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      The Squandered Potential of Tim Scott

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this week having failed to make good on his early promise as a candidate who could broaden the party coalition in a general election. And while he could still have a long career ahead of him in Republican politics, his failure to connect with the primary electorate ought to trouble those pining for a more diverse and capacious G.O.P.Mr. Scott spent much of his campaign making hard-right appeals in a vain effort to wrest a portion of his party’s base from Donald Trump. For social conservatives, he offered a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks. For immigration and crime hard-liners, he supported ending birthright citizenship and committing troops to a war in Mexico against the drug cartels. In a recent appearance in Iowa, he even broadly alleged that Chinese college students studying in America could be “reporting back to the Chinese Communist Party.” And last month, he accused President Biden of having “blood on his hands” after Hamas attacked Israel, baselessly suggesting that by releasing Iranian oil revenue ⁠as part of a prisoner swap — for humanitarian uses, under American supervision — the president might have financed the massacre.None of this separated Mr. Scott, either in substance or in the polls, from the rest of the pack. But Mr. Scott did try make his candidacy distinctive in one important way: selling Republican voters, at every opportunity, a message of racial uplift that minimizes the extent to which racism still shapes American life.On paper, Mr. Scott was well positioned to deliver it.He could have been the first Black Republican nominee. Already, he is not only the South’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, but the first the region has ever popularly elected (he won a special election in 2014 after being appointed to his seat a year earlier by a rival 2024 candidate, Nikki Haley). And over the years, he has spoken often about his experiences as a Black man. He has described being pulled over on the road some 18 times in 20 years and being stopped by the Capitol Police on the way to work even as he wore a senator’s pin.Mr. Scott makes frequent reference, too, to voices on the left who have exposed their own racism by subjecting him to stereotypes and slurs and dismissing his agency. “When I fought back against their liberal agenda,” he said in the video announcing his presidential exploratory committee, “they called me a prop, a token, because I disrupt their narrative.”But Mr. Scott always sweetened these disclosures with a spoonful of sugar. “Is there racism in America?” he asked at a July campaign event. “Of course there is. Are the systems of our country racist? I don’t think so.” While racism lingers on, in other words, the strides we’ve made since slavery and the civil rights movement have been so great that we should deride those who argue it defines American identity or still structures our present.His own life story ⁠is, as far as he’s concerned, strong evidence in support of this idea. “Growing up in a single-parent household, I wondered if the American dream would work for a kid in the inner city,” he said at September’s Republican debate. “I’ve got good news for every single child, whether you’re in the inner cities of Chicago or the rural parts of Iowa. America and the dream — it is alive, it is well and it is healthy.”While most Republicans surely agreed that Mr. Scott’s background fatally undermined the critiques their opponents have been making of America and its history — “I am living proof that our founders were geniuses who should be celebrated, not canceled,” he told a crowd in Iowa early this year — they weren’t enthralled by his campaign, perhaps because Mr. Scott’s message of racial uplift doesn’t have more than a cerebral appeal to an overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate. Thus far, the party’s voters have preferred to get their defenses of American history straight and neat from Mr. Trump and Ron DeSantis, without the detours into personal narrative that Mr. Scott offered up.Mr. Scott insists often that he doesn’t want people to think about his race at all. “People are fixated on my color,” he said to Politico in a 2018 profile. “I’m just not.” There’s a similar line in “America: A Redemption Story,” Mr. Scott’s 2022 entry in a now-venerable genre, the pre-campaign memoir. “Today we live in a world that thrives on creating narratives of division,” it reads. “But my childhood and my life have not been defined by my blackness.”The book itself suggested otherwise — that Mr. Scott was not only as fixated on his own color as the critics he scorned but also as determined to make use of it. The words “Black” or “African American” appear 75 times, or once every three-and-a-half pages — often within its capsule biographies of Black figures like Jackie Robinson and Madam C.J. Walker, whom Mr. Scott evidently sees as his historic peers. In truth and by design, the book is as much a kind of Black History Month reader as it is about Mr. Scott’s own life. And even that material begins with his grandfather teaching his mother how to pick cotton.Ben Carson’s more successful run for the Republican nomination in 2016 seemed to have some of what Mr. Scott’s campaign lacked — though almost forgotten today, Mr. Carson, unlike Mr. Scott, actually found his way to the top tier of contenders for a time. To be sure, the substance of Mr. Carson’s commentary on race did resemble Mr. Scott’s. In a representative interview with the conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, he both denied the persistence of deep racial inequality in American society — “Race doesn’t really keep you down in this country if you get a good education” — and argued that the racism worth worrying about was coming from his progressive critics. “It’s mostly with the progressive movement who will look at someone like me, and because of the color of my pigment, they decide that there’s a certain way that I’m supposed to think,” he said. “And if I don’t think that way, I’m an Uncle Tom and they heap all kinds of hatred on you. That, to me, is racism.”But unlike Mr. Scott, Mr. Carson rarely discussed race of his own volition, on or off the stump. “Asked about it,” Molly Ball observed in The Atlantic, “he tends to deflect, rejecting racial distinctions as divisive.” And to the extent that Mr. Carson’s campaign did attempt to harness race to its advantage, as it did in a pair of conservative talk radio ads it aired before South Carolina’s primary that year, it did so the old-fashioned way: appealing to the racial anxieties and outright racism of white right-of-center voters. One of the South Carolina ads “inveighed against affirmative action as ‘racial entitlement’ while the other depicted Black crime as a ‘crisis,’” Ms. Ball wrote. “Taken together, the ads were a striking attempt to provoke white voters’ racial attitudes by a candidate who has otherwise avoided the subject.”Mr. Carson’s own bootstraps story, meanwhile, mirrors Mr. Scott’s in certain respects — both men came to success from poverty and broken homes — but Mr. Carson’s personal narrative was also a tale of Christian redemption. As he tells it, he worked past the anger and violence of his youth through studying the Bible, which made him famous among the conservative evangelicals who would take an interest in his campaign long before he entered politics.Mr. Scott has nothing like that story in his own narrative — a comparatively simple rags-to-Republican tale about the virtues of hard work and rejecting racial victimhood that, while appealing in the abstract to essentially everyone on the right, wasn’t compelling enough to excite any important constituency in particular. So where Mr. Carson ran largely as a conventional evangelical Republican candidate — racial dog whistles and all — Mr. Scott actively tried and failed to make a race-based message connect.It is important to note that Mr. Scott — a descendant of slaves who is, by all accounts, still warmly received in the North Charleston community where he grew up — is no less fully and authentically Black for being a conservative or having used his identity to sell conservatism. Criticisms of Mr. Scott on this front are inane. The Black community is ideologically diverse — and, in fact, substantively more conservative than the Democratic margins among Black voters might suggest.The pool of Black voters who are skeptical or hostile to the progressive movements that Mr. Scott reviles or who believe, as he does, that unshackling capitalism further might liberate struggling Black communities, may be even larger — and it includes Democrats and independents. This is what might have made Mr. Scott such a formidable general election contender: Given the thin electoral margins in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, even mild slippage rightward among Black voters could be potentially catastrophic for Democrats.But luckily for them, the G.O.P. is still Donald Trump’s party, and nothing Mr. Scott could have said or done would have changed that.Mr. Scott, in fact, has taken pains to frame himself as an occasionally critical but generally loyal friend of the former president, going as far as absolving him of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In his campaign memoir, Mr. Scott describes being invited to the White House for a conciliatory chat after publicly condemning Mr. Trump for what he said after the violence in Charlottesville. When Mr. Trump asked him what he could to do make amends to those he’d offended, Mr. Scott sensed an opportunity to plug Opportunity Zones — tax incentives for private investment in specific high poverty areas, a policy idea he’d nurtured for some time.“The next day, I was stunned to read about President Trump answering a question as he boarded Air Force One,” he writes. “When asked about how our meeting went, he started talking about the importance of rebuilding lower-income neighborhoods through Opportunity Zones.”Opportunity Zones eventually found their way into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and are talked up today, by Mr. Scott, as an example of how rejecting the politics of racial outrage — and, implicitly, countenancing the racism of Republican politicians like Mr. Trump — might pave the way toward making material, market-driven gains for racial minorities. The fact that nearly half of the tax breaks offered under the program thus far had gone to just 1 percent of the designated zones by the end of 2020 — and to projects like a $600 million Ritz-Carlton development in Portland, Ore. — is of no consequence to him.This is Mr. Scott’s dream and, by his lights, America’s: the notion that we might continue making racial progress (even though there’s not much left to make) with the business-friendly policy tools already available to us, and without fundamentally reworking our politics or our economy. It is a thoroughly conservative vision that was offered by a capable conservative spokesman — one who won the respect of Republican voters but not nearly enough of their support.Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian.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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      Bad Feelings About the Economy Sour Arizona Voters on Biden

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      The White House has hailed new investments and new jobs, yet many voters in a battleground state are chafing at inflation and housing costs.If President Biden hopes to replicate his narrow victory in Arizona, he will need disillusioned voters like Alex Jumah. An immigrant from Iraq, Mr. Jumah leans conservative, but he said he voted for Mr. Biden because he could not stomach former President Trump’s anti-Muslim views.That was 2020. Since then, Mr. Jumah, 41, said, his economic fortunes cratered after he contracted Covid, missed two months of work as a trucking dispatcher, was evicted from his home and was forced to move in with his mother. He said he could no longer afford an apartment in Tucson, where rents have risen sharply since the pandemic. He is now planning to vote for Mr. Trump.“At first I was really happy with Biden,” he said. “We got rid of Trump, rid of the racism. And then I regretted it. We need a strong president to keep this country first.”His anger helps explain why Mr. Biden appears to be struggling in Arizona and other closely divided 2024 battleground states, according to a recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College.Surveys and interviews with Arizona voters find that they are sour on the economy, despite solid job growth in the state. The Biden administration also fails to get credit for a parade of new companies coming to Arizona that will produce lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles and computer chips — investments that the White House hails as emblems of its push for a next generation of American manufacturing.Breanne Laird, 32, a doctoral student at Arizona State University and a Republican, said she sat out the 2020 elections in part because she never thought Arizona would turn blue. But after two years without any pay increases and after losing $170,000 trying to fix and flip a house she bought in suburban Phoenix, she said she was determined to vote next year, for Mr. Trump.She bought the investment property near the peak of the market last year, and said she watched its value slip as mortgage rates rose toward 8 percent. She said she had to max out credit cards, and her credit score fell.Arizona’s housing market fell farther than most parts of the country after the 2008 financial crisis, and it took longer to recover. Few economists are predicting a similar crash now, but even so, Ms. Laird said she felt frustrated, and was itching to return Mr. Trump to power.“I’m even further behind,” she said. “I see the value in voting, and plan to vote as much as possible.”Voters waited in line to cast their ballots at dawn in Guadalupe, Ariz., in 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesA majority of Arizona voters in the recent New York Times/Siena survey rated the country’s economy as poor. Just 3 percent of voters said it was excellent.Arizona experienced some of the worst inflation in the country, largely because housing costs shot upward as people thronged to the state during the pandemic. Average monthly rents in Phoenix rose to $1,919 in September from $1,373 in early 2020, a 40 percent increase according to Zillow. Average rents across the country rose about 30 percent over the same period.Home prices and rents have fallen from their peaks this year, but even so, economists say that the state is increasingly unaffordable for middle-class families, whose migration to Arizona has powered decades of growth in the state.Arizona’s economy sprinted out of the pandemic, but economists said the speed of new hiring and consumer spending in the state has now eased. The state unemployment rate of 4 percent is about equal to the national average, and the quarterly Arizona Economic Outlook, published by the University of Arizona, predicts that the state will keep growing next year, though at a slower pace.Arizona has added 280,000 jobs since Mr. Biden took office, according to the federal Labor Department, compared with 150,000 during Mr. Trump’s term. Phoenix just hosted the Super Bowl, usually a high-profile boost to the local mood and economy.Barely a week goes by without Arizona’s first-term Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, visiting a groundbreaking or job-training event to talk up the state’s economy or the infrastructure money arriving from Washington.Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs on stage during the 2023 Inauguration Ceremony at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMr. Biden was even farther behind Mr. Trump in another poll being released this week by the Phoenix-based firm Noble Predictive Insights. That survey of about 1,000 Arizona voters said Mr. Trump had an eight-point lead, a significant swing toward Republicans from this past winter, when Mr. Biden had a two-point edge.Mike Noble, the polling firm’s chief executive, said that Mr. Trump had built his lead in Arizona by consolidating support from Republicans and — for the moment — winning back independents. Respondents cited immigration and inflation as their top concerns.“Economists say, ‘Look at these indicators’ — People don’t care about that,” Mr. Noble said. “They care about their day-to-day lives.”Bill Ruiz, the business representative of Local 1912 of the Southwest Mountain States Carpenters Union, said the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill and CHIPS Act were bringing billions of dollars into Arizona, and helping to power an increase in union jobs and wages. Carpenters in his union were working 7 percent more hours than they were a year ago, and the union’s membership has doubled to 3,400 over the past five years.“We’re making bigger gains and bigger paychecks,” he said. “It blows me away people don’t see that.”Political strategists say Mr. Biden could still win in Arizona next year, if Democrats can reassemble the just-big-enough coalition of moderate Republicans and suburban women, Latinos and younger voters who rejected Mr. Trump by 10,000 votes in 2020. It was the first time in more than two decades that a Democrat had carried Arizona and its 11 electoral votes.The same pattern was seen in last year’s midterm elections, when Arizona voters elected Democrats running on abortion rights and democracy for governor, attorney general and secretary of state, defeating a slate of Trump-endorsed hard-right Republicans.Abortion is still a powerful motivator and a winning issue for Democrats, but many Arizona voters now say their dominant concerns are immigration, inflation and what they feel is a faltering economy.Grant Cooper, 53, who retired from a career in medical sales, is the kind of disaffected Republican voter that Democrats hope to peel away next year. He supports abortion rights and limited government, and while he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, he said he would not do so again.He said his personal finances and retirement investments were in decent shape, and he did not blame the president for the spike in gas prices in 2022. Still, he said he plans to vote for a third-party candidate next year, saying that both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were out-of-touch relics of a two-party system that was failing to address long-term challenges.“They squibble and squabble about the dumbest things, rather than looking at things that could improve our economy,” he said. “The Republicans are fighting the Democrats. The Democrats are fighting the Republicans. And what gets done? Nothing.”David Martinez, 43, is emblematic of the demographic shift that has made Arizona such a battleground. He and his family moved back to Phoenix after 15 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he still works remotely in the tech industry. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, and said he was worried about the threat Mr. Trump poses to free elections, democracy and America’s future in NATO.His working-class friends and extended family don’t share the same concerns. These days, the political conversations with them usually begin and end with the price of gas (now falling) and eggs (still high).“It falls on deaf ears,” Mr. Martinez said of his arguments about democracy. “They feel down about Biden and inflation and his age. They’re open to giving Trump a second term or skipping the election entirely.”Camille Baker More

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      After Calling Foes ‘Vermin,’ Trump Campaign Warns Its Critics Will Be ‘Crushed’

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      The former president’s Veterans Day speech used language similar to the dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by dictators like Hitler and Mussolini.Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign rejected criticism that he was echoing the language of fascist dictators with his vow to root out his political opponents like “vermin,” then doubled down: It said on Monday that the “sad, miserable existence” of those who made such comparisons would be “crushed” with Mr. Trump back in the White House.“Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, “and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”At a campaign event Saturday in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He then said his political opposition was the most pressing and pernicious threat facing America.“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” Mr. Trump said. “Our threat is from within.”The former president’s remarks drew criticism from some liberals and historians who pointed to echoes of dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by fascist dictators like Hitler and Benito Mussolini.An earlier version of Mr. Cheung’s statement, in which he said the “entire existence” of those critics would be crushed, was reported by The Washington Post on Sunday. Mr. Cheung said on Monday that he edited his initial statement “seconds” after sending it, and The Post amended its article to include both versions.Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for President Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement that Mr. Trump at his Veterans Day speech had “parroted the autocratic language” of “dictators many U.S. veterans gave their lives fighting, in order to defeat exactly the kind of un-American ideas Trump now champions.”Though violent language was a feature of Mr. Trump’s last two campaigns, his speeches have grown more extreme as he tries to win a second term.At recent rallies and events, Mr. Trump has compared immigrants coming over the border to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from the horror movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”He called on shoplifters to be shot in a speech in California, and over the weekend in New Hampshire, he again called for drug dealers to be subject to the death penalty. He has insinuated that a military general whom he appointed as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.Last month, Mr. Trump told a right-wing website that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase recalling white supremacist ideology and comments made by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf.” More

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      Abigail Spanberger Announces 2024 Run for Virginia Governor

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      The centrist Democrat helped deliver her party the House majority in 2018, and her decision to seek higher office could make it more difficult for Democrats to reclaim control in 2024.Representative Abigail Spanberger, a prominent Virginia Democrat who was repeatedly able to win in a conservative-leaning district, announced on Monday that she would run for governor in 2024, leaving open a competitive seat that could be crucial to her party’s efforts to win back control of the House next year.Ms. Spanberger, 44, is seen as among the strongest Democratic contenders to succeed Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who is term-limited. Her decision not to seek re-election to Congress leaves House Democrats scrambling to hold a seat that is regularly in play for both parties.“Virginia is where I grew up, where I am raising my own family and where I intend to build a stronger future for the next generation of Virginians,” Ms. Spanberger said in a statement.Ms. Spanberger is the first candidate to announce a run for Virginia governor. Her early announcement is intended to allow a successor to build a campaign for the 2024 House race, which Democrats believe would provide a more favorable electorate than a special election.But House Republicans said their odds of claiming the seat improved substantially with Ms. Spanberger’s planned exit, pointing to it as the latest example of a Democrat in a competitive seat choosing to run for higher office rather than remain in the House.Other examples include Representatives Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Katie Porter of California, both of whom are pursuing Senate seats.“Swing district House Democrats are scrambling for the exits and creating @NRCC pickup opportunities from coast to coast,” Jack Pandol, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are in prime position to pick up this seat.”Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer, won election in 2018 as part of a wave of centrist women — many of them with national security experience — who said they were running to counter President Donald J. Trump and whose victories propelled Democrats to the House majority. She developed a reputation in Congress as a Democrat willing to buck her party, refusing to vote for Representative Nancy Pelosi of California to be speaker and pushing to bar members of Congress from trading stocks.Even so, Ms. Spanberger was recently elected as a member of Democratic leadership to represent the interests of members from battleground districts.Ms. Spanberger currently holds the central and Northern Virginia seat formerly occupied by Representative Eric Cantor, a Republican and former House majority leader. He was defeated in a primary in 2014 by a Tea Party-aligned Republican, Dave Brat, who then lost to Ms. Spanberger in 2018.She won two close re-election campaigns, though the seat was redrawn ahead of the 2022 race, making it slightly more favorable to Democrats. More

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      In Politics, There Are Worse Things Than Wishful Thinking

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, my attention these past few weeks has been devoted almost entirely to outrages and tragedies in the Middle East. But I couldn’t help smiling for a second when Nikki Haley called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” at last week’s G.O.P. debate, after he raised the subject of her daughter’s use of TikTok.Aside from the deep truth of the remark — I wouldn’t have faulted her if she had thwacked him — it also made me think there’s life in this primary yet. Your thoughts on the G.O.P. race?Gail Collins: So glad to be back conversing every week, Bret. And you must be pleased that Haley, your Republican fave, was generally judged the winner of that debate.Bret: As she was of the first two debates.Gail: Not hard to make Ramaswamy look bad, but she certainly did a great job of it.Bret: Ramaswamy is like the human equivalent of HAL 9000 with an addiction to Red Bull.Gail: But what’s this going to do for her? Can you really imagine a path to the presidential nomination here?Bret: There was a great story last week in The Times by Natasha Frost, about an Australian man who freed himself from the jaws of a saltwater crocodile by biting its eyelid. Which is only believable because, well, it’s Australia. That’s about the situation in which the G.O.P. contenders find themselves with respect to Donald Trump.I know it’s a long shot, but at some point there will be just one person left standing against Trump, and I bet it will be Haley. She’s not just the best debater. She also comes across as the most tough-minded and well-rounded, given her experience both as a governor and a U.N. ambassador. She’s in second place in New Hampshire and in her home state of South Carolina, and her numbers have been moving up. As formidable as Trump’s own numbers look, it won’t be lost on centrist-minded G.O.P. voters that he’ll be campaigning while on bail.Now you’ll tell me that’s wishful thinking ….Gail: Hey, in our current political climate, there are worse things than wishful thinking. And we do have a likely Republican nominee who’s under indictment for virtually every nonviolent crime on the books except double parking.One thing I was wondering, looking at the debaters: Trump is going to have to find a new vice-presidential nominee. I keep thinking Tim Scott is campaigning hard for that job, although now he has suspended his campaign. You’ve got better Republican insight — see anybody on the stage you could imagine on Trump’s ticket?Bret: Good question. Trump will want someone with Mike Pence’s servility, minus the fidelity to the Constitution. Somehow I don’t think Scott fits that bill. I’m thinking of someone with more MAGA appeal, like Arizona’s Kari Lake or Ohio’s J.D. Vance.Gail: Ewww. Well then, I guess Scott’s sudden girlfriend reveal won’t do the trick.Bret: Only if the engagement were to Lauren Boebert.Gail: Last week’s election was a very, very good time for the Democrats. Big wins in Kentucky and Virginia, not to mention Ohio. I know a lot of it was attached to the very strong public support for abortion rights, but I can’t help but feel it was also a general Republican fizzle. You agree?Bret: It was a great antidote to that depressing Times/Siena poll, showing Biden’s political weakness against Trump in crucial swing states, which we talked about last week. My read on the results is this: Democrats win when they run with centrist candidates, like Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who ran as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Also, Republicans remain deeply vulnerable, mainly thanks to their abortion extremism. That second fact should, well, abort Ron DeSantis’s campaign. The first fact suggests Democrats can win and win big — with a younger candidate, from a purple state, with a record of governing from the center.Speaking of which, any feelings about Joe Manchin’s decision not to run for re-election? Are you going to miss him?Gail: Well, I’m gonna miss having a Democratic senator from West Virginia. Never found any of his standing-on-my-own shutting-all-progress-down antics to be all that endearing.Bret: Loved them. Democrats won’t easily hold the Senate without him.Gail: What worries me is the possibility that Manchin’s going to run as a third-party candidate for president. As our readers know, I hate, hate, hate the idea of people who could never win a major-party nomination jumping into the general election on their own lines. It has a terrific potential to mess things up. Speaking also to you, Jill Stein, another new entrant, via the Green Party. And Bret, to your pal Joe Lieberman’s shenanigans with No Labels.Bret: To say nothing of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. Both of whom, I think, are bigger political threats to Biden than they would be to the Republican nominee. But none of them would be anything but an afterthought if Biden weren’t such a weak candidate.On the other hand, we have Trump and his trials. Do you think any of these many cases against him are going to do any lasting political damage?Gail: Really wondering. On the one hand, good Lord — 91 felony counts and a civil suit in New York that might just wipe out any semblance of proof that he really has the money he always claims to have. Who could possibly win an election with that kind of record?Bret: Well, Trump could.I haven’t delved too deeply into the particulars of the civil suit filed by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, but I have my doubts about the strength of a case that rests on the theory that it’s unlawful for a real-estate developer to overstate the value of his assets. The market value of any asset is only determined at the point of sale, and real estate is often a classic “Veblen good,” in which demand increases as the price goes up.Gail: None of this can possibly be a surprise to his die-hard supporters, and they’re still with him. They just see it all as persecution. But once the campaign is really underway and voters keep hearing Biden ads reminding them Trump is a crooked underachiever, do you think the swing voters could keep ignoring it?Bret: Hillary Clinton ran on precisely that in 2016. She lost because she came across as the entitled representative of a self-dealing system, and he won because he came across as a disrupter of that system. That’s exactly the scenario Democrats risk repeating now.Would you mind if we switched to a more local topic? Wondering what you think of the mounting legal jeopardy of your mayor, Eric Adams.Gail: Well, Bret, New Yorkers are not unaccustomed to seeing our mayors skating around some corruption pond. But I have to admit this one is pretty mind-boggling. We’re engulfed in a crisis over the enormous influx of migrants, and now we’re engulfed with stories about Adams’s relationships with Turkish leaders … who are, surprise surprise, into Manhattan real estate.Bret: The question that always hovered over Adams’s mayoralty was whether it would send him to greater heights or to jail.Gail: And meanwhile the F.B.I. raided the home of his chief campaign fund-raiser, Brianna Suggs. We will be hearing a lot more about this, I’m sure. But the immediate reaction was, she’s 25 and she’s his chief campaign fund-raiser?Bret: Ageism. Just terrible.Gail: My prediction: More trouble to come. Your thoughts?Bret: Sounds bad for Adams, for which I’m sorry since I still think that he was the best of the lot in the last mayoral election. But it’s also worth remembering that the F.B.I. has a very mixed record of going after prominent political figures. Remember when Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, was going to be charged with sex trafficking? Gaetz is an otherwise despicable person, but that case was a travesty and ultimately collapsed. Or the way the F.B.I. went after Ted Stevens, the Alaska senator, destroying his political career shortly before his death? That was another travesty, in which prosecutors hid exculpatory evidence and engaged in “reckless professional misconduct,” according to a Justice Department report. The F.B.I. was just as bad in its investigations of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.Which is all to say: Innocent until proven guilty.Gail: Yipes, I’m not going to argue that one. Did you note that one of the City Council winners here in New York is Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, who spent nearly seven years in jail for a sexual assault that he didn’t commit?Bret: I hadn’t. I need to start paying attention to New York City politics. They’re getting interesting again.Gail: Now looking forward, what’s your bet on Congress achieving its very basic-minimal job of passing a budget before we’re … budget-less? Think the dreaded new House speaker, Mike Johnson, can make the grade?Bret: Burn-it-all-down conservatism is much easier to practice from the bleachers than from the field. Johnson will have to come up with a budget, he’ll have to learn how to compromise, and he’ll have to learn, like Kevin McCarthy before him, that the price of being a political grown-up is bending to realities that don’t bend toward you.Most of us learn that lesson pretty early in life. Speaker Johnson is only 51, so he still has time.Gail: Ah, if only we didn’t have to be stuck in his classes.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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      Crisis at Gaza’s Main Hospital, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes.Intense, close-quarters combat is taking place near Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip.Khader Al Zanoun/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Today’s Episode:Crisis Heightens at Gaza’s Main Hospital Amid Dispute Over Desperately Needed FuelTim Scott Suspends 2024 Campaign, After Sunny Message Failed to ResonateCan’t Think, Can’t Remember: More Americans Say They’re in a Cognitive FogEmily Lang More

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      in Elections

      Tim Scott Suspends Campaign for Republican Presidential Primary

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      He entered the Republican presidential race as a rising star with substantial financial resources, but struggled to break out of the pack of Trump challengers.Senator Tim Scott, who tried carving out a space in the Republican presidential field with a hopeful message built on his life story — the son of a single mother, he rose from poverty to become the only Black Republican in the Senate — announced on Sunday that he was suspending his campaign.“I think the voters, who are the most remarkable people on the planet, have been really clear that they’re telling me, ‘Not now, Tim,’” Mr. Scott said on Sunday evening on Trey Gowdy’s program on Fox News. “I don’t think they’re saying, Trey, ‘No.’ But I do think they’re saying, ‘Not now.’”Mr. Scott said he had no intention of endorsing another candidate in the Republican primary race. “The best way for me to be helpful is to not weigh in,” he said. He also brushed off the idea that he could serve as someone else’s running mate. “Being vice president has never been on my to-do list,” he said.Mr. Scott’s decision was in many ways unsurprising: He has struggled in polls and with fund-raising, and would have had to hit a new threshold of 80,000 donors as well as a higher number in public opinion surveys in order to qualify for the next debate sponsored by the Republican National Committee, which will be held in December.Still, he kept his plan to suspend his campaign close: Three people familiar with the matter said a number of staff members had learned of it from watching television.He had begun Sunday with a cryptic message on X, formerly known as Twitter, that cited Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.”Mr. Scott entered the race in May, pledging a different kind of message from the often apocalyptic tenor of some in the Republican field, including the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.But Mr. Scott’s brand of sunny optimism found no traction in the modern G.O.P., where the impulse among the party’s core voters, encouraged by Mr. Trump, is to be combative.Mr. Scott began his campaign with $22 million in fund-raising, a substantial war chest that put him in a position of financial strength. He spent millions of dollars on television ads bolstering his candidacy, but his poll numbers remained stagnant, and he never produced a breakout moment on the campaign trail.The super PAC supporting him, fueled by $30 million in donations in 2022 from the Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, announced in mid-October that after seeing no progress for Mr. Scott, it was cutting millions of dollars in television ad reservations it had scheduled for the fall months.Mr. Scott’s momentum appeared to take a hit after the first presidential primary debate, when he was criticized for seeming reluctant to enter the fray. Mr. Scott made it to the third debate, which had increased polling and donor thresholds, only by the narrowest of margins and largely stuck to familiar talking points.He was also never particularly interested in attacking Mr. Trump. And Mr. Trump wasn’t interested in attacking Mr. Scott either, telling aides that he liked the South Carolina senator and planned to say only good things about him.This is a developing story and will be updated. More