a new study by Pew Research Center that attempts to understand the breadth and depth of political dissatisfaction in the country. Just 26 percent of Americans said candidates for office had been good in the last several years, with no split between Republicans and Democrats. That’s down from 47 percent in 2018 and 34 percent in 2021, when voters who aligned with the party in power were more likely to be satisfied.When it comes to the quality of candidates running for the presidency, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they are not satisfied, but majorities of voters from both parties are unhappy.“The two-party system just doesn’t work — there aren’t only two types of people,” said Madison Lane, a mother of two and political independent from Jacksonville, Fla. “I believe in global warming, gay rights and trans rights. I can’t really vote Republican and believe in those things. But at the same time, Democrats are just fueled by big corporations and money. So I feel like I’m left with no good candidates to choose from.”As more ideologically extreme voters decide primary elections, parties are also pushed to the extremes, which leaves a vast majority of the people in the middle feeling alienated, said Professor Ian Shapiro, a political science professor at Yale University and author of “Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself.”“I expect this number who feel alienated by the parties to continue to grow,” he said.Across the partisan spectrum, Americans tend to agree on what is wrong with the political system, citing political fighting, polarization, money in politics and lobbying influence. And when asked specifically to list any strengths of the political system, more than half of Americans either skipped the question entirely or said the system had no strengths. Respondents who did not list a strength tended to be younger and less educated.In an era where many delight in hate watching television shows, engagement in politics may be a part of the problem. Highly politically engaged Americans are more likely than those who are more tuned out to say they always or often feel exhausted and angry when they think about politics.Discontent with political options is not new, and nearly every presidential election features a quest to float a moderate, if often quixotic, alternative to the major parties. According to the Pew study, sizable shares of Americans say they wish there were more political parties from which to choose, and this sentiment is stronger among Democrats than Republicans.But only about a quarter of Americans actually think having more political parties would solve the nation’s problems. And most Republicans and Democrats think their own party governs in an honest and ethical way and is respectful and tolerant of different types of people.“Politicians are not focusing on the priorities of the public,” Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, said. “They’re primarily focused on niche issues.” Even so, he said, “most Americans will hold their nose and pick from the available two parties.”Despite the rhetoric from many Republican elected officials focused on questioning the integrity of elections and vote counting, Americans — including sizable shares of Republicans — still see voting as the single best way to change the country for the better.Even so, only a quarter of Americans think who the president is makes a big difference in their lives. More

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      It’s Not a Race, Yet, in the Republican Primary

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      Donald Trump is polling about as well as any candidate in the modern history of contested presidential primaries.Reba Saldanha/ReutersDonald J. Trump’s lead in the Republican primary just keeps growing.He breached 60 percent of the vote in Fox News and Quinnipiac polls last week, including 60-13 and 62-12 leads over his nearest rival, the not-so-near Ron DeSantis.Even more notable: His gains follow what would be considered a disastrous 50-day stretch for any other campaign. Since early August, he has faced new federal and state criminal indictments for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. He skipped the first presidential debate, which was nonetheless watched by over 10 million people. Not only did it not hurt him, but he came out stronger.With these latest gains, Mr. Trump is inching into rarefied territory. The latest surveys show him polling about as well as any candidate in the history of modern contested presidential primaries. He’s approaching the position of George W. Bush, who led John McCain by a similar margin at this stage of the 2000 race. And in the two aforementioned polls, he’s matching Mr. Bush’s position.The 2000 election is a helpful reminder that the race might still become more competitive. Mr. Bush skipped the first two debates, but Mr. McCain ultimately won New Hampshire, cleared the field of significant opponents, and ultimately won six more contests. He didn’t win, of course. He didn’t come close. But it was at least a race. That’s more than can be said right now for Mr. Trump’s competition, which would probably go 0 for 50 if states voted today.On paper, Mr. Trump faces greater risks than Mr. Bush did — including the risk of imprisonment. On the trail, he’s relatively weak in Iowa, where his recent comments about abortion — he called a six-week ban a “terrible thing” — might raise additional skepticism from the state’s religious conservatives. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in Iowa (roughly 45-15) is quite similar to where Mr. Bush stood in New Hampshire at this time 24 years ago.Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Trump hasn’t consolidated the support of Republican elites. Unlike Mr. McCain, Mr. DeSantis is not a mere factional candidate. There remains a chance, unlikely though it may seem today, that Mr. Trump’s skeptics could consolidate against him, perhaps fueled by an unprecedented criminal trial in the heart of the primary season.But to this point, the theoretical risks to Mr. Trump haven’t materialized. More than anything, this probably reflects his unique strengths. He’s a former president, not the son of a former president. Perhaps this race is more like a president seeking re-election than a typical open, contested primary. At the very least, his resilience in the face of electoral defeat and criminal indictment is a powerful indication of his unusual standing.And in contrast with Mr. McCain at this stage in the 2000 race, Mr. Trump’s opposition is well known. It’s probably fair to say that Mr. DeSantis has faded more than he has been outright defeated, so there’s room for a resurgence — something like Mr. McCain’s comeback in 2008. But the easiest path to surge in a primary is usually to be discovered by voters for the first time, and that path will not be available to the likes of Mr. DeSantis, Mike Pence and Chris Christie.The winner of the first debate might have been Nikki Haley, but she represents something of a best case for Mr. Trump: moderate and strong enough to peel away anti-Trump votes from Mr. DeSantis; far too moderate to pose a serious threat to Mr. DeSantis or to win the nomination.So while history and today’s circumstances suggest a path toward a tighter race, it’s worth being frank about what we’re watching today. This race currently has many of the features of a noncompetitive contest, like an overwhelming polling lead, a leading candidate who doesn’t need to debate and party leadership that’s unwilling to attack the front-runner, despite major reservations. It’s a lot like what we see in the Democratic race, which is not considered competitive. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s lead in the latest polls is getting about as large as President Biden’s recent leads over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Of course, there are several ways in which the Republican contest is different from the Democratic one. Unlike Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has mainstream challengers. The G.O.P. race is closer in the early states, where Mr. Trump is beneath 50 percent. If Mr. DeSantis beat Mr. Trump in Iowa, perhaps Republicans could rapidly coalesce around him, much as moderates did for Mr. Biden against Bernie Sanders in 2020. And there is the extraordinary prospect of a federal trial in March. Together, it’s easy to imagine how this becomes a competitive race again.But while the race might become hotly competitive in the future, it isn’t exactly a competitive one today. More

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      The Borking of Joe Biden

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      If there was any doubt that the Republican House was no more sophisticated than a preschool playground, last week’s opening of an impeachment inquiry into President Biden settled it with a nasty kick of sand in Democrats’ face.How else can you describe the pretext for this fishing expedition other than “You started it”? If our guy got embroiled in impeachment and protracted legal proceedings during election season, well then, damn it, so will yours.Whereas Democrats began the first Trump impeachment inquiry after it was revealed that he tried to extort a political favor from the president of Ukraine in exchange for military aid, and the second impeachment after an insurrection, the Biden inquiry is proceeding with no clear evidence of any misdeeds by the president.This is just the latest asymmetric tit-for-tat by Republicans.Even many Republicans in Congress don’t buy into this kind of baloney, as we’ve learned from a series of Washington confessionals and from several Republicans who have questioned whether their side has the goods or if this is the best use of their time. As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.But this isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed this kind of sorry perversion of Democratic precedent. What Democrats do first in good faith, Republicans repeat in bad faith. Time and again, partisan steps that Democrats take with caution are transmogrified into extraordinary retaliation by Republicans.And so, Al Gore’s challenge of the 2000 election results, ending in his decorous acceptance of the results after a bitter court ruling, is reincarnated as an unhinged insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.In exchange for the brief moment after the 2004 election when some Democrats claimed irregularities with the Ohio ballot process, we get Republicans taking baseless claims of voter fraud in 2020 to thermonuclear level.In June 1992, Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on President George H.W. Bush not to nominate any candidate for the Supreme Court until after the fall election, saying it was “fair” and “essential” to keep what could be a sharp political conflict out of the campaign’s final days — as well as the nomination process itself. Of course, with no vacancy at hand, the stakes in that instance were nonexistent. But just after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Mitch McConnell took the extraordinary position that he would not submit any Supreme Court nominee from President Barack Obama for Senate consideration in an election year. By ignoring that nominee, Merrick Garland, Republicans maintained a conservative majority on the court. McConnell, of course, disingenuously cited the “Biden rule” in his decision.It is a bitter paradox that Biden, long a careful moderate, has suffered the brunt of this vindictive one-upmanship. The trouble with being around for so long, as Biden has been, is that there is always someone who remembers “the time when you” and holds a grudge.And while there’s no direct connection between the 1987 defeat of Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court and the current impeachment inquiry, I can’t help thinking that the rage that set off among conservative Republicans helped ignite the flames of animosity that have only intensified over the years, yet another instance of a Democratic precedent being grossly misinterpreted as a political ploy rather than as a principled stand.It was Biden, who as chair of the Judiciary Committee and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was compelled to lead the fight against Bork. There was plenty of reason to block Bork: He had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the principle of one-person, one-vote; the judicial protection of gay rights; and the idea of a constitutional right to privacy as the foundation of not only Roe v. Wade, but also the right to contraception.But the fight made even some Democrats nervous. “Will Democrats Self-Destruct on Bork?” the liberal columnist Mark Shields asked.At that time, for one party to lead the fight to reject a Supreme Court nominee on ideological grounds was extraordinary. The vehemence with which some senators, like Ted Kennedy, approached it exacerbated the rancor. This sort of process became known as “Borking,” which, for Republicans, meant using someone’s record to destroy their character. To their minds, even though six Republicans voted against Bork, Democrats had politicized and poisoned the nomination process.It’s hard not to see the unhinged attempt to take down Biden now as some kind of warped reincarnation of “Borking,” yet another twisted abuse of Democratic precedent.The misdeeds Trump committed in office clearly warranted an unprecedented double impeachment. They certainly did not warrant this inquiry into Biden.We are left to hope that the effort will now blow up in the G.O.P.’s face. Considering the shameless stuntathon of today’s House Republicans, this may be the closest we get to what’s fair.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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      Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson May Not Make the Next GOP Debate

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

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      Young Voters Are Frustrated. They’re Staying Engaged ‘Out of Sheer Self-Defense.’

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      A Pew Research Center report released this week called Americans’ views of our politics “dismal.”That might be too kind a word.On metric after metric, the report ticked through markers of our persistent pessimism. In 1994, it says, “just 6 percent” of Americans viewed both political parties negatively. That number has now more than quadrupled to 28 percent. The percentage who believe our political system is working “extremely or very well”: just 4 percent.And on many measures, younger people are the most frustrated, and supportive of disruptive change as a remedy.Younger voters recognize that our political system is broken, and they have little nostalgia about a less broken time. They have almost no memory of an era when government was less partisan and less gridlocked. Their instincts are to fix the system they’ve inherited, not to wind back the clock to a yesteryear.According to Pew, among American adults under 30, 70 percent favor having a national popular vote for president, 58 percent favor expansion of the Supreme Court, 44 percent favor expansion of the House of Representatives, and 45 percent favor amending the Constitution to change the way representation in the Senate is apportioned — numbers higher than their older counterparts, particularly those over 50.But the American political system wasn’t built to make radical change easy. Yes, our political system needs a major overhaul, but such an overhaul is almost inconceivable given current political constraints.This can be a bracing reality when youthful idealism crashes into it.The knot that the country finds itself in may be one reason Pew found that younger voters are the least likely to believe that voting can have at least some effect on the country’s future direction.And yet, according to a poll this spring of 18- to 29-year-olds by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, they’re still engaged. As John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the institute and the author of “Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America,” put it, “From the midterms through the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election, we are seeing young Americans increasingly motivated to engage in politics out of sheer self-defense and a responsibility to fight for those even more vulnerable than themselves.”This defensive posture is understandable when you think about the political era in which these younger voters came of age: a dizzying period of dysfunction, calamity and activism.Among voters 30 to 49, the oldest were in their 20s on Sept. 11, 2001. The events of that day would roll into America’s longest war — 20 years in Afghanistan. Those voters would see the hopefulness around the election of Barack Obama as president, but also the extreme backlash to his election that would culminate in the election of Donald Trump, Obama’s intellectual and moral antithesis.Voters 18 to 29 ranged from their preteen years to their early 20s when Trump was elected in 2016. Only the oldest of them were eligible to vote at the time. The Trump years saw a president who has been accused of sexual assault, was openly hostile to minorities and disdainful of civil rights protests, and lied incessantly as those supporting him repeatedly excused or covered for him.The oldest of this group were in their late teens when Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, so they lived the birth and rise of Black Lives Matter and are now living the backlash to it.The Trump years exposed the inability — the ineptitude — of our system to hold leaders accountable and ended with an attempt to overturn an election and a storming of the Capitol.Those years also saw a surge in mass shootings and warnings about the effects of climate change growing more dire, two issues that have become important to young voters. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was the clincher.It’s no wonder that younger voters are so frustrated and so thirsty for change, and they spare no one in pursuing it.While younger voters are more likely to have a favorable view of Democrats than of Republicans, they’re also more likely than older generations to have unfavorable views of both parties. More than half of Americans under 30 said it is usually the case that none of candidates running for political office in recent years represent their views well.This all hints at a profound frustration with a lack of results, the professionalization of politics, and incrementalism and intransigence.And yet this frustrated army of voters could still have a major impact in 2024. The Brookings Institution did the math on how important this voting bloc will be:According to our projections, based on U.S. Census Bureau estimates, if Americans under 45 (plurals and millennials) vote at the same rate as they did in the 2020 presidential election, they will represent more than one-third (37 percent) of the 2024 electorate. If that generational cohort’s contribution to the electorate in next year’s presidential general election is the same as its contribution to the U.S. voting age population, it will comprise nearly half (49 percent) of the vote on Nov. 5, 2024.In recent elections, younger voters have been voting nearly two to one for Democrats. And the Republican Party may be pushing more of that group in that direction as the party digs in its heels on social positions unpopular with them.But it’s a sad state of affairs that our current political system starves young people of hope and optimism, and instead forces them to cast their ballots as if under existential threat, regardless of which party benefits.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Will Hurd Releases A.I. Plan, a First in the Republican Presidential Field

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      The former Texas congressman’s plan takes an expansive view of both the potential and the risks of artificial intelligence, calling for it to be used more widely but also tightly regulated.The policy plan on artificial intelligence released by former Representative Will Hurd of Texas on Wednesday makes him the first candidate in the Republican presidential field to formally propose a way to navigate the uses and dangers of a technology so thorny he likened it to nuclear fission.“Nuclear fission controlled gives you nuclear power — clean, cheap, limitless power,” Mr. Hurd said in an interview with The New York Times. “Nuclear fission uncontrolled gives you nuclear weapons that can destroy the world. And I think A.I. is equivalent.”The plan, first reported by Axios, takes an expansive view of both the potential and the risks of artificial intelligence. He calls for A.I. to be used much more widely than it currently is — both in administrative tasks within the federal government and in highly sensitive areas like national defense — but also supports regulating the industry more tightly than is typical of many Republicans’ approach to private industries.Among his proposals are calls to ensure compensation when people’s intellectual property is used in A.I.-generated content, as well as name, image and likeness protections against so-called deepfakes. He would also seek to require permits for companies that want to build A.I. models and to impose “strict regulations” on exports of A.I. technology, and would reject any exemptions for developers from liability under existing laws.Artificial intelligence has already begun to change political campaigns themselves, with some operatives using it to write first drafts of fund-raising messages and automate tedious tasks — and to spread disinformation, including fake images of opponents.Mr. Hurd has struggled to gain traction in the Republican primary field. He did not qualify for the first debate in August because he failed to reach 1 percent support in enough polls, and he remains at risk of failing to meet the even higher thresholds to qualify for the second debate next week.But that he would be the first candidate to release a formal plan on artificial intelligence tracks with his professional background.He once worked as a senior adviser at a cybersecurity firm called FusionX, and made cybersecurity one of his main focuses as a legislator. He also led the House Oversight Subcommittee on Information Technology, where he organized hearings on artificial intelligence in 2018, long before it entered the mainstream. After leaving Congress in 2021, he joined the board of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence laboratory that developed ChatGPT.“Artificial intelligence is a technology that transcends borders,” Mr. Hurd said at the first congressional A.I. hearing in 2018. “We have allies and adversaries, both nation-states and individual hackers, who are pursuing artificial intelligence with all they have because dominance in artificial intelligence is a guaranteed leg up in the realm of geopolitics and economics.”His plan suggests employing A.I. tools within military, intelligence and border security agencies and using those tools to make the government “more responsive to the needs of everyday Americans.” He said in the interview that this could include using A.I. to issue passports and visas, summarize publicly available information for intelligence agencies, predict what federal support individual communities will need as a hurricane approaches and identify the cause of backlogs at poorly performing Veterans Affairs centers.Current A.I. models have a well-documented tendency to “hallucinate” and provide inaccurate or fabricated information. Mr. Hurd’s plan does not address that problem. He said he envisioned A.I. helping migrants learn English and helping students with math, and was “not as concerned” with hallucination in those contexts.“I think we can achieve the promise of A.I. while minimizing the risk,” he said. More

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      Trump Campaigns in Iowa, Where GOP Rivals See Their Best Chance

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      After a light campaign schedule in the key early state, the former president is making five trips in the next six weeks.Even as former President Donald J. Trump faces a crowded field of Republican primary challengers, he has kept a relatively light campaign schedule, particularly in Iowa, the first state to hold a nominating contest in the 2024 election.But with less than four months until Iowa’s caucuses, Mr. Trump and his team are beginning a more concerted effort to lock up his support there, starting with two events on Wednesday in eastern Iowa that represent the first of five planned visits to the state over the next six weeks.The increased pace of Mr. Trump’s Iowa visits, along with a six-figure advertising purchase by a super PAC supporting him, suggest a more concerted effort by his campaign and supporters to halt his rivals before any can gain momentum and pose a threat.With Mr. Trump holding a commanding lead among Republicans both in national surveys and in Iowa polls, some rivals have made barnstorming the state a cornerstone of their strategies, hoping a victory there could help them coalesce support in later primaries.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who frequently polls as Mr. Trump’s strongest rival, has made Iowa a particular focal point, planning to visit all 99 of its counties and building a robust state operation. Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and political neophyte who has drawn increased support since last month’s Republican debate, has also been blitzing the state talking to voters.Whether this strategy will prove effective remains unclear. Mr. Trump still exerts a firm hold on the Republican base, and he did not need to win the caucus in 2016 in order to receive his party’s nomination. And even as an Emerson College poll released last week showed Mr. Trump’s support among Iowa Republican voters slipping somewhat over the past four months, he still remained 35 percentage points ahead of Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Trump’s campaign has said it has collected more than 27,000 cards in which voters pledge to back the former president in the caucuses. Its events on Wednesday — at a “commit to caucus” event in Maquoketa and at a convention center in Dubuque — will be aimed in part at helping organize supporters ahead of the voting on Jan. 15.“President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.Mr. Trump has made seven trips to Iowa this year, well below other candidates. He has skipped some of Iowa’s large multicandidate events, including a major gathering of evangelical Christians that was held on Saturday and is typically a staple of Republican campaigning.Mr. Trump has remained popular with evangelical voters, even as he has expressed views that might normally alienate them, including his reluctance to endorse a federal abortion ban. In an interview broadcast Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, he criticized Mr. DeSantis for signing a six-week abortion ban in Florida that Mr. Trump called a “terrible thing.”His last two appearances were at high-profile and much-covered events: the Iowa State Fair in August and the Iowa-Iowa State football game this month.His speeches on Wednesday, likely of a slightly smaller scale, will coincide with increased spending on advertising by MAGA Inc., the super PAC backing his campaign. The group spent more than $700,000 on ads in Iowa last week and this week, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.Similar groups backing Mr. DeSantis and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, each spent more than a million in that same period.Nicholas Nehamas More