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      Nikki Haley Wants to Run on Her Record, Not Her Gender

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      The Republican presidential candidate would be the first woman to enter the White House, but she has so far tried to avoid the identity politics that could repel some voters.Inside the warehouse for an upscale department store chain in eastern Iowa, Michele Barton, wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with “Women for Nikki” in bright pink letters, mused excitedly about the prospect of sending the first woman to the White House.But Ms. Barton, 52, a mother of four and a lifelong Republican, was quick to insist that she was not supporting Nikki Haley because she is a woman.“I think she is the right candidate,” she said on Wednesday as she waited for Ms. Haley to appear at a town-hall event in Davenport. “It just so happens that she is a woman.”It’s a familiar refrain from some of Ms. Haley’s most enthusiastic female supporters, who, like the candidate herself, downplay the importance of her gender in the 2024 presidential race, even as they celebrate the potentially historic nature of her bid.Ms. Haley is performing this balancing act at a striking moment in U.S. politics. Her climb in the polls and the struggles of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mean that the Republican candidate with the best hope of pushing the party beyond former President Donald J. Trump — who has a long history of misogynist remarks and sexual misconduct allegations — might well be a woman.Throughout her campaign, Ms. Haley has sought to tread a fine line in talking about her gender. She emphasizes elements of her life and career that inherently set her apart in an otherwise all-male field, but avoids leaning into identity politics in ways that might repel the largely white and graying base of conservative voters she needs to court in order to win the nomination.“I don’t want to just be a woman,” she told Charlamagne Tha God on “The Daily Show” last month. “I don’t want to just be Indian. I don’t want to just be a mom. I don’t want to just be a Republican. I don’t want to just be all of those things. I’m more than that. And I think every person is more than that.”Her stump speech includes nods to her experiences as a mother and a military spouse. Her pithy rejoinders to her rivals invoke her five-inch heels. Her list of close-out songs at town-hall events includes Sheryl Crow’s “Woman in the White House.”A Haley campaign event in Iowa last month. When Ms. Haley mentions that she was the first woman and first person of color to serve as governor of South Carolina, it’s largely to argue that the United States is not “rotten” or “racist.”Jordan Gale for The New York TimesBut Ms. Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, seldom, if ever, mentions directly that she is vying to shatter the highest glass ceiling in American politics. (In her campaign announcement video, she said she did not believe in the idea of such ceilings.)On the campaign trail in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, she rarely brings up her gender, which her allies believe could be a potent asset to win over college-educated voters and suburban women in a general election, if she were to beat Mr. Trump in the primary.Chris Cournoyer, an Iowa state senator and Ms. Haley’s state chairwoman there, said these demographics could also help Ms. Haley become more competitive in the state, where she has trailed Mr. Trump in polls by a wide margin and until recently also lagged behind Mr. DeSantis.“I’ve heard from a lot of women who are independents, a lot of women who are Democrats, that they are going to switch parties to caucus for her on Jan. 15,” Ms. Cournoyer said.Although she often mentions her barrier-breaking victory to become the first woman and first person of color to serve as governor of South Carolina, Ms. Haley does so mainly to argue that the United States is not “rotten” or “racist.”Her event on Wednesday at the Von Maur warehouse in Davenport may have been billed as a Women for Nikki event, but aside from three coalition T-shirts on display near the entrance, the venue carried few signs of the all-female, grass-roots groups that have helped spread her message.Both Republican strategists and gender studies scholars say that Ms. Haley’s relatively muted approach to gender on the trail makes sense: The path to higher office for women is often paved with double standards and gender biases, regardless of a candidate’s party or ideology. But it can be particularly difficult for Republican women. Conservative voters tend to harbor traditional views about femininity while expecting candidates to seem “tough.”A recent study from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University found that Republicans were less likely than Democrats to see distinct barriers to women’s political representation, support targeted efforts to increase diversity in politics and pressure party leaders to embrace strategies to expand the ranks of women in power.Kelly Dittmar, who as the center’s research director worked on the report and has analyzed Ms. Haley’s political bids, said she saw parallels between Ms. Haley’s campaigns for governor and president. In both, Ms. Haley’s ads have talked about being “new” and “different,” offering cues to voters about her race and gender but, Ms. Dittmar said, allowing them to interpret the words as they wished.“It is both strategic and in line with her own conservative identity,” Ms. Dittmar said, adding that as a candidate for governor Ms. Haley rejected calls from her constituents to promise that she would appoint an even number of men and women to her administration.No woman has ever won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, or even a state Republican presidential primary, and Ms. Haley is only the fifth prominent Republican woman to run for her party’s nomination. Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, last made the attempt in 2016, and she made gender central to her campaign.With her own calibrated approach, Ms. Haley has sought to lean into her foreign policy and executive experience, challenge misconceptions about women and electability and position herself as one of her party’s most effective messengers on abortion, despite having signed some of the nation’s toughest anti-abortion restrictions as governor of South Carolina. She recently said that as governor she would have signed a six-week ban on the procedure.The path to higher office for women is often paved with double standards and gender biases, regardless of party or ideology. Conservative voters, in particular, tend to harbor traditional views about femininity.Sophie Park/Getty ImagesThe approach has won her some of her most devoted supporters and often unpaid volunteers — women willing to drive for hours to set up chairs, collect contact information and hype up her bid. Campaign officials say that Women for Nikki chapters have now emerged in all 50 states. At recent town halls in Iowa, at least two women asked her to reiterate her stance on abortion, though they had already heard it, so that others in the room could hear it, too.“I don’t think the fellas know how to talk about it properly,” she said both times.And yet, the issue of gender has remained inescapable. In the fourth Republican presidential debate, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy lobbed gendered attacks, accusing her of benefiting from “identity politics,” as former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey went the other direction, defending her in what some of her supporters saw as playing the white knight. Then, there is Mr. Trump, who calls her a “Birdbrain” and remains popular among Republican women.A poll from The New York Times and Siena College released this month found that 63 percent of female Republican primary voters supported Mr. Trump. Ms. Haley had 12 percent support from that group. Other surveys show her garnering more support from men than women. But in hypothetical matchups, Ms. Haley has beaten President Biden by the widest margin of any Republican challenger, roughly splitting female votes with him.“Nikki has potent electability against Biden, but she needs to find potent electability against Trump,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has been working to defeat Mr. Trump. “Right now, voters just don’t believe she can do it, and so she has to change that perception.”Perhaps Ms. Haley best captured her approach in response to a question from a prospective voter while campaigning this week in Agency, Iowa. Listening to Ms. Haley on the warehouse floor of a corn seed company, Sarah Keith, 28, a chemical engineer, wanted to know how the candidate would draw more women into the party, particularly those dissatisfied with the liberal agenda.“They talk about women’s issues,” Ms. Haley said, referring to the Democrats and defining those concerns as the same ones that worry most voters, including the economy and national security. “I think women are tired. I think everybody is tired of the noise, and what they want is just to see results.” More

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      I Clerked for Justice O’Connor. She Was My Hero, but I Worry About Her Legacy.

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      When I learned that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had died, I felt not just the loss of a world historical figure but also the loss of someone who formed a part of my identity.As a young woman, I was in awe of Justice O’Connor. Her presence on the Supreme Court offered an answer to any doubts I had that I belonged in the law. As a young lawyer, I was lucky enough to work for a year as her law clerk.While clerking for her, I came to understand and appreciate not only her place in history but also her vision of the law. She refused opportunities to issue sweeping opinions that would substitute her ideals for the democratic process. This made it all the more tragic that toward the end of her career, she joined in a decision — Bush v. Gore — that represented a rejection of her cautious approach in favor of a starkly political one.For me, she stands as a shining example of how women — everyone, really — can approach life and work. I witnessed her warmth, humor and humanity while experiencing the gift of learning and seeing the law through her eyes. Those personal and legal impressions have left an enduring mark on me as a person and as a lawyer.At the time Justice O’Connor became a lawyer, women in that role were rare. As has now become familiar lore, after she graduated near the top of her class from Stanford Law School in 1952, she was unable to find work as a lawyer. As a justice, she made sure that opportunities denied to her were available to others. Shortly after I graduated from law school, I joined two other women and one man in her chambers, making a rare majority-woman chamber when just over a third of the clerks for Supreme Court justices were women.I always found it remarkable that I never heard Justice O’Connor talk with any bitterness of the barriers she faced pursuing her career. Instead, she worked hard and without drama to overcome them. Remarkably, that experience did not harden her.She had a wicked sense of humor. The door to our clerks’ office held a photocopied image of her hand with the words “For a pat on the back, lean here.” Her face transformed in an almost girlish way when she laughed, which she did often.When she met with the clerks on Saturday to discuss upcoming cases, she brought us a home-cooked lunch — often something inspired by her Western roots. (One memorable example was tortillas and a cheesy chicken filling, to make a kind of cross between a burrito and a chicken quesadilla. It was a bit of a mess to eat but delicious.) She insisted that we get out of the courthouse and walk with her to see the cherry blossoms, and she took us to one of her favorite museums; once we visited the National Arboretum and lingered at the bonsai exhibit. She believed firmly in the benefits of exercise, and she invited us to join daily aerobics sessions with a group of her friends early in the morning in the basketball court above the Supreme Court chamber, which she delighted in calling the “highest court in the land.”She was also a hopeless romantic, and she was well known for trying to find partners for her single clerks. She met her husband, John, in law school, and they married shortly after graduation. He had received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis when I clerked for her, though that knowledge was not yet public. He often came by her chambers as she worked to maintain a sense of normalcy. She retired in 2006 largely because of his progressing dementia. In a powerful lesson of what it is to love, she was happy for him when he struck up a romance with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient. It was devastating to learn that she was subsequently diagnosed with dementia herself.When I clerked for her in 1998 and ’99, she was at the height of her powers. She was the unquestioned swing justice, and some called her the most powerful woman in the world.But she approached the role with humility. Considered a minimalist, she worked to devise opinions that decided the case and usually little more. She was sometimes criticized for that approach. Justice Antonin Scalia made no secret of his frustration. When she refused to overturn Roe v. Wade, in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he snarlingly referred to the opinion as a “jurisprudence of confusion.” She was criticized by many academics for failing to articulate a grand vision of the law.What they missed was that this was her grand vision of the law — or at least of the Supreme Court. She had spent the formative part of her career before she entered the court as a member of the Arizona State Legislature, where she rose to become the first female majority leader of a State Senate.She believed that the most important decisions about how to govern the country belonged to the political branches and to state legislatures, not to a court sitting in Washington. Seeing the law through her eyes during the year I worked for her, I realized that she was not looking for a sweeping theory that would change the face of the law. She wanted to decide the case before her and provide a bit of guidance to the lower courts as necessary but leave the rest to the democratic process.In December 2000, this made reading the opinion she joined in Bush v. Gore all the more heartbreaking. Her vote made a 5-to-4 majority for the decision to halt the recount in Florida rather than allow that process to play out, throwing the election to George W. Bush, who became the first president since 1888 to be elected without winning the popular vote. The decision, widely criticized for its shoddy reasoning, was the opposite of the careful, modest decisions she had spent her career crafting. It disenfranchised voters whose ballots had been rejected by ballot-counting machines in the interests of finality — in the process substituting the judgment of the court for the expressed will of the people.The court showed that it could — and would — behave in nakedly political ways. It had given into the temptation to engage in ends-driven reasoning that was utterly unpersuasive to those who did not already share its view of the right result. In doing so, the court might have opened the door to what has now become something of a habit.Justice O’Connor retired just over five years later, and she was replaced by Samuel Alito. It has been painful to watch as, in decision after decision, he has voted to undo much of the legacy she so carefully constructed. The blunt politics of Bush v. Gore now look less like an embarrassing outlier and more like a turning point toward a court that has cast aside Justice O’Connor’s cautious minimalism for a robustly unapologetic political view of the law. Unsurprisingly, public opinion of the court has fallen to a near historic low.Justice O’Connor remains a transformative figure in the law, a woman who charted a path that I and so many others have followed. If the court is to regain the public trust, it should look, once again, to her shining example, which embodied a powerful ideal: the court is not a body meant to enact the justices’ vision of what the law should be. Its role is, instead, to encourage our imperfect democracy to find its way forward on its own.Oona A. Hathaway is a professor of law and political science at Yale University and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Overturning Roe Changed Everything. Overturning Affirmative Action Did Not.

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      What do the strikingly different public responses to two recent Supreme Court rulings, one on abortion, the other on affirmative action, suggest about the future prospects for the liberal agenda?Last year’s Dobbs decision — overturning the longstanding precedent set by Roe v. Wade in 1973 — angered both moderate and liberal voters, providing crucial momentum for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, as well as in elections earlier this month. The hostile reaction to Dobbs appears certain to be a key factor in 2024.Since Dobbs, there have been seven abortion referendums, including in red states like Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Abortion rights won every time.In contrast, the Supreme Court decision in June that ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions provoked a more modest outcry, and it played little, if any, role on Election Day 2023. As public interest fades, so too do the headlines and media attention generally.There have been no referendums on affirmative action since the June decision, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. Six states held referendums on affirmative action before that ruling was issued, and five voted to prohibit it, including Michigan, Washington and California (twice). Colorado, the lone exception, voted in favor of affirmative action in 2008.Do the dissimilar responses to the court decisions ending two key components of the liberal agenda, as it was originally conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, suggest that one of them — the granting of preferences to minorities in order to level differences in admissions outcomes — has run its course?On the surface, the answer to that question is straightforward: Majorities of American voters support racial equality as a goal, but they oppose targets or quotas that grant preferential treatment to any specific group.In an email, Neil Malhotra, a political economist at Stanford — one of the scholars who, on an ongoing basis, oversees polling on Supreme Court decisions for The New York Times — pointed out that “race-based affirmative action is extremely unpopular. Sixty-nine percent of the public agreed with the court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, including 58 percent of Democrats.”On the other hand, Malhotra noted, “the majority of Americans did not want Roe overturned.”The July 1-5 Economist/YouGov poll posed questions that go directly to the question of affirmative action in higher education.“Do you think colleges should or should not be allowed to consider an applicant’s race, among other factors, when making decisions on admissions?”The answer: 25 percent said they should allow racial preferences; 64 percent said they should not.“Do you approve or disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, which ruled that colleges are not allowed to consider an applicant’s race when making decisions on admissions?”Fifty-nine percent approved of the decision, including 46 percent who strongly approved. Twenty-seven percent disapproved, including 18 percent who strongly disapproved.I asked William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, about the significance of the differing reactions to the abortion and affirmative action decisions, and he referred me to his July 2023 essay, “A Surprisingly Muted Reaction to the Supreme Court’s Decision on Affirmative Action”:In a marked contrast to last year’s Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the response to its recent decision prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions has been remarkably muted. The overall reason is clear: while voters wanted to preserve access to abortion by a margin of roughly 20 percentage points, they were willing by the same margin to accept the end of affirmative action.“To the surprise of many observers,” Galston writes, citing poll data, Black Americans “supported the court by 44 percent to 36 percent.”Key groups of swing voters also backed the court’s decision by wide margins, Galston goes on to say: “Moderates by 56 percent to 23 percent, independents by 57 percent to 24 percent, and suburban voters, a key battleground in contemporary elections, by 59 percent to 30 percent.”Sanford V. Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin, wrote me by email thatThere has always been a certain ambivalence on the part of many liberals regarding the actual implementation of affirmative action. I thought that it would ultimately be done in by the sheer collapse of the categories such as “white” or “Black,” and the impossibility of clearly defining who counts as “Hispanic” or “Asian.”In contrast, Levinson continued,Abortion has become more truly polarized as an issue, especially as the “pro-life” contingent has revealed its strong desire to ban all abortions. Moreover, it’s become immediately and obviously clear that the consequences of Dobbs are absolutely horrendous for many women in Texas, say, and that the “pro-life” contingent simply doesn’t seem to care about these consequences for actual people.I asked Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., about the divergent responses to the two decisions, and he emailed his reply:There are two reasons the public and political reaction differs so dramatically between the two decisions. The first is that in public opinion polling, affirmative action has always had significantly less than majority support.Pildes pointed out thatin perhaps the most liberal state in the country, California, 57 percent of voters in 2020 voted to keep in place the state’s ban on affirmative action, even as Biden won the state overwhelmingly. Popular opinion on abortion runs the other way: a majority of the country supports the basic right of access to abortion, and we see strong majorities even in red states voting to support that right, as in recent votes in Ohio and Kansas.Pildes’s second reason involves the advance preparation of the public for the decisions. In the case of affirmative action in college admissions,It was widely expected the Supreme Court was going to ban it. That outcome did not come as a surprise; it had long been discounted into the assumptions of those who follow these issues closely.In the case of the Dobbs, according to Pildes, “there was far more uncertainty in advance, even though the expectation was that the court would uphold Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks.”While the court majority might have decided the case “on narrow grounds, without overruling Roe,” Pildes wrote, it took “the far more extreme path of overruling Roe altogether. That came as a stunning shock to many people and it was the first time the court had taken away a personal constitutional right.”Nicholas Wu reported last month in Politico (in “Why Dems Aren’t Campaigning on Affirmative Action”) that some of the strongest proponents of affirmative action in the House do not see campaigning against the court decision as an effective strategy.Representative Mark Takano, a California Democrat who believes affirmative action helped get him into Harvard, told Wu, “I don’t see it as a rallying point for Democrats.”Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat and the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and Workforce, told Wu, “This is going to cause some heartburn, but we need to campaign on the fact that we are opening opportunities to everybody, and we’ll do everything we can to maintain opportunities.”“It’s difficult,” Scott added, “to bring back a strategy that the Supreme Court has directly ruled as unconstitutional.”Nicholas Dias, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, responded by email to my inquiry by noting that his “read of the existing data is that Americans care more about equality of opportunity than equality of outcome.”Dias conducted a study asking Americans how they prioritize three social goals in setting policies concerning wealth: “ensuring wealth is determined by effort (i.e., deservingness); providing for basic needs (sufficiency); and ensuring wealth equality.”He found that Republicans overwhelmingly give top priority to ensuring that wealth is determined by effort, at 70.5 percent, while Democrats give top priority, at 51.2 percent, to ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met.Dias noted that very few Democrats, Republicans or independents gave wealth equality top priority.Dias sent me a 2021 paper, “Desert and Redistribution: Justice as a Remedy for, and Cause of, Economic Inequality,” in which Jacob S. Bower-Bir, a political scientist affiliated with Indiana University, makes the case that:People tolerate grave inequalities if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Moreover, people who assign a significant role to personal responsibility in their definitions of economic desert oppose large-scale redistribution policies because government intervention makes it harder for people to (by their definition) deserve their economic station.In short, Bower-Bir argues, “people must perceive inequality as undeserved to motivate a policy response, and the means of combating inequality must not undermine desert.”In that context, Dias wrote in his email, it would be inaccurate to say thatpolicies designed to benefit minority constituencies have run their course. There’s plenty of evidence that members of these constituencies lack economic opportunities or cannot meet their needs. However, I think many Americans need to be convinced of that.In a further elaboration of the affirmative action debate, three sociologists, Leslie McCall, Derek Burk and Marie Laperrière, and Jennifer Richeson, a psychologist at Yale, discuss public perceptions of inequality in their 2017 paper “Exposure to Rising Inequality Shapes Americans’ Opportunity Beliefs and Policy Support”:Research across the social sciences repeatedly concludes that Americans are largely unconcerned about it. Considerable research has documented, for instance, the important role of psychological processes, such as system justification and American dream ideology, in engendering Americans’ relative insensitivity to economic inequality.Challenging that research, the four scholars contend that when “American adults were exposed to information about rising economic inequality in the United States,” they demonstrated increased “skepticism regarding the opportunity structure in society. Exposure to rising economic inequality reliably increased beliefs about the importance of structural factors in getting ahead.” Receiving information on inequality “also increased support for government redistribution, as well as for business actors (i.e., major companies) to enhance economic opportunities in the labor market.”The intricacies don’t end there.In their April 2017 paper, “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” three professors of psychology, Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom, write thatThere is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies.How can these two seemingly contradictory findings be resolved?The authors’ answer:These two phenomena can be reconciled by noticing that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness.Human beings, Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom write, “naturally favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”My interest in the subdued political response to the court’s affirmative action decision was prompted by a 2021 book, “The Dynamics of Public Opinion,” by four political scientists, Mary Layton Atkinson, James A. Stimson and Frank R. Baumgartner, all of the University of North Carolina, and K. Elizabeth Coggins of Colorado College.The four scholars argue that there are three types of issues. The first two types are partisan issues (safety net spending, taxation, gun rights etc.) and nonpartisan issues, like the space program. Public opinion does not change much over time on these two types of issues, they write: “Aggregate opinion moves up and down (or, left and right) but fifty years later remains roughly where it started.”Such stability is not the case with the third category:These are social transformations affecting society in powerful ways, literally shifting the norms of cultural acceptability of a given issue position. These can be so powerful that they overwhelm the influence of any short-term partisan differences, driving substantial shifts in public opinion over time, all in the same direction.Two factors drive these transformations:Large swaths of the American public progressively adopting new, pro-equality positions on the issue, and the generational replacement of individuals with once-widespread but no-longer-majority anti-equality opinions — with younger individuals coming-of-age during a different time, and reflecting more progressive positions on these cultural shift issues.Opinion on these mega issues, Atkinson and her co-authors argue, has been moving steadily leftward. “The overall trend is unmistakable,” they write: “The public becomes more liberal on these rights issues over time,” in what Atkinson and her co-authors describe as the shifting “equality mood.”While trends like these would seem to lead to support for affirmative action, that is not the case. “We cannot treat belief in equality as a normative value as interchangeable with a pro-equality policy preference,” Atkinson and her co-authors write:This is particularly true because many pro-equality policies emphasize equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. And while equality of opportunity is the touchstone of a liberal society (i.e., all Americans are entitled to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness), the right to equality of outcomes has not been equally embraced by Americans. Once equality of opportunity is significantly advanced, or de jure equality is established, public support for further government action focused on equalizing outcomes may not exist, or at least wanes significantly.In other words, there has been a steady leftward movement on issues of equality when they are described as abstract principles, but much less so when the equality agenda is translated into specific policies, like busing or affirmative action.Atkinson and her co-authors point specifically to growing support for women’s equality in both theory and in practice, reporting on an analysis of four questions posed by the General Social Survey from the mid-1970s to 2004:When asked whether women should let men run the country and whether wives should put their husbands’ careers first, the policy responses look nearly identical to women’s ‘equality mood.’ The series trend in the liberal direction over time and reach a level of approximately 80 percent liberal responses by 2004.But when asked whether it is better for women to tend the home and for men to work, and whether preschool children suffer if their mothers work, the responses are far less liberal and the slopes of the lines are less steep. While responses to these questions trend in the liberal direction during the 1970s and 1980s, by the mid-1990s the series flattens out with liberalism holding between 50 and 60 percent.I asked Stimson to elaborate on this, and he emailed in reply:We have long known that the mass public does not connect problem and solution in the way that policy analysts do. Thus, for example, most people would sincerely like to see a higher level of racial integration in schools, but the idea of putting their kids on a bus to achieve that objective is flatly rejected. I used to see that as hypocrisy. But I no longer do. I think the real issue is that they just do not make the connection between problem and solution. That is why affirmative action has such a troubled history. People are quite capable of supporting policy goals (e.g., racial balance in higher education) and rejecting the means.Where does that leave the nation? Galston, in his Brooking essay, provided an answer:In sum, the country’s half-century experiment with affirmative action failed to persuade a majority of Americans — or even a majority of those whom the policy was intended to benefit — that it was effective and appropriate. University employers — indeed the entire country — must now decide what to do next to advance the cause of equal opportunity for all, one of the nation’s most honored but never achieved principles.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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      Trump’s Deportation Plans for Immigrants

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      More from our inbox:Shocked by Trump’s Vow to Root Out ‘Vermin’Women in China, Loath to Turn Back the ClockBillionaires, Invest in EarthDonald Trump quiere reimponer una política de la era de la COVID-19 de rechazar las solicitudes de asilo: esta vez basando ese rechazo en afirmaciones de que los migrantes son portadores de otras enfermedades infecciosas, como la tuberculosis.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump’s ’25 Immigration Plan: Giant Camps, Mass Deportation” (front page, Nov. 12):After choking on my coffee reading this excellent in-depth piece, I contemplated the America we will live in if these ambitious and aggressive ideas bear fruit.Do the architects of this plan really believe we will have a stronger, safer and more prosperous country by setting up giant immigrant camps and carrying out mass deportations?I am descended from “white” privilege and members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. My family has grown stronger in recent years by the blending of ethnic, cultural and religious origins through marriage and adoption — with Indonesian, Malaysian, Algerian, Romanian, Iranian and Danish heritages combined with Scot Irish and English ones.We have family members who are Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, atheist and agnostic as well as Episcopalian, Quaker and Catholic.The reality is that our economy and society thrive because of our diversity. For that reason, my license plate is framed with the slogan “Make America Great, Welcome Immigrants.”Cynthia MackieSilver Spring, Md.To the Editor:Stating that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Donald Trump has offered a vision for another term that includes immediate mass deportations, ending DACA, an even more restrictive Muslim ban, relegating migrants to huge tent cities in Texas and more.I read this with the same dread I felt when articles were written about the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade. Many people thought, “Oh, that won’t happen here.” But it did. It did happen.Donald Trump and Stephen Miller will wreak havoc on everything our country stands for. It will be a daily dose of outrage and horror. Those who aren’t tuned in to this potential for disaster will realize what they were ignoring only when it is too late.The next election may be the most important in our history as a country. Sitting it out or voting third party is not an option. Our country’s future and our quality of life depend on showing up to vote.People need to understand that these are not offhand remarks. Mr. Trump does what he says he’s going to do. He has clearly shown us what he is and who he is: a wannabe dictator.Kathryn JanusChicagoTo the Editor:Donald Trump’s immigration restriction plans contain much that will be to the liking of the American people. As a lifelong Democrat and the son of immigrants who had to wait years for citizenship, I like it myself because 1) huge amounts of taxpayer dollars are going to the support of undocumented immigrants and 2) America faces a crisis of overpopulation, which is already straining our natural resources.I categorically reject the demonization of immigrants, and I also note that Mr. Trump’s policies generally favor the top 2 percent, not the average American. But if President Biden ignores this issue, or keeps doing what he is doing, it will cost him the election.Alan SalyBrooklynTo the Editor:It is worse than hypocritical that the man behind the dark menace of deportation — Stephen Miller — descends from a family of immigrants who escaped the pogroms in Eastern Europe and found refuge in America.As a Jew and the son of Holocaust survivors, I am frankly appalled by Mr. Miller’s harsh and seemingly uncompromising position.America is nothing if not a nation of immigrants. For Mr. Miller to foment an unrestrained assault against immigrants is, if I may use the term, “beyond the Pale.”Edwin S. RothschildMcLean, Va.Shocked by Trump’s Vow to Root Out ‘Vermin’Former President Donald Trump said his political opposition was the most pressing and pernicious threat facing America during a campaign event in New Hampshire on Saturday.Sophie Park for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “After Calling Foes ‘Vermin,’ Trump Campaign Warns Its Critics Will Be ‘Crushed’” (nytimes.com, Nov. 13):At a campaign event Saturday in New Hampshire, Donald Trump vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”So often I have heard variations on the poem that begins, “First they came for the Communists …”Did the people attending a Veterans Day event not hear the echo from less than 100 years ago when they or their parents or grandparents went to war to protect democracy against fascists from Germany and Italy who voiced these same goals?It is shocking that a vast support network is prepared to put these plans into effect here if the former president is re-elected in 2024.Bob AdlerNew YorkTo the Editor:People are not vermin. Even the person who compares his political opponents to “vermin” is not vermin; he is a human being.Donald Trump’s despicable speech, however, should make every American recoil in horror that he would use such a dehumanizing tactic toward people who disagree with him. The Republican Party should immediately distance itself from Mr. Trump and his dangerous rhetoric.Anyone who believes that people are vermin should not be elected to any office, from local P.T.A. president on up. Certainly, the highest office in the land should never be in the hands of such a person.Justin Stormo GipsonNewman Lake, Wash.Women in China, Loath to Turn Back the Clock Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “China’s Male Leaders Signal to Women That Their Place Is in the Home” (news article, Nov. 3):Although Mao Zedong proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky,” the weight of thousands of years of Chinese culture held back — and continues to hold back — many from attaining their full potential.My mother, born before the 1949 Communist takeover of the government, was prohibited from going to school by her father, but even decades later suffered limited choices, gender discrimination and the societal stigma of having only daughters.Now that Chinese women have tasted power, freedom and independence, they are not going to go back to being merely wives, mothers and caretakers any more than American women, as evidenced by the recent U.S. elections, are going to give up their hard-won reproductive rights to satisfy the wishes of right-wing conservatives.Men on both sides of the globe are going to find that turning back the clock is a lot harder than they thought.Qin Sun StubisBethesda, Md.The writer is a newspaper columnist and author of “Once Our Lives,” a historical saga about four generations of Chinese women.Billionaires, Invest in Earth George WylesolTo the Editor:Re “Space Billionaires Should Spend More Time Thinking About Sex,” by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Nov. 5):Doesn’t it make more sense to address challenges to our future on Earth, a very appealing home for humans, than to try to adapt to hostile, inhospitable planets? We’d likely be better off if Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires would invest their vast sums in things like wind turbines and infrastructure. They might also help advance the human race by promoting development of qualities like compassion, reconciliation and cooperation.Beyond that, the authors make great points about the difficulties of sex and procreation in space. Let’s not forget Earth’s sex appeal!Marjorie LeeWayland, Mass. More

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      Nikki Haley and Those High Heels

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      If Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have the best shot at taking on Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, there was an especially telling moment at Wednesday’s debate that shows why Ms. Haley might be better suited to endure and overcome Mr. Trump’s lines of attacks than Mr. DeSantis would be.It was when their rival, the tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, used a question about Israel to jab at Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis for being foreign policy hawks and then try to belittle them for wearing heels — high heels in the case of Ms. Haley, and cowboy boots for Mr. DeSantis (there has been much speculation that he has lifts in those boots).“Do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?” Mr. Ramaswamy said, clearly pleased with his one-liner. “In which case we’ve got two of them onstage tonight.”It was a classic Trump play by the Trump-toady Ramaswamy — the way the former president tries to reduce women to gender and make them seem weak (Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina, Megyn Kelly and more) or tries to de-man a male rival (the penis comparisons with Marco Rubio, the wimp attacks on Jeb Bush and more).Mr. DeSantis said nothing. He was either trying to ignore it or rise above it (or perhaps forget it ever happened). If that’s the soft-shoe dance that Mr. DeSantis plans if and when Mr. Trump escalates attacks on him, history suggests that Mr. DeSantis will get stomped.Ms. Haley, by contrast, seemed almost delighted that Mr. Ramaswamy raised her stilettos: It gave her an opportunity to emphasize this most feminine of objects, while also turning the moment around on her male rival.“I’d first like to say, they’re five-inch heels,” she corrected. “And I don’t wear ’em unless you can run in ’em.”“The second thing that I will say is, I wear heels. They’re not for a fashion statement. They’re for ammunition.”It wasn’t the most artful line. (Who was she outrunning? How could heels be ammunition? Was she not worried she’d conjure a bad “Single White Female” comparison, which of course she did?) But what the exchange revealed was that, amid this sea of macho men and during this era of macho politics, there is a path for women that involves simultaneously rising above and leaning into a gendered insult; while the men, on the other hand, too often succumb to the temptation of going lower.Ms. Haley seemed to know she’d gain more by shutting down a male jerk with humor than by letting the moment go. A bit later, too, when Mr. Ramaswamy brought up Ms. Haley’s daughter’s use of TikTok, an unusually personal attack on a family member, Ms. Haley spoke for many when she said, “You’re just scum.”Now imagine Ms. Haley on the debate stage with Mr. Trump. Maybe Mr. Trump has imagined it. Maybe that’s why he’s afraid to debate her.Whether you love or hate these playground-style duels, these moments can be more consequential than many of us assume. Most Americans are not reading deeply into the platforms of each candidate; they get glimpses of them in public performances like this, and often form opinions around them. So when a moment like this goes viral, often it matters even more. “People get to see whether you could stand your ground or hold your own,” said Tristan Bridges, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies gender politics. “And they’re just intensely gendered, every time, no matter who’s running.”Masculinity contests have long been a part of politics; for years, war heroes and combat veterans won office or their party’s presidential nominations, as other men sought to project traditionally masculine characteristics like toughness, resolve, seriousness, strength. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton ran for president staking out some hawkish positions on Iraq and foreign policy; her image of toughness helped her at first, given the ongoing threats from the war on terror. But she became caught up in questions about her likability, with none other than Barack Obama delivering if not a Ramaswamy comment, then still a pretty gendered one in a hushed aside at a critical debate: “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”No woman runs for office these days without having some way of responding to such digs, and Ms. Haley has practiced. As far back as 2012, she’s been recycling a version of her heels-as-ammunition line. As governor of South Carolina: “I’ve got a completely male Senate. Do I want to use these for kicking? Sometimes, I do.” During an address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “If I see something wrong, we’re going to kick them every single time.” In her official campaign announcement: “You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”The reason for this stiletto contortion is actually quite clever: Ms. Haley, like the women candidates before her, must balance the qualities we expect of women (warmth, femininity) with what we expect of leaders (authority, strength). By taking the most feminine of objects — a heel — and turning it into a weapon is essentially her way of saying “I wear heels, but I’m tough.” It’s not clear how effective this strategy will be with large numbers of voters, but at least it doesn’t contribute to making American politics a locker room.Which is more than we can say for Mr. Trump, of course, who took masculinity chest-beating to new heights with his attacks on “Little Marco” and “Low Energy Jeb” in 2015 and 2016, and any number of sexist attacks on Mrs. Clinton as weak and tired. Or even on occasion Joe Biden, who once said he would have “beat the hell out of” Trump had the two been in high school together.Mr. DeSantis, for his part, seems stuck — there’s no way to judo out of a subject that his critics seem to be dissecting with the fury of a coded Taylor Swift lyric. No, really: There are diagrams of how his boots bend; their arch; the shape they make inside his pants; how they affect his gait. Politico Magazine even interviewed shoemakers about the boots — including one who makes bespoke cowboy boots with heel lifts for Texas politicians, and who concluded there was “no doubt” Mr. DeSantis is wearing lifts. (The shoemaker said the effect of a heel lift is similar to “five-inch stilettos.” A DeSantis spokesperson replied that the governor does not pad his boots and called the magazine’s story a “hit piece.”)It is certainly no surprise that Mr. Trump appears positively giddy over the whole boot matter, posting an image of Mr. DeSantis from a TV appearance on his Truth Social platform with the caption, “Tell me he’s not wearing hidden heels,” followed by a statement from a spokesman, Steven Cheung, suggesting Mr. DeSantis might consider something “sassier like platform shoes more appropriate for a contestant on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’ ”Mr. DeSantis, in response, did what any grown man running for president would apparently do: He went for Mr. Trump’s genitalia. “If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate” — he didn’t — “I’ll wear a boot on my head,” Mr. DeSantis challenged. His campaign quickly began selling golf balls with the slogan: “Ron DeSantis Has a Pair. He Shows Up.”If this all feels a little tired, as it may to at least a lot of women in this country, perhaps Ms. Haley offers Republicans another path.I hope she sticks with the heels, to be honest. They are imbued with meaning: a way to remind voters that, like Ginger Rogers, she’s essentially had to dance backward in them — calling attention to the double standard for women — and to give her a comeback against a gendered attack.A final observation. I spent some time examining Ms. Haley’s debate stilettos last week, and by my feminine assessment they look more like four inches than five. Which is utterly inconsequential, except that it tells us something about Ms. Haley: She’s willing to play the size game, too.Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in Opinion who writes on gender, politics and culture. She teaches journalism at New York University and is co-host of the podcast, In Retrospect.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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      Why Is the Democratic Base Eroding?

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      More from our inbox:Income Inequality and Test ScoresHelping Kids Thrive With Full WIC Funding Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Democrats Are Their Own Worst Enemies,” by Pamela Paul (column, Nov. 3), about why polls are showing a loss of support for the party among minorities and the working class:Ms. Paul writes that “the Democratic Party cannot win and America cannot flourish if it doesn’t prioritize the economic well-being of the American majority over the financial interests and cultural fixations of an elite minority.”That, she says, is the reason that “the Democratic Party’s reliable base — the working class, middle-class families, even Black and Latino Americans and other ethnic minorities — have veered toward the G.O.P.”Is she talking about the same G.O.P. that, under the former president, passed legislation that gave enormous tax breaks to the wealthiest in the country? Is she referring to G.O.P. legislators who now want to reduce funding for the I.R.S., an agency that serves as a watchdog against unfair tax manipulation that leaves the middle class with a proportionately greater tax burden than the richest?If so, it is hard to imagine that the G.O.P., as opposed to the Democratic Party, is prioritizing the economic well-being of the American majority.Sheila Terman CohenMadison, Wis.To the Editor:OMG! I had no idea how crazy the Democrats really are! As Pamela Paul reminds us, they are out of touch with the “broadly shared beliefs within the electorate.”Democrats support legal immigration and care for refugees. They think Social Security is a good idea. They think everyone is entitled to equal protection under the law regardless of race, gender or ethnicity. They think that people who want to impose their religion on this country are just wrong. They think that people are entitled to autonomy over their own bodies and health care. They recognize the rule of law.And the worst part is they are right up front about it. Thank you, Pamela, for helping me feel better about how I plan to vote.Richard W. PoetonLenox, Mass.To the Editor:Pamela Paul is correct that there is room for robust debate about what policies the Democrats should adopt to better help most Americans, but she misses the bigger problem. The Republican Party is full of one-issue voters who will vote to promote racist policies, misogyny or guns regardless of whether most Republican policies are good for America or not.Many Democratic voters have been quick to say they won’t vote for a Democratic candidate since that candidate promises to do only seven of the 10 things they want. Especially with the Electoral College and gerrymandering favoring minority rule, everyone who recognizes the danger that the current Republican Party poses to our freedoms must vote for the Democratic candidate, even if they want some different policies.Until the current Republican Party is out of power, any debate within the Democratic Party must take a back seat to saving our country from election deniers.Richard DineSilver Spring, Md.Income Inequality and Test ScoresNew SAT Data Highlights the Deep Inequality at the Heart of American EducationThe differences in how rich and poor children are educated start very early.To the Editor:Re “‘18 Years Too Late’ to Solve SAT Gap” (The Upshot, Oct. 30):It is unsurprising that SAT scores correlate strongly to family income. A huge portion of top scorers come from the richest families. Only 0.6 percent of all students from the bottom 20 percent of family income score above 1300 out of 1600.This data dispels the myth that the SAT boosts access to higher education by identifying “diamonds in the rough” from historically underrepresented populations. They are far outnumbered by students from wealthy families taking full socioeconomic advantage to achieve higher scores. The “rough” — in the form of under-resourced public education and family poverty — completely obscures the diamonds.Furthermore, the SAT is a very weak predictor of undergraduate performance. Grades work better. The test is a strong measure of accumulated opportunity rather than college readiness. Relying on SAT results to prejudge future educational performance locks in inequity.That is one reason that nearly 90 percent of U.S. four-year colleges and universities now have SAT/ACT-optional or test-blind policies.Of course, such policies alone will not solve the college access problem. Admissions offices need to scrutinize other determinative factors. A fair process should not provide the greatest opportunities to teenagers who have already had the most advantages in life.Harry FederBrooklynThe writer is the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest).To the Editor:Again and again, research has shown that poverty and income inequality are the most powerful influence on school performance. How could it be otherwise in a country without a real safety net, with parents working two gig jobs and juggling which bills to pay, with no secure access to health care, rampant evictions and parking lots for employed people who have to live in their cars? Yet the public refuses to believe this, and at best seeks to bolster schools in the hopes that they will make up for fundamental deprivation.It is deeply distressing to see how many reader comments declare that wealth reflects genetic superiority and other “virtues.” In an era of barely taxed billionaires building self-perpetuating stock market fortunes on the labor of warehouse workers and A.I., that view is not only undemocratic and ahistorical. It’s also dangerously complacent.Nina BernsteinNew YorkThe writer is a former New York Times reporter.Helping Kids Thrive With Full WIC FundingTo the Editor:Re “Infant Mortality Up for 1st Time in Two Decades” (front page, Nov. 2):The increase in America’s infant mortality rate is a deeply alarming sign that policymakers do not adequately prioritize children’s health and well-being.Sadly, it is not the only sign.The child poverty rate more than doubled last year. Nearly 9 percent of households with children were food insecure in 2022, up from 6.2 percent the year before. Children’s reading and math scores have plummeted since the pandemic.No single program can fix all of this. But the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which serves about half of all infants born in the United States, should be considered our first line of defense.A 2019 study found that WIC participation is directly attributable to a 16 percent reduction in the risk of infant mortality. WIC participation also lowers the risk of poverty, reduces food insecurity, improves nutritional intake and strengthens kids’ cognitive development.Yet new data from the Department of Agriculture finds a significant gap between WIC eligibility and coverage. For instance, only 25 percent of 4-year-olds eligible for WIC are actually enrolled.All children deserve to grow up healthy and thrive. Full funding for WIC is an essential step toward that goal.Georgia MachellWashingtonThe writer is interim president and C.E.O. of the National WIC Association. More

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      Nikki Haley Wears the Skirts

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      Whether on the debate stage or “The Daily Show,” the Republican presidential candidate is strategic about standing out — in every way.In a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates, Nikki R. Haley is starting to stand out. Such, anyway, seems to be the conclusion of pollsters, voters and donors alike, who have helped bolster her numbers since she first took to the debate stage back in August. She’s on enough of an upswing that “Saturday Night Live” has started to prep a Haley character in anticipation.But as the third debate — and, perhaps, Ms. Haley’s debut as an “S.N.L.” character — looms, it’s worth considering just how tactically she has used the fact that she unmistakably stands out, even before she has opened her mouth to show off her foreign policy experience, or scold a competitor, to her advantage.Yes, I am talking about gender. Being a woman has always been seen as an issue to manage in a presidential race. Ms. Haley is using it as an asset. She announced, in the first debate, as her opponents were sniping at each other, “This is exactly why Margaret Thatcher said, ‘If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.’”And where is that woman? Just open your eyes and look.Mr. Ramaswamy, left, in the typical Republican uniform, next to Ms. Haley, in a uniform of her own choosing, at the debate in August. Morry Gash/Associated PressIn that initial debate, surrounded by seven men in the exact same outfits — dark blue suits, white shirts, red ties, tiny flag pins, otherwise known as the political uniform of the non-debating Donald J. Trump — Ms. Haley was a beacon in a light blue bouclé skirt suit and high heels.In the second debate, with the men in pretty much the same outfits (Tim Scott did wear a red and navy striped tie that time), there she was, in gleaming crimson silk shantung and pumps. And chances are, as the field shrinks in the third debate, such distinctions will become even more apparent.“Political campaigns are about differentiation,” said Cheri Bustos, a former congresswoman from Illinois, who said she also wore skirts and heels during her first primary campaign, when she was the only woman in a field of six. “The best candidates look for every opportunity. Nikki Haley has taken advantage of the situation.”Ms. Haley in crimson at the second Republican presidential debate in September. Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd she has done so while repudiating conventional wisdom when it comes to women seeking the highest office. You know, the truism that trouser suits should be the uniform of choice for women as well as men, the better to fit in with the group and downplay the whole gender issue.Hillary Clinton was, of course, the ultimate pantsuit champion, though she swapped her signature rainbow of trouser suits for basic black when she was on the debate stage in 2016, segueing to symbolic suffragist white only after she had won the nomination and setting a tone that has defined the American female political wardrobe ever since.Indeed, in the 2020 election cycle Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson stuck almost entirely to the clothing script, Ms. Harris in dark suits and Ms. Gabbard and Ms. Williamson in white. Since Ms. Harris became vice president, she has worn dark pantsuits almost entirely.But Ms. Haley wears the skirts. And not just any old skirts: knee-length skirts. The kind of skirts often referred to as “demure,” that suggest legs crossed at the ankle, and traditional gender roles. The irony is, in adopting this more classically female garment in this context, she looks both acceptably conservative and radical at the same time.Ms. Haley at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Annual Leadership summit in Las Vegas in October, in her trademark skirt and high heels.Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesAfter all, you’re not exactly fooling anyone in a pantsuit. So why not upend the status quo and wear something your rivals cannot?Besides, the pantsuit is in part a Democratic convention. Republican women have hewed more to the sheath dress-skirt suit tradition in presidential politics. When Sarah Palin was John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate in 2008, she wore skirts and skirt suits for most of her major public appearances, including her debate with Joe Biden. Ditto Elizabeth Dole in 2000 for her presidential run.Many Republican candidates seem to buy into the idea, expressed by Mr. Trump during his term in office, that the women who worked for him should “dress like women,” in the most clichéd sense. Though Ms. Haley’s interpretation of that idea is less Fox News presenter and more Thatcherite. (Ms. Haley did title her 2022 book on female leadership “If You Want Something Done.”)Still, clichés, generally shared, are also a subtle way for Ms. Haley to plant a seed in viewers’ minds without anyone necessarily being conscious of what is going on. “Her presentation adds to her credibility,” said Frank Luntz, a political communications strategist. “Her verbal strategy and her visual strategy are in sync.”Ms. Haley may have flip-flopped in her positions on Mr. Trump and his transgressions, especially the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, but she has always stuck to certain core principles, at least when it comes to her image: color, heels, skirt or dress (when not at the Iowa State Fair, where she we wore jeans). She grew up working in her mother’s clothing store in Bamberg, S.C. Her husband is a commissioned officer in the South Carolina Army National Guard, currently serving in Africa. She understands the impact of uniform.Ms. Haley at the Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia in June.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesOne of her favorite lines, first trotted out in 2012 when she was the governor of South Carolina, is about her shoe preference. “I wear high heels, and it’s not a fashion statement — it’s for ammunition,” she said back then, adding: “I’ve got a completely male Senate. Do I want to use these for kicking? Sometimes, I do.’’She recycled the line, with a few edits, when addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2017: “I wear heels. It’s not for a fashion statement. It’s because if I see something wrong, we’re going to kick them every single time.”Then she made it the capstone of her February announcement video: “You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies, and when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.” And just last week, she discussed it on “The Daily Show” in reference to resurfaced rumors that Ron DeSantis wore lifts in his cowboy boots to make himself taller — an allegation the DeSantis campaign has denied but which his opponents, especially Mr. Trump, have somewhat gleefully embraced.When Charlamagne Tha God, a host of the show, asked if Ms. Haley would be wearing higher heels than Mr. DeSantis so she could be taller, Ms. Haley replied: “I’ve always said, ‘Don’t wear ’em if you can’t run in ’em,’ so we’ll see if he can run in ’em.”It’s probably not a coincidence that Tom Broecker, the costume designer for “House of Cards” (and “S.N. L.”) said he always dressed Robin Wright Penn’s character in pointed high heels when she was president.“She felt in control when she had them on,” Mr. Broecker said. “High heels make you walk, and stand, a certain way, as if you can go toe to toe with a person.”Given the cloud of suspicion hanging over Mr. DeSantis’s shoes, and what they may reveal about his insecurities, it’s not a bad time to have a facility with strategically wielded footwear. Like Hillary Clinton, who after years of pushing back against discussion around her clothes, finally started joking about it and thus neutralized it as an issue to be used again her, Ms. Haley has pre-emptively weaponized her wardrobe for herself. She owns the heels in this race, just as she owns the skirt.It may seem like a minor detail, but it is starting to become a telling one. More

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      How the Left Is Reacting to the Hamas Atrocities

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      More from our inbox:Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Candidacy: Demeaning the Family’s LegacyGender InequalityTrump’s Harangues Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself,” by Bret Stephens (column, Oct. 11):Hamas’s systematic and indiscriminate rape, torture, murder and kidnapping of children, grandmothers, ravers and peace activists are brutal enough. What compounds the despair, however, has been the response in the immediate aftermath by some of my fellow liberals.These are the people who reflexively see “microaggressions” everywhere, yet are blind to this macroaggression. The people who insist that “words are violence,” yet celebrated actual violence against innocents as a form of “resistance.” The people who are quick to accuse so many institutions of systemic racism, yet glorify an institution (Hamas) that has been publicly and unapologetically antisemitic for decades.It is possible, as I do, to support and sympathize with ordinary Palestinians, and strive for a future of peaceful coexistence, while also recognizing the unequivocal depravity of these terrorist attacks. This was not a difficult moral test. Yet liberals failed miserably.Mark BessoudoLondonTo the Editor:Bret Stephens is right to call out supporters of Palestinian rights who minimize or even celebrate the atrocities committed by Hamas, and to point to the explicit or implicit antisemitism of some anti-Zionist arguments.However, his claim that to call for a cease-fire is pro-Hamas is wrong. It is rather to call for the taking of innocent life on both sides to cease. Israeli officials made it clear that they would exercise no restraint in their bombardment of Gaza, and Israeli actions have followed through on these words.Let’s leave aside questions of “moral equivalence” between actors, and focus on actions. Deliberately killing civilians and deliberately failing to avoid killing civilians are both war crimes under international law.Stopping criminal killing on all sides and releasing hostages are not only vital for upholding the increasingly fragile and widely disregarded framework of international law, but also an essential step toward attempting to bring a just peace to the Middle East.Chris SinhaNorwich, EnglandThe writer is an honorary professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication, University of East Anglia.To the Editor:Thanks to Thomas L. Friedman (“Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than Now,” column, Oct. 11) and Bret Stephens for their brilliant analyses of the situation in the Middle East. I am a secular American Jew, a proud liberal who is appalled at the authoritarian tendencies of the Netanyahu regime.There is no doubt in my mind that decades of harsh treatment of Palestinians by Israel has led to tremendous frustrations, and that Benjamin Netanyahu has exacerbated the problem, but nothing justifies the terrorist actions taken by Hamas.Israelis must boot Mr. Netanyahu and his ilk, and elect leaders who will offer Palestinians respect and some measure of hope. The Middle East powers such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan must dislodge Hamas, and blunt the influence of Iran in the area.New leadership is the only way to achieve a lasting peace. I am not holding my breath.Bill GottdenkerMountainside, N.J.To the Editor:In the last few days we have witnessed with horror and disbelief that Israeli civilians, including children, have been killed and captured by Hamas. This is the true definition of terrorists — those who try to intimidate civilians to pursue a political goal.The stated political goal of Hamas is the eradication of the state of Israel. This is what makes peace so elusive in this region. The right of Israel to exist is reality. When we see Hamas taking up arms and the cheering for the barbarous acts committed on an innocent civilian population in Israel, we too should raise our voices in unison. We should declare that this type of terror has no place in a civilized world.Deborah GitomerTampa, Fla.To the Editor:The horrors visited upon Israeli civilians ought not to be replicated in Gaza. The international community, including the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations, ought to press and support Egypt in immediately setting up refugee centers and opening the border to rescue innocent civilians in Gaza and give them shelter, food and water.Isebill V. GruhnSanta Cruz, Calif.The writer is emerita professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Candidacy: Demeaning the Family’s LegacyRobert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, has built a base of support made up of disaffected voters across the political spectrum.Matt Rourke/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Kennedy Announces He Will Run for President as an Independent” (news article, Oct. 10):Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s candidacy as an independent is an unwelcome development. It serves no purpose other than increasing the chances of a Donald Trump victory by dividing the anti-Trump votes. It is no accident that most of his financial support comes from groups aligned with the G.O.P.It is telling that no fewer than four of his siblings — Rory, Kerry, Kathleen and Joseph — have publicly condemned Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy. I hope that anyone considering supporting him listens to the warnings of his siblings.He may share the surname of a political dynasty, but Mr. Kennedy demeans the legacy of his father and uncles, and does the nation a disservice with his candidacy.Harvey M. BermanWhite Plains, N.Y.Gender InequalityElsa/Getty ImagesClaudia Goldin’s wide-ranging work has delved into the causes of the gender wage gap and the evolution of women’s participation in the labor market.Harvard University/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “Travis, Don’t Fumble Taylor,” by Maureen Dowd (column, Oct. 8), and “Trailblazer in Economics Is Awarded Nobel Prize” (Business, Oct. 10):Ms. Dowd’s concern about successful men who feel intimidated by powerful women offers a striking and poignant example of one attitude that perpetuates the gender inequality and couple inequity that Claudia Goldin, the Nobel prize recipient, has analyzed in the workplace and the home.The roots of this inequality are so deeply embedded and so historically interwoven in personal behaviors and relationships as well as social and economic structures that lasting change will not result unless there is a simultaneous assault on all these fronts.Patricia AusposQueensThe writer is the author of “Breaking Conventions: Five Couples in Search of Marriage-Career Balance at the Turn of the 19th Century.”Trump’s HaranguesSupporters of former President Donald J. Trump gathered near Trump Tower the night before the first day of the fraud trial against him and his company.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Sharpens His Remarks as His Legal Woes Escalate” (news article, Oct. 4):I was a career public defender in coastal Mississippi, representing thousands of indigent people charged with felonies. Not one of them ever stood outside a courtroom and harangued or denigrated his or her judge, and I have no doubt about what would have occurred if they had. Off to jail for contempt they’d go.The media deserves some blame for the problem, for giving Donald Trump the forum he so desires, no matter his blather. Maybe it should back off a bit.Ross Parker SimonsPascagoula, Miss. More