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      Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off

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      Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Ron DeSantis still trails Donald Trump by double digits. And now Mr. Trump is stepping up his visits.On paper, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing everything that a Republican presidential candidate should do to win Iowa.He is doggedly crisscrossing the state, visiting 58 of its 99 counties so far and vowing to make it to the rest. He is meeting voters at small-town churches, meeting halls, county fairgrounds and ice-cream parlors, heavily courting evangelicals and racking up endorsements from influential faith leaders and local politicians. His super PAC is building a formidable get-out-the-vote operation and says it has reserved $13 million in television ads in Iowa through Thanksgiving.For Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Iowa by double digits, the state has become a must-win. Mr. Trump, who has campaigned sparingly here, appears to know it. The Trump campaign recently announced that he would visit Iowa five times in the next six weeks, including stops on Wednesday, in a clear attempt to scupper Mr. DeSantis’s bid for the presidency with a resounding victory in the Jan. 15 caucuses, the first votes of the race for the nomination.Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the Republican base — so strong that the former president has recently felt comfortable veering away from the party’s orthodoxy on abortion — is only one of Mr. DeSantis’s major hurdles in Iowa. The other is his lack of light-up-the-room charisma and folksy authenticity, qualities that seem required, at a minimum, to beat an established star like Mr. Trump.“He’s very cerebral, very smart,” said John Butler, 75, an accountant from Pella, Iowa, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “But it feels like it can be hard to get to know him.”For now, Mr. DeSantis’s top advisers say they are planning a steady diet of the grind-it-out approach that worked for the Republican victors in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Iowa caucuses — none of whom, notably, went on to capture the party’s nomination.“Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult,” David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, said in an interview this month. “It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organization, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”A campaign stand for former President Donald J. Trump was set up at a tailgate event this month in Nevada, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMuch of the DeSantis strategy mirrors the approach taken by the last three Republicans to win contested caucuses in Iowa: former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, all social conservatives who trekked to practically every corner of the state. Mr. Cruz — not exactly a ball of white-hot magnetism himself — beat Mr. Trump here in 2016, an effort in which Mr. Polyansky played a key role.“Governor DeSantis is doing the 99-county tour,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who appeared with Mr. DeSantis on Saturday at a meet-and-greet at a county historical society in her hometown, Red Oak. “He’s meeting with those Iowa voters. That makes a difference.”And Mr. Trump may be giving Mr. DeSantis openings to press his case in the state.In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida a “terrible thing.” Iowa passed a similar law that is widely popular with social conservatives. Mr. DeSantis struck back on Monday in an interview with Radio Iowa, saying, “I don’t know how you can even make the claim that you’re somehow pro-life if you’re criticizing states for enacting protections for babies that have heartbeats.”The former president has also spent few days campaigning in Iowa so far, and he was booed when he appeared this month at the Iowa-Iowa State football game.“They’re jittery, they’re nervous, and they absolutely should be,” Mr. Polyansky said of the Trump campaign. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a very tight race in Iowa. And the former president losing there seriously damages the sheen of invincibility that they are trying to project.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump would “put the pedal to the metal” in Iowa, even though he has a commanding lead.“We don’t play prevent defense,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time.”One of Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenges may be showing voters that he is not as painfully awkward as his critics suggest.Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, has seen Mr. DeSantis appear at roughly 10 events so far this cycle. She said that his small-town approach made sense in Iowa but that he himself might not be the right candidate to execute it. She has been particularly struck, she said, by how he interacts with voters.“He always looks miserable until he’s directly in front of a camera about to take a selfie,” said Dr. Paine Caufield, who has written a book about the Iowa caucuses.On Twitter, a cottage industry has sprung up turning Mr. DeSantis’s most awkward moments into viral memes. There was the time he told a young girl at a county fair in Iowa that her Icee probably had a lot of sugar. The painful way his face contorted when he was reminded that Mr. Trump led him in the polls. And, of course, the bizarre, almost body-racking laughs — his head thrown violently back, eyes screwed shut, mouth agape — he uses to herald jokes from voters.New York magazine and Vanity Fair have packaged those interactions into clickbait listicles. They have become fodder for late-night comedians. The Onion, a satirical news site, has turned Mr. DeSantis into a regular punching bag (“DeSantis Has Surprisingly Smooth Verbal Exchange With Iowa State Fair Corn Dog,” one headline read).Even his super PAC, Never Back Down, reminded Mr. DeSantis that he should be “showing emotion” when discussing his wife and children, in an unexpectedly public memo about last month’s debate.Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has been integral to his campaign in Iowa, and it has reserved $13 million in television ads there through Thanksgiving.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesBut on the campaign trail, where he is often accompanied by his wife, Casey, a former local television anchor, and their three small children, Mr. DeSantis has seemed plenty likable, voters say. Even some Trump supporters don’t find him to be a stiff. They just like Mr. Trump better and wish the Florida governor had waited to run until 2028.“I saw a very confident spokesman for what he believes in,” said Madeline Meyer, 85, a retiree who heard Mr. DeSantis speak at a fund-raiser in Iowa last month but said she planned to stick with the former president. “He’s got a good voice and a nice, young family.”In a Fox News interview last weekend, Mr. DeSantis called criticisms of his demeanor a “bogus narrative.”Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer, said the group’s messaging in Iowa would zero in on Mr. DeSantis’s plans for immigration and the economy, which polling shows are top issues for Republicans.“We’re focusing on amplifying what the governor has said he will do for voters,” Ms. Davison said in an interview.Mr. DeSantis has also tried to tailor his appeal more specifically to Iowa voters in recent trips, after heavily focusing his initial pitch on his record in Florida. He has noticeably adjusted his stump speech to talk less about Florida and more about what his priorities would be as president.But the governor clearly finds it hard to leave his home state behind.As he walked through an Iowa cattle ranch over the weekend, a gust of wind blew his blazer open, revealing that its lining had been stitched with images of Florida’s state flag.Maggie Haberman More

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      Democratic Leaders Are More Optimistic About Biden 2024 Than Voters

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      Party leaders have rallied behind the president’s re-election bid, but as one top Democratic strategist put it, “The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll.”As President Biden shifts his re-election campaign into higher gear, the strength of his candidacy is being tested by a striking divide between Democratic leaders, who are overwhelmingly unified behind his bid, and rank-and-file voters in the party who harbor persistent doubts about whether he is their best option.From the highest levels of the party on down, Democratic politicians and party officials have long dismissed the idea that Mr. Biden should have any credible primary challenger. Yet despite their efforts — and the president’s lack of a serious opponent within his party — they have been unable to dispel Democratic concerns about him that center largely on his age and vitality.The discord between the party’s elite and its voters leaves Democrats confronting a level of disunity over a president running for re-election not seen for decades.Interviews with more than a dozen strategists, elected officials and voters this past week, conversations with Democrats since Mr. Biden’s campaign began in April, and months of public polling data show that this disconnect has emerged as a defining obstacle for his candidacy, worrying Democrats from liberal enclaves to swing states to the halls of power in Washington.Mr. Biden’s campaign and his allies argue that much of the intraparty dissent will fade away next year, once the election becomes a clear choice between the president and former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the Republican primary field.But their assurances have not tamped down worries about Mr. Biden from some top Democratic strategists and many of the party’s voters, who approve of his performance but worry that Mr. Biden, who will be 82 on Inauguration Day, may simply not be up for another four years — or even the exhausting slog of another election.“The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll,” said James Carville, a longtime party strategist, who worries that a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden could lead to lower Democratic turnout in 2024. “You can’t look at what you look at and not feel some apprehension here.”James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, is among those who worry that the party’s voters are not enthusiastic enough about Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.Raul E. Diego/Anadolu Agency, via Getty ImagesIn recent days, a barrage of grim news for Mr. Biden, including an autoworkers strike in the Midwest that poses a challenge to his economic agenda and the beginning of impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, has made this intraparty tension increasingly difficult to ignore. Those developments come amid a darkening polling picture, as recent surveys found that majorities of Democrats do not want him to run again, are open to an alternative in the primary and dread the idea of a Biden-Trump rematch.A CNN poll released this month found that 67 percent of Democrats would prefer Mr. Biden not be renominated, a higher percentage than in polling conducted by The New York Times and Siena College over the summer that found half would prefer someone else.In quiet conversations and off-the-record gatherings, Democratic officials frequently acknowledge their worries about Mr. Biden’s age and sagging approval ratings. But publicly, they project total confidence about his ability to lead and win.“It’s definitely got a paradoxical element to it,” said Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who is among a group of governors who put aside their national ambitions to support Mr. Biden’s re-election bid. “This is only a matter of time until the broad party, and broadly speaking, Americans, converge with the opinions of folks like myself.”Many party officials say that Mr. Biden is making a high-stakes bet that the power of incumbency, a good political environment for his party and the fact that Democrats generally like the president will eventually outweigh the blaring signs of concern from loyal supporters. Any discussion of an alternative is little more than a fantasy, they say, since challenging Mr. Biden would not only appear disloyal but would also most likely fail — and potentially weaken the president’s general-election standing.One Democratic voter who backed Mr. Biden in 2020, James Collier, an accountant in Houston, sees the situation slightly differently. He said he would like Mr. Biden to clear the way for a new generation that could energize the party’s base.“I think he’s a little — not a little — he’s a lot old,” Mr. Collier, 57, said. “I’m hoping he would in his own mind think, ‘I need to sit this out and let someone else do this.’”There are no indications that anyone prominent will mount a late challenge to Mr. Biden, though strategists working for other elected officials say that a number of well-known politicians would probably jump into the race if, anytime before the end of the year, the president signaled he was not running.The situation is almost the opposite of the Republican field, where Mr. Trump holds a commanding lead among the party’s base but remains far less beloved by a political class that fears his unpopularity among moderate and swing voters will lead to defeat in 2024.William Owen, a Democratic National Committee member from Tennessee, was full of praise for Mr. Biden and said he was puzzled by surveys that consistently showed the president struggling to win over Democratic voters.“I’m looking at all the polling, and I’m amazed that it has so little to do with reality,” he said in an interview this past week. “A big part of it is just pure ageism. The American people are prejudiced against old people.”Yet in describing his interactions with Democrats around Knoxville, which he represented for years in the Tennessee legislature, Mr. Owen said he could not escape questions about Mr. Biden’s health.“People ask me: ‘How’s Joe doing? Will he last another four years?’” Mr. Owen said. “That’s the real question. Will Joe Biden last another four years? I’m happy to say, yes, he will. He’s going to live to be 103.”Officials in Mr. Biden’s campaign insist that hand-wringing about his age is driven by news coverage, not by voters’ concerns. They dismiss his low approval ratings and middling polling numbers as typical of an incumbent president more than a year away from Election Day.A campaign spokesman cited articles about Democrats’ fretting about President Barack Obama before his second term and noted the limitations of polls so far from an election, suggesting that Mr. Biden had ample time to make his case.“President Biden is delivering results, his agenda is popular with the American people and we are mobilizing our winning coalition of voters well ahead of next year’s general election,” said Kevin Munoz, the spokesman. “Next year’s election will be a stark choice between President Biden and the extreme, unpopular MAGA agenda.”Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania, who is Black and has issued public warnings about Mr. Biden’s standing with Black voters, said that simply casting the election as a referendum on Mr. Trump and his right-wing movement — as Mr. Biden’s campaign did in 2020 — would not be enough to energize the Democratic base. Mr. Davis has urged the White House to be more aggressive about highlighting the impact of Mr. Biden’s accomplishments, particularly with Black voters.“Everyone is kind of exhausted by the fight between Biden and Trump,” he said. “People really want to hear leaders talk about how they’re going to improve the lives of their families.”Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania has cautioned Democrats against framing the 2024 election as a referendum on former President Donald J. Trump.Matt Rourke/Associated PressOther Democrats argue that Mr. Biden’s campaign must make clearer that the stakes are bigger than just the president.“It’s about showing people that the future of American democracy is at stake,” said Representative Jennifer McClellan of Virginia, who is a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “It’s not just about which president can get through the day without tripping or stumbling over their words, which everybody is going to do, but which president is going to lead this country forward in a way that helps people solve problems and keeps American democracy intact.”Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid, said Mr. Biden needed to show voters that he was fighting for the American public, pointing to battles like his administration’s legal fight with pharmaceutical companies over their new Medicare pricing plan.“The question that I would want to answer is, is he is a strong leader?” Mr. Shakir said. “When people see he is a strong leader, they will feel different about his age. They will feel different about the economy. They will feel different about a lot of things.”Malcolm Peterson, 34, a waiter in St. Paul, Minn., said he thought Mr. Biden had done a good job tackling issues related to climate change during his first term, but worried about the president’s outlook for a second term.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesMalcolm Peterson, a waiter from St. Paul, Minn., whose foremost political concern is climate change, said he generally approved of Mr. Biden’s work as president and thought he had done a good job tackling environmental issues. But he said he worried about whether the president would be able to continue that work in a second term.“I just wonder, because he’s quite old, what does he look like in another four years?” Mr. Peterson, 34, said. “I’m not a doctor. I just know what I’ve seen.” More

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      How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support

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      Yes, there’s reason for skepticism, but also reason for concern for Democrats, particularly over turnout.Is President Biden really struggling as badly among nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — as the polls say?I’ve seen plenty of skepticism. Among nonwhite voters, a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t fared as badly as those polls suggest in a presidential election result since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In the case of Black voters, the disparity between the usual support for Democrats — around 90 percent or more — and the recent polling showing it in the 70s or even the 60s just seems too much to accept. Some skeptics believe they’ve seen results like this before, only for Republican strength to vanish on Election Day.But if we compare the polls with those from previous election cycles, Mr. Biden’s early weakness looks serious. His support among Black, Hispanic and other nonwhite voters is well beneath previous lows for Democrats in pre-election polls over the last several decades — including the polls from the last presidential election. Yet at the same time, his weakness is put in better perspective when judged against prior polls, rather than the final election results.Here’s how you should interpret what the polling really means for Mr. Biden’s eventual support among nonwhite and especially Black voters.Election results are the wrong benchmarkA major source of skepticism of Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters is the sheer magnitude of the drop-off, based on the difference between the early poll results among registered voters and the estimated final results in post-election studies, like the exit polls.It’s an understandable comparison, but it’s a bad one. Millions of people are undecided in polling today, while all voters have made up their minds in these post-election studies. The registered voter polling also includes millions of people who won’t ultimately vote; the post-election studies typically include only actual voters.These two factors — undecided voters and low-turnout voters — help explain many seemingly weird differences between pre-election polls and the post-election studies.For illustration, consider the following from our New York Times/Siena College polling:Mr. Biden leads, 72 percent to 11 percent, among Black registered voters over the last year.Mr. Biden’s lead among Black voters jumps to 79-11 if undecided voters are assigned based on how they say they voted in 2020.He leads by 76-10 among Black voters with a record of participating in the 2020 general election.His lead among 2020 voters jumps to 84-10 if we allocate undecided voters based on their self-reported 2020 vote preference.For comparison, this same group of Black voters who turned out in 2020 reported backing Mr. Biden over Donald J. Trump, 89-7, in the last election.The upshot: The gap between post-election studies and registered voter polls narrows considerably after accounting for the inherent differences between the two measures — undecided voters and turnout.This lesson isn’t limited to Black voters. To take a different example, Mr. Biden leads by just 46-34 among young registered voters in our polling over the last year, but he leads by 57-35 among young validated 2020 voters if we assign undecided voters based on their 2020 vote preference. His lead among Hispanic voters grows from 47-35 to 56-36 with the same approach. Among Asian American, Native American, multiracial and other nonwhite voters who aren’t Black and Hispanic, it goes up to 50-39, from 40-39.Of course, we can’t assume that Black, Hispanic, young or any voters will turn out as they did in 2020. We can’t assume that undecided voters will return to their 2020 preferences, either. The point is that the differences between pre-election registered voter polls and the final post-election studies explain many of the differences between survey results by subgroup and your expectations. If you must compare the crosstabs from registered voter polls with the final election studies, here’s a tip: Focus on major party vote share. In the case of Black voters, Mr. Biden has a 71-12 lead, so that means he has 86 percent of the major party vote in our Times/Siena polling, 71/(71+12) = 86. That roughly five- or six-point shift in major party vote share is a lot likelier to reflect reality than comparing his 59-point margin among decided voters (71-12 = 59) with his 80-point margin from 2020.Why major party vote share? The logic is simple. Imagine that today 17 percent of eventual Biden voters are undecided and 17 percent of eventual Trump voters are undecided. What would that mean for a poll of voters who will eventually vote 86 to 14? They would be 71 to 12 in the polls today.Mr. Biden’s polling weakness is unusualThere’s another aspect of the skeptics case that I’m less sympathetic toward: the idea that we always see this kind of weakness among nonwhite voters, and it just never materializes.If you look back at polling from prior cycles, it becomes clear that Mr. Biden today really is quite a bit weaker than previous Democrats in registered voter polling from prior cycles. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the Millennial 2024 Candidate, Emphasizes His Generation

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      The 38-year-old entrepreneur says he has a plan to fix what ails Americans his age and younger, but many of his positions are out of step with those voters.Vivek Ramaswamy, rising in the polls and buoyed by the first Republican primary debate this week, was barnstorming through central Iowa on Friday with a trademark smile and a remarkably bleak generational diagnosis of what ails younger America.Millennials like himself, the entrepreneur and political newcomer explained to an overflowing audience in Pella, Iowa, “are starved for purpose, meaning and identity”; robbed of those anchors that made America great — “faith, patriotism, hard work, family”; and stumbling from one cult to another — race, gender, sexuality and climate activism. The government “systematically lies to us,” he said. He told another gathering in Indianola, “We face a nonzero risk that the United States of America could cease to exist,” obliterated by the blossoming alliance of Russia and China.Young Americans, he concluded, have “a black hole in our hearts.”It is hardly Ronald Reagan’s shining city on the hill, Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century or the countless evocations of American exceptionalism that have buoyed politics for decades now, including those offered by some of his 2024 rivals. And yet somehow his evocation of a generational malaise seems to resonate, at least with the crowds that are packing the restaurants, cafes and even larger venues in the state that will cast the first ballots this January for the Republican presidential nomination.Noticeably, however, those crowds don’t seem to include many young voters. And many of his views are out of step with those of his generation as well as with the one below it, particularly his positions on climate change — he loudly rejects prescriptions for combating it, like eliminating, or even reducing, the burning of fossil fuels — and the voting age, which he wants to raise, unless young voters can pass a civics test.Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, has never held elective office or worked in government, and he is competing for the presidential nomination in a party whose most loyal voters are baby boomers and Gen Xers, not millennials. (The Pew Research Center defines a millennial as anyone born between 1981 and 1996.)Yet in national polling averages, he is running second in the primary fight, far behind the front-runner, Donald J. Trump, but overtaking the man who was supposed to be Mr. Trump’s biggest threat, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Ramaswamy has pitched himself as the Republican future, a conservative in Mr. Trump’s image who holds forth at campaign events near a large list of commandments he’s labeled “truth.”Mr. Ramaswamy was greeted by crowds packing restaurants, cafes and larger venues in Iowa. While the crowds are dotted with younger people, they are largely made up of older voters.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHis rhetoric in recent weeks has become increasingly strident, though he still delivers those lines with the calm tones and seeming intellectualism of the Harvard debater he was. He speaks now of “revolution” and his own “radicalism.” On Friday, he condemned Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts; the author Ibram X. Kendi; and other avatars of what he called the “racism of the left” as “the modern grand wizards of the modern K.K.K.”But most of his proposals have not changed for months, including eliminating the Department of Education, the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service; firing 75 percent of the federal work force; ending all aid to Ukraine and freezing the battle lines where they are (“Those would be real wins for Putin, I admit that,” he allowed in Indianola); ending birthright citizenship; and using the military to attack the drug cartels in Mexico.His positions have simply gotten the attention of opponents who until now have declined to take him seriously. Former Vice President Mike Pence called him a “rookie” on Wednesday night. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, accused him of sounding like ChatGPT.“You have no foreign policy experience,” said Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, “and it shows.”But at his events, Iowa voters are clearly with him on policy. Their qualms lie elsewhere.“He’s too young for the country,” said Kevin Klucas, 55, of Oskaloosa, Iowa, not for me, but the country tends to vote for older presidents.”Outside the Fireside Bistro in Indianola, Dan Bailey, 67, and Pat Hoppenworth, 70, agreed that Mr. Ramaswamy, along with the other candidates not named Trump, were all auditioning to join Mr. Trump’s ticket, and that Mr. Ramaswamy had won them over. But they could not agree on the order of the ticket: Ms. Hoppenworth thought the younger man should be president, with the former president by his side; Mr. Bailey said Mr. Ramaswamy would be vice president.“I will never give up on Trump,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy’s views of American society, especially youthful society, could be politically risky. He doesn’t exactly deny the established science of human-made climate change, but he says climate change policy is a “hoax” and that “climatism,” what he calls the youth-driven activism seeking to reverse global warming, is a cult — a position that seems guaranteed to alienate young voters.He has proposed a constitutional amendment that would raise the legal voting age to 25, though 18- to 24-year-olds would retain the right to vote if they passed the same civics test that naturalized citizens must pass.More than anything, he has portrayed his generation and younger ones as empty souls living meaningless lives. “There’s more to life than the aimless passage of time, which is what we teach 18-year-olds today,” he said on Pella’s central square, to an audience at the Butcher’s Brewhuis that was so large dozens had to be turned away.Mr. Ramaswamy sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence during the debate on Wednesday over their idea of the country. The younger candidate said America was “in a dark moment.”Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMr. Ramaswamy’s views seem to strike a chord with the bulk of his audiences, who are older and unindicted by his observations. Rick Giarusso, a 61-year-old retired Army officer from Carlisle, Iowa, spoke of his 29-year-old son and his son’s 26-year-old wife, who he said are both “well-educated professionals” but with “a sense that something is missing.”The younger members of his audiences, a small minority, are more divided. Alex Foley, 32, a Pella resident, asked Mr. Ramaswamy a pointed question on his “truth” that “God is real,” and how he could unite a country where the idea of God inspires so many different beliefs. For Mr. Foley, who said he “loves Jesus intensely,” the notion of a young generation devoid of spirituality seemed alien. His own journey led him from drugs and clerking in a video store to a commitment to the Bible, hardly a path followed only by millennials.“Do I consider myself, aimless, purposeless, meaningless?” Mr. Foley said. “Of course, no one would like to consider themselves such thing. But do I feel like my generation has a particularly increased struggle to find what it is they should be fight for? I would say yes.”Taylor Harrison, 22, a Canadian from Alberta, and Drew Johnson, 24, from Pella, both members of Generation Z, saw the commotion at Butcher’s Brewhuis and packed in to see what Mr. Ramaswamy was all about.“Aimless and soulless, I wouldn’t say,” Ms. Harrison objected. She said her peers felt more that they had been dealt a bad hand, “so we’re not quite sure what to do with it.”“What sells on the news is just what’s wrong with everything,” Mr. Johnson chimed in. “Nobody wants to point out the good. No one wants to show the good things that are happening.”Austin Alexander, from Nashville, Tenn., was passing through Iowa and tracked Mr. Ramaswamy for much of the day. Mr. Alexander, who at 42 is a millennial, didn’t mind Mr. Ramaswamy’s portrayal of younger Americans, though he was quick to say that there were “a variety of faces in our generation.” Still, he said, he is old enough to remember when Lee Greenwood’s country anthem “Proud to Be an American” won over even young listeners. Now, he said, younger Americans are more likely to identify with the critique of violence, greed, nihilism and racism in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.”“I think he accurately diagnoses the lack of identity and purpose that some — many — in my generation and younger struggle with,” he said. “Especially with the identity of our country, there’s been a shift during my lifetime.” More

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      What Questions Should Be Asked at the First G.O.P. Debate? Tell Us What You Think.

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      Republican presidential candidates will face off on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee. Let us know what you’d like them to have to address.The 2024 presidential race is hitting a higher gear, with the first Republican primary debate next week in Milwaukee.So, we want to hear from you: Do you plan to watch the debate, set for Aug. 23? What are you most eager to see from the candidates taking the stage? What issues do you hope they will discuss? How will you judge their performances?We will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. We may use your contact information to follow up with you. More

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      Trump Stronghold Is Unbothered by Indictments, But Worried About Winning

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      Republicans in Alton, N.H., still love the former president. But some are rethinking their loyalty, fearing Mr. Trump might not prevail in the general election.Follow our live updates on the Trump investigation in Georgia.Donald J. Trump has amassed a load of legal baggage that is hard to ignore: three indictments and 78 felony counts, including four for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. More charges could be imminent this week in Fulton County, Ga. Yet polls show his supporters have so far been unfazed.Republicans in small-town Alton, N.H., seem to be no exception. In interviews this month with more than 20 residents who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, all but two dismissed the indictments as manufactured political theater.But in a twist that hints at burgeoning complexity within Republican circles, roughly half of the Trump voters interviewed here in recent days also said that while the indictments don’t bother them, they are increasingly concerned that Mr. Trump may not be able to win the general election.“Trump had a great opportunity and he did a lot of work, but the guy’s an idiot, he’s narcissistic and it’s too much to risk,” Roger Sample, a builder and member of the local planning board, said one recent morning outside the Alton McDonald’s. He was drinking coffee with a group of men; most of them agreed with his assessment.Many acknowledged that they still admired the former president. But his failure to win a second term, combined with their deepening despair at the country’s direction under President Biden, led them to a reckoning, they said. More mindful that Mr. Trump’s personal attacks and “second-grade stuff,” as one put it, repel some voters, they are considering other candidates.While Mr. Trump’s lack of filter raised doubts, the criminal cases did not. On the day when prosecutors in Washington laid out the most serious charges against Mr. Trump, the coffee drinkers outside McDonald’s rolled their eyes at the accusation that Mr. Trump had plotted to overthrow democracy. It was just more political nonsense, they said — the same sort of petty infighting that drove them to embrace Mr. Trump in the first place.“It’s like little kids on the playground — ‘You stole my marbles!’” said Rick Finethy, 61, a Trump loyalist who plans to stick with the former president.“That’s the swamp,” agreed Brian Mitchell, 69, another Trump supporter.From left, Rick Finethy, Roger Sample, Gary Nickerson and Brian Mitchell are among the men who meet daily for coffee at the McDonald’s in Alton. John Tully for The New York TimesWhat concerns them more than legal wrangling, Alton Republicans said, is Mr. Trump’s tendency to speak before he thinks on social media or in debates, causing controversy and diminishing the public’s perception of him as a capable leader. Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020 shook their confidence in his ability to overcome that behavior — and in voters’ willingness to overlook it.Mr. Mitchell said he would like to see Mr. Trump and his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, team up on one ticket, a strategy he thought could shore up Mr. Trump’s electability. “DeSantis is more politically correct,” he said. “He doesn’t fly off the handle.”Few places in New Hampshire have backed Mr. Trump as strongly as Alton, a conservative stronghold of about 6,000 people at the southern tip of Lake Winnipesaukee, near the center of the state in Belknap County. It was one of only two New Hampshire counties won by Mr. Trump in 2020. In Alton, he defeated Mr. Biden 62 to 37 percent.Among voters who plan to vote for Mr. Trump again, Nicholas Kalamvokis, 58, said he liked the former president’s “regular people” persona and was willing to overlook his role in the events of Jan. 6, which he did not believe rose to the level of a crime.“I think he encouraged it, but I don’t believe he incited it, and I don’t think he expected it to be as violent as it was,” said Mr. Kalamvokis, who moved to Alton from Massachusetts last year and works three part-time jobs. “I can see his motivation for it. It was selfish, but also for the betterment of the country.”Few places in New Hampshire have backed Mr. Trump as strongly as Alton, a conservative stronghold of about 6,000 people at the southern tip of Lake Winnipesaukee, and the surrounding Belknap County.John Tully for The New York TimesOnce humming with industry at its sawmills and shoe factories — as well as a corkscrew plant that produced tens of millions of the utensils in the early 20th century — the town, like many others in New England, now relies heavily on tourism for its economy. Drive north from Main Street, on a winding road where American flags fly from every utility pole, into the lakefront village of Alton Bay, and modest, middle-class neighborhoods give way to more imposing homes with docks and boats.The challenges of the seasonal economy, with its long dormant stretches, take a toll on year-round residents.Mr. Mitchell, a Massachusetts native whose father fought in World War II, felt that strain firsthand after moving to Alton 20 years ago and buying a country store on the shore of the lake.“People here recognize that when we lose manufacturing, we become a weaker nation, economically and militarily,” said State Representative Peter Varney, a Republican and lifelong Alton resident who represents the town.John Tully for The New York TimesAfter a decade, they sold the business, weary of trying to make a year’s living in three or four months.State Representative Peter Varney, a Republican and lifelong Alton resident who represents the town in the legislature, said New Hampshire’s lost industry — and its ongoing struggle to attract new jobs and stabilize its population — looms large. “People here recognize that when we lose manufacturing, we become a weaker nation, economically and militarily,” he said.Mr. Varney, who voted for Mr. Trump twice, said he was supporting another candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, for now to help the 38-year-old entrepreneur build name recognition in the state. Mr. Varney said he was not bothered by the indictments against Mr. Trump. But he hoped that Mr. Ramaswamy’s youth, enthusiasm and business know-how would drive voters his way and make him a contender.“I’m looking at the long game here,” said Mr. Varney, 69, who serves as fire chief in nearby New Durham and owns an Alton gun shop and an engineering firm.Other Republicans who backed Mr. Trump in the past said they, too, were considering their options.Renee and Jim Miller, a couple in Alton, said their newfound support for Mr. Ramaswamy was not a reaction to the indictments but a product of their attendance at one of his campaign events, where they said they were drawn in by the candidate’s empathy, eloquence and hopefulness.The Millers, like other Republicans planning to cast their primary ballots for other candidates, pledged to support Mr. Trump in 2024 if he were to be the nominee. But their clear preference for a fresh contender hints at an uptick in strategic thinking, at least in New Hampshire, a swing state that plays a prominent role in presidential politics with the first Republican primary in the nation.Ron Stevens, 75, a former Navy aircraft mechanic and retired auto body repair teacher, said he may also vote for Mr. Ramaswamy, a son of Indian immigrants who Mr. Stevens described as “very Trump-like.”Among the issues that matter deeply to him, Mr. Stevens said, is illegal immigration, partly because of his grandparents’ struggles as immigrants from Italy and Ireland.“I have nothing against immigrants personally; some of them work like hell,” he said. But “knowing what my relatives had to go through,” he added, he finds it hard to stomach generous handouts for people who don’t follow the rules.In the coffee circle at McDonald’s, the shift away from Mr. Trump has left Mr. Finethy outnumbered as he makes his case for the former president. A builder who started working on his family’s garbage truck when he was a 6-year-old boy in Alton, he said his biggest concern is China’s growing power and the threat it poses to the United States — a threat made more ominous, in his view, by revelations of financial ties between the Biden family and Chinese executives.(Mr. Biden recently announced new restrictions on U.S. investment in China.)“Do I think Trump is an idiot who doesn’t know when to shut up? Yes,” Mr. Finethy said. “But I don’t want to go back to a politician who’s just using the government to get rich. It’s what he does, not what he says, that matters. And this is a guy they can’t buy off.” More

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      Biden’s Campaign Fund-Raising Filing Shows Sluggish Small Donations

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      Wealthy Democrats have thrown their money behind the president’s re-election bid, but for many reasons, the party’s small donors have yet to step up their contributions.When President Biden traveled to San Francisco last month, he raised more than $10 million in 36 hours from wealthy Democrats. Trips to Chicago and New York netted millions more, as did fund-raising events around Washington, proving that the party’s big-donor class is fully committed to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.But the small-dollar online money spigot that helped Mr. Biden smash fund-raising records during his 2020 presidential campaign has not yet turned on, and there are ample signs that it may be months before it does.The Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, its joint fund-raising vehicle, collected $10.2 million from small donors — defined as those who gave $200 or less — during the three-month fund-raising period that ended June 30, according to a Federal Election Commission report filed Saturday. That figure is about half of the $21 million President Barack Obama’s campaign raised during the same period of his 2012 re-election effort.Democrats involved with Mr. Biden’s campaign and the world of online fund-raising detailed a host of reasons for Mr. Biden’s relatively low small-dollar haul.Google and Apple have made it harder for email senders to see data about who has opened solicitations. Inflation slowed political donations across the board. Donors are exhausted by the unending flow of emails asking for money, and recipients are responding to far fewer of them.At the moment, Democrats aren’t quite as fired up as they were in 2018 and 2020, when Donald J. Trump’s presidency opened floodgates of liberal money, or ahead of the 2022 midterms, when the Capitol riot, the rise of the election-denial movement and the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade all motivated donors.And Mr. Biden is not an insurgent candidate who is motivating students to put up posters of him on dorm-room walls, as Mr. Obama or Senator Bernie Sanders did in their campaigns. His low-key White House and bare-bones campaign haven’t yet motivated supporters to rage-donate to his campaign.“Right now there’s there is no day-to-day competition combat going on,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul, whom Mr. Biden named a co-chairman of his campaign. “So these are the most loyal, most dedicated believers and supporters. It’ll build over time.”Mr. Biden’s campaign highlighted an array of statistics to promote its grass-roots donor operation. Nearly a third of its 394,000 donors did not contribute to Mr. Biden in 2020, the campaign said.Yet the president’s finance reports show that he is far more dependent on the wealthiest donors than Mr. Trump was in his re-election bid or Mr. Biden’s opponents were in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary contest.Ten donors, including Mr. Katzenberg, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the Maryland hotel magnate, gave $500,000 or more to the Biden Victory Fund. Another 82 donors contributed $100,000 or more.Four years ago, 35 percent of the money raised by Mr. Trump and the two joint committees his campaign formed with the national committee — Trump Victory and Trump Make America Great Again Committee — came from donors who gave $200 or less. For Mr. Biden, 21 percent of funds to his campaign and the joint finance committee came from small donors.Small-dollar contributions are down across the political spectrum. An analysis conducted by Middle Seat, a digital fund-raising firm with an array of Democratic clients, found that small donors had given less money during the first fund-raising period of 2023 than they had in nearly four years — since early 2019.“If I were on the Biden team right now, I’d be really happy with the numbers,” said Kenneth Pennington, a partner at Middle Seat. “It’s a terrible fund-raising environment, and he’s not launching a new campaign.”While Mr. Biden’s total fund-raising was roughly on par with the Republican candidates, he outpaced them with small donors. Combined, the G.O.P. candidates raised $7.5 million from small donors to his $10.2 million.The percentage of contributions of less than $200 is typically at its high point at the beginning of a campaign and drops as campaigns proceed, because when the amount an individual donor has given exceeds $200, it triggers a federal disclosure requirement.When Mr. Biden began his 2020 campaign for president, 38 percent of the money his campaign raised during the comparable reporting period came from small donors. Democratic online fund-raising experts said they expected the pace of online giving to the Biden campaign to pick up early next year, once voters begin to pay more attention to the Republican primary race and the nominee to oppose Mr. Biden emerges.“Once Democratic donors become focused on the Republican primary and what’s at stake in the 2024 election, the Biden campaign will have no problem raising record amounts of money online,” said Lauren Miller, who served as digital director to Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaigns.Mr. Trump’s small-dollar percentage cannot be discerned until his joint fund-raising committees, into which most of his online solicitations direct money, report finances. They are not required to do so until July 31.Finance reports for the other Republican candidates reveal a party that, even more than Mr. Biden, is heavily reliant on large donors.Among the other Republican candidates, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida reported $2.9 million from small donors, but that figure accounts for a mere 14 percent of what his campaign raised. The small-dollar percentages among other candidates ranged from 34 percent for former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to 2 percent for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who is largely self-financing his campaign.Unlike the Obama and Trump campaigns, the Biden campaign didn’t begin with a digital fund-raising team in place. Instead, it has relied on the Democratic National Committee for its online solicitations. The campaign advertised last week that it was seeking a “director of email and SMS” to lead a division that typically would have more than a dozen people. The campaign recently hired a grass-roots fund-raising director, an official said Saturday.Mr. Biden’s campaign has plowed at least $3.3 million into advertising on Facebook and Google, according to data compiled by Bully Pulpit Interactive, a marketing and communications agency. That figure is far more than any Republican candidate has spent on the platforms and suggests that the campaign is investing in its search for small donors.Two of Mr. Biden’s top advisers, Anita Dunn and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who are overseeing his re-election campaign from the White House, this week formally blessed a super PAC, Future Forward, as the chief outlet for large sums of cash from supportive billionaires and multimillionaires. More

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      Mike Pence Answers Jan. 6 Question From Iowa Voter

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      It was midway through a three-day swing of Iowa for Mike Pence when Luann Bertrand confronted him at a Pizza Ranch.Ms. Bertrand, a retired store manager whose family also farms corn and raises cattle outside Sioux City, had a question about Jan. 6, 2021, the date that looms under the Pence campaign like a land mine.Mr. Pence took questions from voters at a meet-and-greet at Pizza Ranch, a chain restaurant in Sioux City. Luann Bertrand, a retired store manager whose family also farms corn and raises cattle outside Sioux City, was among them.Jesse Brothers/Sioux City Journal, via Associated PressIn Iowa, the state whose caucuses next year are make-or-break for Mr. Pence, Ms. Bertrand accused the former vice president of putting President Biden in the White House. Seated at a table of G.O.P. voters in the restaurant, Ms. Bertrand, dressed in gray, shook a finger at Mr. Pence as she told him he should have rejected the electoral votes of certain states on Jan. 6.Mr. Pence, after listening with hands clutching his belt, offered a forceful rebuttal.A Question for Mike Pence“If it wasn’t for your vote, we would not have Joe Biden in the White House. Joe Biden shouldn’t be there. And all those wonderful things you and Trump were doing together would be continuing, and this country would be on the right path. Do you ever second-guess yourself? That was a constitutional right that you had to send those votes back to the states. It was not like you were going to personally elect him. We all know by the number of votes that were there who won that election. You changed history for this country.”The SubtextFor a former vice president, Mr. Pence holds a position in the Republican presidential race that is both credibly strong and incredibly weak: He ranks third in polling averages, but with only about 7 percent support, far behind former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Digging into the polls suggests why: About one in three potential Republican primary voters views Mr. Pence unfavorably. In a survey of registered voters nationwide, the same share says they would never vote for him.Anti-Trump Republicans are wary of Mr. Pence’s years of quiet servitude as the No. 2, while much of the G.O.P. base that embraces Mr. Trump and his continued lying about the 2020 election blames Mr. Pence for his actions on Jan. 6, when he refused to block certification of the results.Mike Pence’s Answer“The Constitution affords no authority to the vice president or anyone else to reject votes or return votes to the states. It had never been done before. It should never be done in the future. I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s actually what the Constitution says. No vice president in American history ever asserted the authority that you have been convinced that I had. I want to tell you, with all due respect — I’ve said it before, I say it right now — that President Trump was wrong about my authority that day, and he’s still wrong.”The SubtextMr. Pence is not running a race focused on Jan. 6; he presents himself as a traditional conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold. Still, the exchange was a crucial moment for Mr. Pence, in the eyes of the candidate, his campaign, a super PAC that supports him and outside Republican strategists.What Other People Are SayingDevin O’Malley, a spokesman for the campaign, said it was the first time a voter openly queried Mr. Pence about “sending back” 2020 electoral votes to state legislatures, a common fallacy on the right. Mr. Pence decided to lean into his response to make a statement, Mr. O’Malley said.“I don’t think the moment was lost on him that the answer that he gave was going to be one that was kind of the answer of record and would be given a lot of attention.“We view it as an opportunity to set ourselves apart from other candidates. On the issue of who stands firmly with the Constitution of the United States under immense pressure, I don’t think there’s a moment in recent history that any one political leader has faced which has put on display their character and their judgment more than that one day.”On Friday, Mr. Pence returns to Iowa with other Republican candidates (but not Mr. Trump) for the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of evangelical voters. These voters make up the most crucial bloc for Mr. Pence’s candidacy, but they retain a strong allegiance to Mr. Trump.Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Family Leader, the group sponsoring the summit, said Mr. Pence did the right thing by tackling Jan. 6 head-on in Sioux City, though there are many voters he might never bring around.“He has to own it and double down on it. Everybody’s got their hurdle, and this is going to be one that Mike Pence is going to have to clear.”“Because the former president has boastfully said Pence was wrong and he wimped out and he lacked courage, his base of supporters are going to believe that. Pence is not going to win that issue with Trump’s base. But Pence isn’t trying to win Trump’s base.”Scott Reed, co-chairman of a super PAC working to elect Mr. Pence through grass-roots organizing and advertising in Iowa, agreed. To him, Mr. Pence’s response to the voter was golden. “We put it in the can,” he said, meaning that the tape will show up in a future television ad.“There’s a segment of the party that we’re never going to get — the Steve Bannon crowd. And there’s plenty of the party left for us to get.”David Oman, a longtime center-right Republican strategist in Iowa who is unaffiliated with a campaign, said it was unclear whether Mr. Pence’s rebuttal of the voter — and his swipe at Mr. Trump — would help in the caucuses, which are Jan. 15, 2024.“Will it be helpful or unhelpful in six months? We’ll see.”“My personal view is history will be good to Mike Pence with respect to what happened on Jan. 6. Someday he’ll get the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Probably from a Democratic president.”What the Voter SaysIn a follow-up interview, Ms. Bertrand, the voter who challenged Mr. Pence, repeated a falsehood that lawyers who told Mr. Trump that his vice president could refuse states’ electoral votes had won prior cases for Mr. Trump.(The Trump lawyer who advanced that fringe theory about the 2020 election, John Eastman, is facing disbarment in California. Mr. Pence’s legal advisers told him that Mr. Eastman was wrong, and one testified before a grand jury investigating Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 riot.)Although Ms. Bertrand was a Trump supporter in 2020, she is uncertain whether she will back him in the caucuses next year and said she wanted to hear from other candidates. Mr. Pence, however, failed to convince her that he acted correctly on Jan. 6.“President Trump has been accused time and again and went to court and won every case, and so I’m under the assumption that in this case, when President Trump said he had a right to challenge Pence on his decision, it was his lawyers that told him that — the same lawyers who had come out on top before.”“But if I am right or I am wrong is not important. To me, the idea Pence needs to know is there are people in Iowa — and I think in the entire country — that still believe this. That’s a challenge he’s up against when he’s running.”“I did not feel that I was personally attacking him. I just wanted him to know, hey, there’s more of me than of you out there.” More