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      Biden’s 2024 Playbook

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      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicYesterday, we went inside Donald Trump’s campaign for president, to understand how he’s trying to turn a mountain of legal trouble into a political advantage. Today, we turn to the re-election campaign of President Biden.Reid Epstein, who covers politics for The Times, explains why what looks on paper like a record of accomplishment is proving to be difficult to campaign on.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a politics correspondent for The New York Times.The president and his team have waved away Democrats’ worries about his bid for another term.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesBackground readingIn South Carolina, Democrats see a test of Biden’s appeal to Black voters.Political Memo: Should Biden really run again? He prolongs an awkward conversation.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein More

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      Biden Plans 2 Campaign Speeches to Underscore Contrasts With Trump

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      President Biden is intensifying his campaign efforts as he looks toward November, planning a series of speeches that aides said on Wednesday would cast the stakes of the coming election as the endurance of American democracy itself.Even before a single vote is cast in the Republican Party’s nominating race, Mr. Biden and his team are treating former President Donald J. Trump as their de facto opponent in the general election. They’re seeking to frame the contest not as a traditional referendum on the incumbent president and his governance of the nation, but as an existential battle to save the country from a dangerous opponent.With the calendar flipped to 2024, Mr. Biden is making a notable escalation of his re-election campaign with an address planned at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by a pro-Trump mob.The location, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War, is intended to draw a sharp contrast between Washington, who voluntarily ceded power after serving as the nation’s first president, and Mr. Trump, who refuses to accept the results of the 2020 race. On Monday, Mr. Biden will appear in Charleston, S.C., at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church where a white supremacist killed nine parishioners in 2015. The venue embodies the country’s current fight against political violence and white supremacy, his campaign said.The two speeches are part of an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and remind Democratic and independent voters of the alternative to his re-election. In recent weeks, campaign aides have seized on Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric and potentially radical plans for a second term.“The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since,” said Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager. “Our message is clear and it is simple. We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.”Mr. Biden has held only one public event for his 2024 campaign, though in many official White House appearances he has drawn contrasts between his leadership and that of Mr. Trump and other Republicans. He has focused instead on wooing donors in private fund-raising events.Mr. Biden’s appearances will also provide voters with the first side-by-side contrast between himself and his predecessor this election cycle. Mr. Trump is scheduled to hold two campaign rallies on Saturday in Iowa, where he leads the nomination contest by a double-digit margin.For months, Democrats have issued public and private warnings about the need for Mr. Biden’s campaign to engage more aggressively in the 2024 efforts. Polls suggest a neck-and-neck race, with Mr. Biden struggling to energize key constituencies of the Democratic coalition, including young, Black and Latino voters.Biden aides said the campaign planned to hire organizing teams in every battleground state, eventually employing thousands of staff members across the country. A new round of campaign ads is planned later this week.They also plan to dispatch Vice President Kamala Harris on a national tour, focused on abortion rights, that will begin in Wisconsin on Jan. 22, the 51st anniversary of the landmark abortion-rights decision in Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court struck down that ruling in 2022 with the support of three Trump-appointed justices. More

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      Ramaswamy Is Still Sprinting Across Iowa, While His Polling Barely Moves

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      Vivek Ramaswamy tore across eastern Iowa on Tuesday at the breakneck pace that has come to define his long-shot presidential campaign.He stopped just long enough at most of the six restaurants and bars on his itinerary to remind voters he’s still in the race, lingering longer at his final stop of the day. He drew praise for his straightforward, bombastic style. And he made humorous quips, promising to finish Donald J. Trump’s mission of draining the bureaucratic swamp in Washington by “bringing the pesticide” to anything that crawls out.But the day mostly served as a stark reminder of how deeply Mr. Ramaswamy remains mired in a kind of swamp of his own, trailing far behind his rivals for the Republican nomination and stuck in fourth place in most state polls. In Dubuque, a few minutes before Mr. Ramaswamy arrived at a cozy cocktail bar where he was scheduled to speak, one of his campaign’s surrogates asked the 50 attendees how many planned to caucus for him. Only about five raised their hands.Some voters at his six Iowa events Tuesday wondered aloud whether he was simply burnishing his credentials for a 2028 presidential run or for a position in Mr. Trump’s cabinet if the former president were to win back the White House.“I think he’s got a really good chance of that,” said Matt Casey, 49, of a possible role for Mr. Ramaswamy in a Trump administration. “He could probably be the vice president real easy.”Mr. Ramaswamy, who has largely financed his presidential bid with the money he earned from his shrewd pitches to investors in his biotechnology business, can probably afford to remain in the contest as long as he desires. And he has maintained that he will outperform expectations and pull off an underdog victory on caucus night on Jan. 15. He has argued that many of his supporters are young people and other first-time caucusgoers not being counted in the polls.“I think we’re going to deliver a major surprise,” Mr. Ramaswamy told reporters on Tuesday.His tactic of hewing close to Mr. Trump’s policies and heaping praise on the former president has won him accolades and respect from Iowa Republicans. But with under two weeks until the caucuses, voters’ support for Mr. Trump seems as ironclad as ever, leaving Mr. Ramaswamy simply as the second-favorite for many.“I’d like to see a Ramaswamy presidency, but I think he’s got a steep hill to climb,” said Jeremy Nelson, 46, who worried that voting for Mr. Ramaswamy instead of Mr. Trump could help Nikki Haley, who is trying to emerge as the main alternative to the former president. “I don’t want a vote for Vivek in the primary to be a vote for Nikki Haley,” he added.Still, Mr. Ramaswamy’s pointed rhetoric impressed many on Tuesday, and changed at least a few minds. At the dimly lit bar in Dubuque, he eschewed his typical stump speech and launched straight into a question-and-answer session as his wife, Apoorva Ramaswamy, a surgeon and cancer researcher, looked on.Mr. Ramaswamy painted himself as a more sophisticated version of Mr. Trump, quoting former President John Quincy Adams one moment and telling a voter that Democrats were “selling us the rope today they will use to hang us tomorrow” the next.He drew applause when he said that unlike Mr. Trump, he would not be led astray by political advisers who stopped the former president from dissolving various federal agencies, ending birthright citizenship or using local law enforcement to aid in the capture of undocumented immigrants.Sandy Kapparos, 75, said she was “very impressed” with Mr. Ramaswamy’s wide grasp of various issues.“He brought up everything,” she said. “He just seemed to know so much about all of it. I was leaning toward Nikki Haley, but now I’m not sure.”Ben Dickinson, a 32-year-old libertarian from Davenport, who visited a Bettendorf event on Tuesday night with his partner and two children, is planning to caucus for Mr. Ramaswamy. He said he thought the candidate had set himself up well should something happen with Mr. Trump’s candidacy. “If Trump were to drop out, then Vivek would most likely get a lot of Trump’s followers because he hasn’t said anything negative against Trump.”Mr. Ramaswamy is hardly the first presidential long-shot candidate who has lingered in a primary far longer than expected, and staying in a race can increase name recognition and pay other dividends. Some also-rans, like former Representative Ron Paul of Texas, built fervent fan bases even as their presidential chances dwindled to near zero.“I think he’ll get his name out there,” Tom Priebe, 75, said of Mr. Ramaswamy’s goal on caucus night. “I don’t know if he’ll do well this time, but maybe next time.”As his hopes of winning the nomination have faded, Mr. Ramaswamy has resorted to a host of tactics, some of them signaling desperation. He rented an apartment in Des Moines, campaigned through Thanksgiving and has packed so many events into his schedule that he frequently shows up late. His campaign said on Tuesday that he had become the first candidate in history to complete the so-called Full Grassley — a tour through each of Iowa’s 99 counties, so named for the trip the state’s longtime senator Chuck Grassley takes each year — two different times.Mr. Ramaswamy has also delved into the fringes of the far right, promoting conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement theory” — the racist idea that Western elites are trying to replace white Americans with minorities. On Tuesday, he trumpeted a new endorsement from Steve King, the former Iowa congressman who was pushed out of office by a primary challenger after his history of racist comments prompted the Republican Party to strip him of his committee assignments in Congress.On Tuesday morning, Robert Johanningmeier showed up to Mr. Ramaswamy’s event at a bar in Waukon, in northeastern Iowa, with a plan. He had a brown “Vivek 2024” hat cued up in the Amazon cart on his phone. Assuming he liked what he heard, he planned on clicking “buy.”But after hearing Mr. Ramaswamy speak, Mr. Johanningmeier still wasn’t sold, although he said he was wavering. He decided to keep wearing the same hat he had walked in with — a camouflage “Trump 2024” cap. The Ramaswamy hat, though, stayed in his cart. More

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      Trump da un paso más en su solicitud de ‘inmunidad absoluta’

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      Exfuncionarios del gobierno destacan que la postura de Trump tiene “consecuencias absurdas y de gran alcance”.Casi no hay nada en el texto de la Constitución de Estados Unidos que siquiera respalde de manera remota el más osado argumento de la defensa del expresidente estadounidense Donald Trump contra el cargo de conspiración para anular las elecciones de 2020: que tiene inmunidad absoluta contra cualquier acusación por las acciones realizadas mientras ocupaba el cargo.La próxima semana, un tribunal federal de apelaciones evaluará los fundamentos expuestos en los alegatos, y el panel considerará factores como la historia, los precedentes y la división de poderes. Sin embargo, como ha reconocido la Corte Suprema, la Constitución en sí misma no aborda de manera explícita el tema de la existencia o el alcance de la inmunidad presidencial.En su recurso de apelación, Trump señala que el análisis incluyó una disposición constitucional, aunque su argumento no tiene muchos fundamentos legales. Tal disposición, la cláusula relativa al caso de una sentencia por juicio político, estipula que los funcionarios sometidos a juicio político por la Cámara de Representantes y declarados culpables por el Senado todavía pueden quedar sujetos a un procedimiento penal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Trump Makes Another Pitch to Appeals Court on Immunity in Election Case

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      The filing was the last step before an appeals court in Washington will hold a hearing on the crucial issue next week.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday made their final written request to a federal appeals court to grant Mr. Trump immunity to charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing the indictment should be tossed out because it arose from actions he took while in the White House.The 41-page filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was the final step before the defense and prosecution debate the issue in front of a three-judge panel next Tuesday.The dispute over immunity is the single most important aspect of the election interference case, touching not only on new questions of law but also on consequential issues of timing. The case is scheduled to go to trial in Federal District Court in Washington in early March, but has been put on hold until Mr. Trump’s efforts to have the charges tossed on immunity grounds are resolved.In their filing to the appeals court, Mr. Trump’s lawyers repeated some of the arguments they had made in earlier submissions. They claimed, for instance, that a long history of presidents not being charged with crimes suggested that they all enjoyed immunity. They also said that prosecuting Mr. Trump now could unleash a chain reaction of other presidents being indicted.“The 234-year unbroken tradition of not prosecuting presidents for official acts, despite vociferous calls to do so from across the political spectrum, provides powerful evidence of it,” D. John Sauer, a lawyer who has handled Mr. Trump’s appeals, wrote of the idea of executive immunity.Mr. Sauer added: “The likelihood of mushrooming politically motivated prosecutions, and future cycles of recrimination, are far more menacing and crippling to the presidency than the threat of civil liability.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers raised another, even more audacious argument: that because he had been acquitted by the Senate during his second impeachment of inciting insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he could not be tried in a criminal court in the election interference case.But both legal experts and some of the senators who acquitted Mr. Trump have disagreed with that position — not least because the federal charges he is facing are not analogous to those he faced during his impeachment.The issue of Mr. Trump’s immunity claims is legally significant because the question of whether former presidents can be criminally liable for things they did in office has not been tested in court. Mr. Trump is the first former president to have been charged with crimes.But the appeal of the immunity issue has revolved around more than the question of whether Mr. Trump should eventually stand trial on the election charges. It has also touched on the separate, but equally critical, question of when the trial should occur.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have been trying for weeks to keep the trial on schedule, arguing that the public has an enormous interest in a speedy prosecution of Mr. Trump, the Republican Party’s leading candidate for the presidency.Mr. Trump’s lawyers, pulling in the opposite direction, have used every lever at their disposal to slow the case down, hoping to delay a trial until after the 2024 election is decided. If that happened and Mr. Trump won, he would have the power to simply order the charges against him dropped.The immunity challenge is being considered by Judge Karen L. Henderson, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, and by Judges Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs, who were put on the bench by President Biden.On Tuesday, before Mr. Trump’s court papers were filed, the judges informed both sides in the case that they should be prepared at the hearing next week to discuss issues raised in several friend-of-the-court briefs that have been submitted.One of the briefs argued that the issue of immunity should never have been subject to an immediate appeal, but rather should have been raised only if Mr. Trump were convicted. Another maintained that Mr. Smith had been improperly appointed to the role of special counsel and lacked the “authority to conduct the underlying prosecution.”Last month, fearing that a prolonged appeal could delay the case from going in front of a jury, Mr. Smith made an unusual request to the Supreme Court: He asked the justices to step in front of the appeals court and consider the case first.Although the justices rejected his petition, they are likely to get the case again after the appeals court makes its decision. More

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      Tracking State Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 Ballot

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      States with challenges to Trump’s candidacy Trump disqualified, decision appealed Decision pending Challenge dismissed or rejected Alaska Ariz. Calif. Colo. Conn. Del. Fla. Idaho Kan. La. Maine Mass. Mich. Minn. Mont. Nev. N.H. N.J. N.M. N.Y. N.C. Okla. Ore. Pa. R.I. S.C. Texas Utah Vt. Va. W.Va. Wis. Wyo. Formal challenges to Donald J. Trump’s […] More

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      Haley’s Civil War Gaffe Complicates Her New Hampshire Push

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      Her failure to mention slavery in response to a question about the causes of the Civil War has given Chris Christie fresh ammunition as they compete for the anti-Trump vote.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor seeking the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, appears to have weathered a holiday-season gaffe on the causes of the Civil War, but the controversy over her answer, which neglected to mention slavery, was a gift to a rival, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And that fresh ammunition may be the most lasting fallout for her effort to catch former President Donald J. Trump in the nation’s first Republican primary in New Hampshire on Jan. 23.With less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley is expected back in southern New Hampshire on Tuesday for a two-day campaign swing, working to maintain the momentum that has lifted her to second place in the state. But the final week of 2023 was a particularly rocky one. She flubbed the name of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ star basketball player Caitlin Clark, stirred anger and frustration among the independent and moderate factions of her base over her Civil War answer at a Berlin, N.H., town hall meeting, then potentially provoked the anti-Trump faction again when she said she would pardon Mr. Trump should he be convicted.Mr. Christie, who will be in the state on Thursday and Friday, has seized on Ms. Haley’s gaffe, and both of their campaigns are at a pivotal moment. They have long been on a collision course in New Hampshire, which Mr. Christie has made his do-or-die state and where Ms. Haley has been climbing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Conservative Group Wins Legal Victory Over 2020 Voting Challenges in Georgia

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      The group, True the Vote, had been accused by the liberal organization Fair Fight of violating the Voting Rights Act by intimidating voters. A judge rejected the claims.A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that a conservative group’s efforts to challenge the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in the Senate runoff elections in Georgia in early 2021 did not violate the Voting Rights Act under a clause outlawing voter suppression.In a 145-page opinion, the judge, Steve C. Jones of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, wrote that the court “maintains its prior concerns” regarding how the group, True the Vote, sought to challenge voters’ eligibility. But he said that Fair Fight, the liberal voting rights group that brought the lawsuit against True the Vote, had failed to show that the efforts were illegal.The decision was relatively narrow, applying only to Judge Jones’s district in northern Georgia, and will do little to change the status quo: Right-wing election groups have already tried to help bring thousands of challenges to voter registrations in states across the country.But the opinion is likely to encourage conservative activists hunting for voter fraud during the 2024 presidential election. Election officials and voting rights groups have expressed worries about these efforts, warning that an expanded campaign to challenge voters en masse could intimidate people away from the ballot box. True the Vote and similar groups, taking a cue from former President Donald J. Trump, have often spread false theories about election fraud.“Any of these decisions that allows these kinds of mass challenges to go forward embolden that movement,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U.In his opinion, Judge Jones wrote that evidence from Fair Fight and individual voters in the trial did not amount to intimidation under an important section of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 11(b), which outlaws any attempt to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate” any voter or act of voting.“While the court believes that actions increasing the difficulty to vote if paired with other conduct might give rise to a Section 11(b) violation in some circumstances, increased difficulty alone does not constitute voter intimidation,” Judge Jones wrote.Voting rights experts said the ruling could raise the bar of what constitutes voter intimidation under the Voting Rights Act, and said it was yet another court decision that chipped away at the protections in the landmark law.“He took a very narrow view of what constitutes intimidation,” Ms. Lakin said. “But raising the bar of what you need to show altogether will make demonstrating voter intimidation claims more difficult, at least in the Northern District of Georgia.”In a footnote in the decision, Judge Jones, who was appointed to his post by President Barack Obama, was careful not to give a blessing to tactics like True the Vote’s.“In making this conclusion, the court, in no way, is condoning TTV’s actions in facilitating a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges,” he wrote. He added: “TTV’s list utterly lacked reliability. Indeed, it verges on recklessness.”Fair Fight sued True the Vote three years ago, after the conservative group organized challenges in December 2020 questioning the eligibility of more than 250,000 registered Georgia voters. To spur right-wing activists to help challenge voters, True the Vote created a $1 million reward fund and offered bounties for evidence of “election malfeasance.”Fair Fight argued in its lawsuit that finding actual fraud or ineligible voters was only a secondary concern for True the Vote, and that the real intention was to frighten Democratic-leaning voters from turning out in what were expected to be razor-thin runoff elections that would determine control of the United States Senate.Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of True the Vote, celebrated the ruling as “an answer to the prayers of faithful patriots across America.”“Today’s ruling sends a clear message to those who would attempt to control the course of our nation through lawfare and intimidation,” Ms. Engelbrecht wrote in a statement. “American citizens will not be silenced.”Fair Fight, in a lengthy statement, said that federal courts were not adequately protecting Americans from ramped-up attacks on voting rights.“While there is much to make of the court’s 145-page opinion, Fair Fight is disappointed that Georgians and voters nationwide must continue to wait for our federal courts to impose accountability in the face of widespread and mounting voter intimidation efforts,” Cianti Stewart-Reid, the executive director of Fair Fight, said in the statement.It was unclear whether the group planned to appeal the decision. More