As Election Day approached, social media users shared a video of a man who said he planned to vote multiple times in New York City.
“I’m here in New York about to illegally vote for Zohran Mamdani six times,” the man in the TikTok video reshared on X says as he walks down a city street.
The caption of the Nov. 2 X post says, “VOTER FRAUD ALERT!! This guy just admitted he was on his way to ILLEGALLY vote for Mamdani six times! I live in (New York state) & there’s no ID requirement, you just sign your name. He could just lie about his address & vote in multiple precincts!”
This video, sharedwidely, is misleading. It was originally published Oct. 29 on TikTok by a punk rock band member who wrote in the comments that he was “purposefully (spreading) misinformation over the internet.”
Voter ID is required to register to vote in New York. State law prohibits people from voting more than once. A law that permits registered voters to cast ballots without showing their IDs at the polling site does not change that.
Mamdani, a New York State assemblymember and Democratic Socialist, won the Democratic primary election in the New York City mayoral race. He faces former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a longtime Democrat who is running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the primary, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, a Republican, in the Nov. 4 election.
Who can vote in the New York general election?
Before people can cast a ballot, they must register to vote. That involves providing identification, such as a New York driver’s license number or a Social Security number, and attesting that the information they are providing is correct. The state’s voter eligibility laws require that a person:
Be a U.S. citizen.
Be at least 18 years old.
Be a resident of the state, county, city or village for at least 30 days before the election.
Not be in prison for a felony conviction.
Not be adjudged mentally incompetent by a court.
Not claim the right to vote elsewhere, meaning that the person is not registered to vote in another state, county or municipality in the U.S.
Kathleen McGrath,a New York State Board of Elections spokesperson, told PolitiFact in a Nov. 3 email that sometimes a person who didn’t meet verification requirements while seeking to register shows up at a poll site seeking to vote. In those instances, elections officials require the person to present valid identification on site.
All voters must provide their signatures when voting as a means of voter ID, under the New York State Constitution Article II, Section 7. Poll workers confirm a voter’s identity by matching their signature to official records.
The County Board of Elections, which conducts local elections, operates voting sites and maintains voter registration lists, uses electronic pollbooks to check in voters at poll sites. The poll books are updated in real time as people cast ballots. If a voter has checked in at a poll site, they would be unable to check-in at another poll site during the same election.
Erica Smitka, executive director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, told PolitiFact in a Nov. 4 email that because voting records are constantly changing, all voter list maintenance is conducted by bipartisan teams to ensure the process is fair, accurate, and transparent.
“Another person cannot just say a voter’s name and vote on their behalf,” McGrath said.
Doing so would also require forging the voter’s signature.
“That action would be a felony,” McGrath said.
McGrath said that if a voter has requested a mail ballot, they will be unable to cast a ballot in person on a machine and must complete a provisional ballot. Post-election, the County Board of Elections conducts an audit to ensure all ballots cast via affidavit are not from voters who have already cast another ballot.
If people are not registered to vote, they will be turned away.
Donald Trump encountered some of these safeguards first-hand in 2004, years before he ran for president. “Access Hollywood” followed him as he sought to vote in New York City. The show captured him being turned away from various polling sites because poll workers said he wasn’t registered to vote at those locations. Access Hollywood said Trump ultimately filled out a provisional ballot in the backseat of a car, after learning that his issues related to his son Donald Trump Jr.’s change of address.
McGrath said voting fraud is a rare occurrence because of the Boards of Elections record keeping.
“Because Boards of Elections keep permanent, individualized records of which elections a person participates in, the probability of detection after the fact is exceedingly high,” McGrath said. She said this is likely why there is little evidence in the U.S. of voter fraud-related crimes.
Our ruling
An X post said, New York state has “no ID requirement” to vote, and people could lie about their address and “vote in multiple precincts.”
New York voters are not required to present ID when voting, but they are required to present valid ID to register to vote. State law includes numerous safeguards to prevent anyone from casting more than one ballot in an election — and doing so is a felony. Poll workers confirm voters’ identities by matching their signatures to official records.
The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
One year after Donald Trump retook the White House and set into motion a dramatic expansion of executive power, the Republican president figures prominently in state and local elections being held Tuesday. Video above: House Speaker Mike Johnson talks about potential impact of Tuesday’s elections on the government shutdownThe results of those contests — the first general election of Trump’s second term — will be heralded by the victors as either a major repudiation or resounding stamp of approval of his second-term agenda. That’s especially true in high-profile races for Virginia and New Jersey governor, New York City mayor, and a California proposition to redraw its congressional district boundaries. More than half of the states will hold contests on Tuesday. Here’s a look at some of the major statewide and local races on the ballot: In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli are the nominees to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. Sherrill is a four-term U.S. representative and former Navy helicopter pilot. Ciattarelli is a former state Assemblyman backed by Trump. In 2021, Ciattarelli came within about 3 percentage points of toppling Murphy.In Virginia, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger look to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. While Spanberger has made some efforts to focus on topics other than Trump in stump speeches, the president remained a major topic of conversation throughout the campaign, from comments Earle-Sears made about him in 2022 to some of his more polarizing policies, such as the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill tax and spending cut measure and the widespread dismissal of federal workers, many of whom live in northern Virginia.Trump was scheduled to participate in telephone rallies for the candidates on Monday night. As the only gubernatorial races held in the year following a presidential election, the contests have long served as the first major test of voter sentiment toward the party holding the White House. In every race for governor since 1973, one or both states have elected a governor from a party different than that of the sitting president. The race to lead the nation’s largest city features Democratic state legislator Zohran Mamdani, independent candidate and former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.Mamdani’s comfortable victory over Cuomo in the June primary generated excitement from the party’s more progressive wing and apprehension among the party establishment. Party leaders like Gov. Kathy Hochul and U.S. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries eventually endorsed the self-described democratic socialist months after he won the nomination.The winner will replace outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, who initially sought renomination as a Democrat. After losing the primary, Adams opted to run as an independent, but dropped out of the race in September and eventually endorsed Cuomo. In February, the Trump Justice Department asked a court to drop corruption charges against Adams because the case impeded Trump’s “immigration objectives.” Trump later said he’d like to see both Adams and Sliwa drop out of the race in an effort to defeat Mamdani. California voters will decide a statewide ballot measure that would enact a new congressional map that could flip as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats to Democratic control. Proposition 50, championed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, is in response to a new Texas map that state Republicans enacted in August as part of Trump’s efforts to keep the U.S. House under Republican control in the 2026 midterms. The Texas plan, which could help Republicans flip five Democratic-held U.S. House seats, has sparked an escalating gerrymandering arms race among states to pass new maps outside of the regular once-a-decade schedule. Control of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will be at stake when voters cast Yes or No votes on whether to retain three justices from the high court’s 5-2 Democratic majority. Partisan control of the court could have major implications for the 2028 presidential race, since justices might be asked to rule on election disputes, as they did in 2020. Spending on Tuesday’s contests is on track to exceed $15 million as Republicans have campaigned to end the majority and Democrats have responded. If all three justices are ousted, a deadlock in the confirmation process to replace them could result in a court tied at 2-2. An election to fill any vacant seats for full 10-year terms would be held in 2027. Virginia attorney generalRepublican incumbent Jason Miyares seeks a second term against Democrat Jay Jones. Much of the fall campaign has focused on text messages suggesting violence against political rivals that Jones sent in 2022.Texas-18 Sixteen candidates hope to fill a vacant congressional seat previously held by the late Democratic U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner.State legislaturesControl of the Minnesota Senate and Virginia House of Delegates is at stake, while New Jersey Democrats defend their 52-28 General Assembly majority.Ballot measuresMaine voters will decide statewide questions on voting and a “red flag” law aimed at preventing gun violence. Texas’ 17 ballot measures include constitutional amendments on parental rights and limiting voting to U.S. citizens. Colorado and Washington also have statewide measures on the ballot.Mayors Detroit, Pittsburgh, Jersey City and Buffalo will elect new mayors, while incumbents in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Cincinnati seek another term.
WASHINGTON —
One year after Donald Trump retook the White House and set into motion a dramatic expansion of executive power, the Republican president figures prominently in state and local elections being held Tuesday.
Video above: House Speaker Mike Johnson talks about potential impact of Tuesday’s elections on the government shutdown
The results of those contests — the first general election of Trump’s second term — will be heralded by the victors as either a major repudiation or resounding stamp of approval of his second-term agenda. That’s especially true in high-profile races for Virginia and New Jersey governor, New York City mayor, and a California proposition to redraw its congressional district boundaries.
More than half of the states will hold contests on Tuesday. Here’s a look at some of the major statewide and local races on the ballot:
In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli are the nominees to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. Sherrill is a four-term U.S. representative and former Navy helicopter pilot. Ciattarelli is a former state Assemblyman backed by Trump. In 2021, Ciattarelli came within about 3 percentage points of toppling Murphy.
In Virginia, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger look to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. While Spanberger has made some efforts to focus on topics other than Trump in stump speeches, the president remained a major topic of conversation throughout the campaign, from comments Earle-Sears made about him in 2022 to some of his more polarizing policies, such as the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill tax and spending cut measure and the widespread dismissal of federal workers, many of whom live in northern Virginia.
Trump was scheduled to participate in telephone rallies for the candidates on Monday night.
As the only gubernatorial races held in the year following a presidential election, the contests have long served as the first major test of voter sentiment toward the party holding the White House. In every race for governor since 1973, one or both states have elected a governor from a party different than that of the sitting president.
The race to lead the nation’s largest city features Democratic state legislator Zohran Mamdani, independent candidate and former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.
Mamdani’s comfortable victory over Cuomo in the June primary generated excitement from the party’s more progressive wing and apprehension among the party establishment. Party leaders like Gov. Kathy Hochul and U.S. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries eventually endorsed the self-described democratic socialist months after he won the nomination.
The winner will replace outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, who initially sought renomination as a Democrat. After losing the primary, Adams opted to run as an independent, but dropped out of the race in September and eventually endorsed Cuomo. In February, the Trump Justice Department asked a court to drop corruption charges against Adams because the case impeded Trump’s “immigration objectives.” Trump later said he’d like to see both Adams and Sliwa drop out of the race in an effort to defeat Mamdani.
California voters will decide a statewide ballot measure that would enact a new congressional map that could flip as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats to Democratic control.
Proposition 50, championed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, is in response to a new Texas map that state Republicans enacted in August as part of Trump’s efforts to keep the U.S. House under Republican control in the 2026 midterms. The Texas plan, which could help Republicans flip five Democratic-held U.S. House seats, has sparked an escalating gerrymandering arms race among states to pass new maps outside of the regular once-a-decade schedule.
Control of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will be at stake when voters cast Yes or No votes on whether to retain three justices from the high court’s 5-2 Democratic majority.
Partisan control of the court could have major implications for the 2028 presidential race, since justices might be asked to rule on election disputes, as they did in 2020. Spending on Tuesday’s contests is on track to exceed $15 million as Republicans have campaigned to end the majority and Democrats have responded.
If all three justices are ousted, a deadlock in the confirmation process to replace them could result in a court tied at 2-2. An election to fill any vacant seats for full 10-year terms would be held in 2027.
Virginia attorney general
Republican incumbent Jason Miyares seeks a second term against Democrat Jay Jones. Much of the fall campaign has focused on text messages suggesting violence against political rivals that Jones sent in 2022.
Texas-18
Sixteen candidates hope to fill a vacant congressional seat previously held by the late Democratic U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner.
State legislatures
Control of the Minnesota Senate and Virginia House of Delegates is at stake, while New Jersey Democrats defend their 52-28 General Assembly majority.
Ballot measures
Maine voters will decide statewide questions on voting and a “red flag” law aimed at preventing gun violence. Texas’ 17 ballot measures include constitutional amendments on parental rights and limiting voting to U.S. citizens. Colorado and Washington also have statewide measures on the ballot.
Mayors
Detroit, Pittsburgh, Jersey City and Buffalo will elect new mayors, while incumbents in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Cincinnati seek another term.
Election offices across Northern California are preparing for a rush of voters, with Election Day in just three days. Many offices have taken extra steps to ensure transparency and trust this election cycle.Ballots are being cast and counted in Placer County elections.”We want to make sure that it’s counted and not tampered with anywhere along the lines,” said voter Bryan Keenan.Keenan said he always votes on election day, but didn’t want to take any chances this time.And he wanted to see his ballot scanned into the system.”We don’t know what’s going to happen, so I’m just being cautious and making sure that we can make sure that our votes are counted,” he said.Placer County has started what it calls “sign, scan and go.”People can fill out their ballots at home, but instead of dropping it in the ballot box, they bring it inside to get scanned.”You can open that envelope and just scan your ballot right there in front of you,” said Registrar of Voters, Ryan Ronco. “You get to see your ballot counted so you don’t have to worry about when is the ballot going to be counted. You know it’s counted and part of the election night results for this Tuesday.”If voters want to see the counting in action, Ronco will also give people a tour and share the process. “We want people to understand that this process is their process. It’s not my process. It’s not Placer County’s process. It’s the people’s process,” said Ronco.Other voters, like the Boyetts want to stick to the voting booths.It’s Michaelle’s first time ever casting a ballot at age 57.”I do feel secure here, doing pen to paper and having it, acknowledged here in person,” she said.”I did the original way because I feel that’s the best way to go about it,” said Brian Boyett. Ronco said election officials want people to know they have a say. They also have live cameras set up in certain areas of the building, where people can watch a livestream from home 24/7.”Transparency is very, very important to us,” said Ronco. So far, Placer County has 50 percent voter turnout. It expects to reach at least 90 percent turnout. For more information about the November election, including key issues and other races on the ballot, check out the KCRA 3 Voter Guide.Find more political news from our national team here.
ROCKLIN, Calif. —
Election offices across Northern California are preparing for a rush of voters, with Election Day in just three days.
Many offices have taken extra steps to ensure transparency and trust this election cycle.
“We want to make sure that it’s counted and not tampered with anywhere along the lines,” said voter Bryan Keenan.
Keenan said he always votes on election day, but didn’t want to take any chances this time.
And he wanted to see his ballot scanned into the system.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen, so I’m just being cautious and making sure that we can make sure that our votes are counted,” he said.
Placer County has started what it calls “sign, scan and go.”
People can fill out their ballots at home, but instead of dropping it in the ballot box, they bring it inside to get scanned.
“You can open that envelope and just scan your ballot right there in front of you,” said Registrar of Voters, Ryan Ronco. “You get to see your ballot counted so you don’t have to worry about when is the ballot going to be counted. You know it’s counted and part of the election night results for this Tuesday.”
If voters want to see the counting in action, Ronco will also give people a tour and share the process.
“We want people to understand that this process is their process. It’s not my process. It’s not Placer County’s process. It’s the people’s process,” said Ronco.
Other voters, like the Boyetts want to stick to the voting booths.
It’s Michaelle’s first time ever casting a ballot at age 57.
“I do feel secure here, doing pen to paper and having it, acknowledged here in person,” she said.
“I did the original way because I feel that’s the best way to go about it,” said Brian Boyett.
Ronco said election officials want people to know they have a say. They also have live cameras set up in certain areas of the building, where people can watch a livestream from home 24/7.
“Transparency is very, very important to us,” said Ronco.
So far, Placer County has 50 percent voter turnout. It expects to reach at least 90 percent turnout.
For more information about the November election, including key issues and other races on the ballot, check out the KCRA 3 Voter Guide.
The results are in, and Keir Starmer is on track to be Britain’s next Prime Minister.
The nationwide exit poll, which is not 100% accurate but rarely far off, has forecast an enormous majority for the Labour Party over the Conservatives of 279 seats, a majority that has been predicted by virtually every poll for months.
According to the exit poll, Labour will win 410 seats, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak‘s Conservatives will take 131 and the Liberal Democrats are in third on 61. There are 650 up for grabs. If the exit poll comes true, the win for Labour will be almost as large as Tony Blair’s momentous 1997 victory. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is predicted to gain 13 seats, far exceeding expectations, making it the country’s fourth biggest party.
Starmer, Sunak and hundreds of candidates across the UK will now spend the next few hours anxiously observing just how accurate the exit poll turns out to be. Unlike pre-election day polls that track voter intention, this huge countrywide poll directly asks voters at polling stations who they have just voted for, and is therefore far more accurate.
The first constituencies are expected to announce winners in an hour or so and the final overall result will likely be unveiled in the early hours of the morning.
Starmer’s landslide victory, which, if realized, will bring an end to 14 years of Conservative rule, comes as little surprise, although Labour has spent the past six weeks warning voters that the polls are not a foregone conclusion. Starmer has led the Labour Party since the disastrous previous election defeat in 2019. He lacks charisma, and has angered those on the left of the party due to a wealth of U-turns on radical policies, but he is broadly viewed as a safe pair of hands who has turned the party from oblivion to today’s electoral force.
An exit poll predicting that the Labour Party led by Keir Starmer will win 410 seats in Britain’s general election is projected onto BBC Broadcasting House in London. Image: OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images.
Following the disastrous reigns of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, Sunak’s 18-month stint in office has seen a steadying of the ship while rarely moving the dial. He ran a feisty campaign but it was littered with gaffes, including the rain-soaked election announcement and decision to leave the commemorative D-Day celebrations early, while has has had to face the re-emergence of Donald Trump’s pal Nigel Farage in the political sphere with his Reform UK party.
Reporting restrictions that have been in place for the past 15 hours while Brits have voted have now been lifted and audiences can tune in to the likes of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News or even GB News to see how things unfold through the night. Our primer on those preparations can be found here and we will keep things ticking on deadline.com.
Unless the exit poll has had a rare off day, it looks like the UK will have a new Prime Minister by the morning.
Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.
Donald Trump is determined to avoid accountability before the general election, and, so far, the U.S. Supreme Court is helping him.
Trump has no legal ground whatsoever to delay a ruling in his plea for presidential immunity. The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Department of Justice and thus could quash the prosecution altogether. The Supreme Court has shamed itself by being a party to this, when the sole issue before the Court is presidential immunity. By contrast, Special Counsel Jack Smith has both law and policy on his side in seeking a prompt determination on immunity and a speedy trial soon thereafter. Yet the Court has ignored all that.
The Supreme Court’s lollygagging is reflected in its scheduling the immunity case for a leisurely April 25 hearing. It’s too late to do anything about that now, but the Court has an opportunity to correct course following oral argument. The justices should press Trump’s counsel on what possible legitimate reason he has to oppose a speedy resolution of the appeal. And then they should rule with dispatch because there is still time, albeit barely, to vindicate the public’s right to a speedy trial.
Let’s recap how we arrived at the present moment. After Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled against Trump’s claim of presidential immunity on December 1 and Trump appealed that ruling to the D.C. Circuit, Smith asked the Supreme Court to hear the appeal immediately, leapfrogging the delay of the circuit-level argument and decision. Trump opposed that, and the Supreme Court declined Smith’s invitation. The circuit court expedited its appeal and on February 6 issued its decision, again rejecting Trump’s immunity argument in toto. Trump then sought a stay in the Supreme Court, and advocated various measures to slow the Court’s hearing of the case. The Supreme Court then deliberated for a couple of weeks before accepting the case for review, and not scheduling the argument until two months later—on the very last day of oral arguments for this session.
Were he not seeking to avoid any trial in advance of the general election so he could maximize the chances of becoming the next president of the United States, Trump would have an interest in a speedy resolution of the immunity question, in contrast to the foot-dragging positions he has advocated throughout the litigation of this issue. Anyone with a legitimate claim of immunity has every interest in not suffering a single day more under the opprobrium of multiple criminal charges, not to mention being under pretrial bail conditions and a gag order. (Trump’s lawyers have argued against his existing gag order, saying it sweeps so broadly as to undermine their client’s ability to campaign for the presidency.)
The law itself recognizes the need for speed on this issue. With questions of immunity, courts permit an appeal in advance of a trial and forgo the usual rule that appeals are permitted only after a verdict is reached. The hope, in allowing for this, is to relieve someone from the opprobrium and burden of a trial, if the defendant is indeed immune. For the Court to set such a prolonged schedule—antithetical to the appropriate time frame for the only issue actually before the justices—speaks volumes about the role the Court has chosen to play in advancing the interests of the former president over the rule of law.
The government has its own interests in seeking a prompt resolution of the immunity issue and a speedy criminal trial (and it has the same interest as a defendant in not subjecting someone to criminal charges who is immune from prosecution). But before delving into the government’s interests, let’s first dispense with a red herring: Special Counsel Smith is not disputing that Trump should be accorded sufficient time to prepare for trial. An inviolable constitutional safeguard is that all criminal defendants must be able to exercise their procedural rights to prepare. Judge Chutkan already weighed the parties’ competing claims. Her decision on a trial date fell well within the mark for similar cases, and that ruling is not on appeal (despite the Supreme Court’s behaving as if it were).
The district judge’s selected timeline (seven months from the August 1 indictment), in a case whose facts and substantial evidence were already available to the defendant, was longer than deadlines set all around the country. By way of comparison, next door in the more conservative Virginia district, defendants routinely go to trial at great speed, without conservative commentators going to the barricades over alleged violations of the rights of the accused. That Trump is a rich, white, and politically powerful man does not mean he should be accorded more (or fewer) rights than others. And Chutkan has said that when the case returns to her, she will give Trump more time to prepare.
With Trump’s rights intact, then, Smith has several legitimate grounds for the immunity appeal to be decided expeditiously and a trial to start as promptly as possible. DOJ internal policy prohibits taking action in a case for “the purpose of” choosing sides in or affecting the outcome of an election. That is unquestionable and not in dispute here. Rather, the point is that well-established neutral criminal-justice principles support a speedy trial. This trial’s outcome, of course, is not known in advance, and it may lead some voters to think better or worse of the defendant and the current presidential administration depending on the evidence and the outcome.
Moreover, the public has a profound interest in a fair and speedy trial. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court, the Speedy Trial Act “was designed not just to benefit defendants but also to serve the public interest.” The refrain that “justice too long delayed is justice denied” has unmistakable resonance in this criminal context. The special counsel’s briefs in the D.C. case are replete with references to this well-settled caselaw. This means that even when the accused is seeking to delay his day in court, that “does not alter the prosecutor’s obligation to see to it that the case is brought on for trial,” as the Supreme Court has well articulated. Many defendants seek to avoid the day of reckoning—hence Edward Bennett Williams’s famous quip that for the defense, an adjournment is equivalent to an acquittal. The law provides that the public, the prosecution, and most emphatically the courts need not oblige that stratagem.
What’s more, when a defendant seeks to postpone a trial until a point at which he can no longer be prosecuted, the Justice Department may request the trial be held before that deadline. The DOJ’s interest in deterrence and accountability warrants this action. If Trump should win the election, he will become immune as president from criminal trial for at least four years (and perhaps forever by seeking dismissal of the federal case with prejudice or testing the efficacy of granting himself a pardon). The Justice Department can accordingly uphold the public interest in deterrence and accountability by seeking the prompt conviction of the leader of an insurrection. This DOJ need not advance the goals of a future administration led by that very “oathbreaking insurrectionist.”
Another objective of criminal punishment is “specific deterrence,” ensuring the defendant herself does not commit offenses in the future. Given the grand jury’s determination that Trump committed felonies to try to interfere with the 2020 election, there are strong law-enforcement reasons to obtain a conviction to specifically deter Trump. Indeed, in proposing a trial date to Judge Chutkan, Smith quoted Justice Alito, on behalf of the whole Court, that speedy trials “serve the public interest by … preventing extended pretrial delay from impairing the deterrent effect of punishment.”
Trump’s public denigration of the legal system—the incessant claims that the criminal case is a witch hunt—also gives a nation committed to the rule of law a vital interest in holding a public trial where a jury can assess Trump’s actions. Trials can thus serve to restore faith in the justice system.
It is worth noting that when the government seeks its day in court, it simultaneously affords the defendant his day in court—providing him more process, not less. Indeed, the Department of Justice’s so-called 60-day rule—which generally forbids it from taking overt actions in non-public cases with respect to political candidates and closely related people right before an election—is there to avoid a federal prosecutor hurling untested new allegations against a political candidate precisely because he would not have time to clear his reputation before the election. Here, the government is seeking to provide just that forum for Trump to clear his name before the election—to test the criminal allegations against the highest legal standard we have for adjudicating facts—and yet right-wing critics attack Smith. Trump of course wants to avoid that test, but that is an interest the courts should abjure.
The justices still have time to get back on track. Trump’s claim that presidents have absolute immunity should be an easy issue to resolve given these criminal charges. Whether a president should have criminal immunity in some specific circumstances is an abstract question for another day, because efforts to stay in office and use the levers of the presidency are certainly not those specific circumstances. The appeals have delayed matters long enough at the expense of the right of the American people to a fair and speedy trial. Let them not stand in the way of ever having a trial at all.
Not too long ago, Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. Thepost–Trumpera had supposedly begun.
Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech.
Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?
I talk with Republican-primary voters in focus groups every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself. Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment.
The other candidates hoped to be able to defeat Trump even as they accommodated his behavior and made excuses for his criminality. They even said they would support his reelection. By doing so, they established a permission structure for Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.
My focus groups over the past few years can be seen as a travelogue through the GOP’s journey back to Trump. Three key themes emerged that help explain why Trump’s opponents failed to gain traction.
First, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Republican field didn’t offer voters anything new.
Nikki Haley and Mike Pence cast themselves as avatars of the pre-Trump GOP. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy did their best to imitate Trump, presenting themselves as younger and more competent stewards of the same MAGA agenda. None of them offered a viable alternative to Trump; instead, they spent their resources trying not to anger his supporters.
But Republican voters don’t want Reagan Republicanism. Old-school conservatives may pine for a return to balanced budgets, personal responsibility, and American leadership in the world (guilty). But a greater share of Republican voters prefer an isolationist foreign policy and candidates who promise to punish their domestic enemies.
“The feds, both parties, the elites … want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected,” said Bret, a two-time Trump voter from Georgia. “And that would be the wrong direction, in my opinion.”
And voters aren’t interested in Trump-lite when they can have the real thing. Trump’s supporters see in him a leader who’s willing to fight for them. No other candidate proved they could do that better than Trump.
“We need a man that is strong as hell, a brick house,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from South Carolina, in May 2023. “He is that man.”
Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disruptor. In the business world, you bring in a disruptor when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”
Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”
“Does it kind of feel in a sense that he just kind of gave up?” Ashley, another Iowa Republican, asked about DeSantis before he dropped out of the race.
Pence, Chris Christie, and the other also-rans came in for much worse criticism. “I don’t know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point,” Justin, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said of Pence. “I think he’s alienated everyone.”
The second theme: Trump’s competitors declined to hit him on his 91 felony counts, despite the fact that voters say they have serious concerns about them. Instead, most of them (with the honorable exception of Christie and Asa Hutchinson) actively defended Trump.
DeSantis called the charges the “criminalization of politics.” Haley said the charges were “more about revenge than … about justice.” And Ramaswamy promised to pardon Trump “on day one.”
By the time Haley started attacking Trump in recent weeks, it was already too late. She can call him “diminished,” “unhinged,” “weak in the knees,” and “incredibly reckless,” but voters saw her raise her hand six months ago when asked whether she would support him if he became the nominee.
If Trump’s primary opponents weren’t going to hold his indictments against him, why should GOP voters? “It’s all a witch hunt,” Dennis, a two-time Trump voter from Michigan, said of the charges. The Department of Justice and state prosecutors bringing the cases “are terrified of Trump for whatever reason … because they’re afraid he will run and they’re afraid he will win.”
Lastly, Trump started to be seen as electable. This represented a big shift from a year ago, when voters had concerns about Trump’s ability to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch.
In February 2023, Isaac, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of Trump: “I just feel he is unelectable. I think you could put him up there against fricking Donald Duck and Donald Duck will end up coming out ahead. He just ticks too many people off.”
But as they got a better look at the alternatives—and as they came to believe that Biden was too frail, weak, and senile to be competitive in the general election—GOP voters came around.
“I’m convinced that he is in the final stages of dementia,” Clifton, an Iowa Republican, said of Biden. “I mean, yeah, Trump’s an asshole and he doesn’t have a filter and he says stupid things, but it doesn’t matter.”
These voters have come to believe that the election is a choice between senility and recklessness. And they’ve decided they prefer the latter.
DeSantis’s rise and fall is the clearest demonstration of how we got here. For a time, he looked like the greatest threat to Trump, leveraging culture-war issues to gin up the base while projecting an image of being, as one voter put it to me, “Trump not on steroids.”
He sent refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, went after Disney, banned books—and the base loved him for it. “For the most part, from what I hear, he’s doing a good job in Florida,” said Chris, a Republican voter from Illinois, in March 2023. “He stands for a lot of the same values that I think I do.”
But over time, DeSantis’s star began to fade. The more retail campaigning he did, and the more voters were exposed to him, the less they liked what they saw.
“I think he was a strong candidate before he was actually a candidate,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire in December 2023. He cited “things he’s done in Florida and how big he won his last governor’s election.” But now, he said, “I think he got a little too into the social issues.”
By the time DeSantis dropped out, skepticism had turned to contempt among the Republican voters I spoke with. Sean, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, put it succinctly last month: “He has a punchable face, and I just don’t like him.”
This time last year, DeSantis had a real shot at consolidating the move-on-from-Trump faction of the GOP while making inroads with the maybe-Trumpers—each of which constitutes about a third of the party. Instead, he tried to wrestle the former president for his always-Trump base, a doomed effort. He couldn’t get traction with the always-Trumpers and he alienated the move-on-from-Trumpers. It was a hopeless strategy for a flawed candidate.
Haley may hold out for a few more weeks, even though she has virtually no chance of beating Trump outright. Her only real incentive for remaining in the race is to be the last person standing in the event that he is imprisoned or suffers a major health event. Barring either of these scenarios, Trump’s path to the nomination is clear.
This outcome wasn’t inevitable; Trump was beatable. His opponents had real opportunities to cleave off his support, but they squandered them.
The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party. They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job.
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In late 2021, Tom Suozzi made an announcement that exasperated Democratic Party leaders: The third-term representative would give up a reelection bid for his highly competitive New York House district to mount a long-shot primary challenge against Governor Kathy Hochul.
Suozzi got trounced, but the ripple effects of his ill-fated run extended far beyond his Long Island district. Democrats ended up losing their narrow majority in the House, in part because the seat Suozzi vacated went to a little-known Republican named George Santos. He’s not so little-known anymore. Nor is he in Congress, having been expelled in December after his colleagues discovered that his stated biography was a fiction and that his campaign was an alleged criminal enterprise.
In a special election next week, Suozzi will try to reclaim the seat he abandoned—and bring the Democrats one step closer to recapturing the House. He’s made amends with party leaders (including Hochul), but he’s not apologizing. “I don’t regret any of my decisions,” Suozzi told me recently. “When things don’t work out, that’s the way it is.”
A pro-business moderate, Suozzi helped start the cross-party Problem Solvers Caucus in the House after Donald Trump won the presidency. He told me that his penchant for bipartisanship makes him “a very poor candidate” in a Democratic primary—he’s now lost two such gubernatorial campaigns by more than 50 points—but a much better one in a general election.
Officials in both parties give Suozzi a slight edge; he has more money and is much better known than his GOP opponent, Mazi Pilip, a county legislator who spent her teenage years in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. But Suozzi is trying to run as an underdog, shunning a Democratic brand that he believes has been soiled on Long Island by voter frustration with the migrant crisis, the high cost of living, and turmoil overseas. He’s kept his distance from President Joe Biden, who, according to both Democratic and Republican strategists, is no more popular in the district than Trump. “If I run my campaign to say, ‘I’m Tom Suozzi. I’m the Democrat, and my opponent’s the Republican,’ I lose this race,” Suozzi said at a rally before members of the carpenters’ union on Saturday.
The third congressional district borders the blue bastion of New York City and includes a sliver of Queens, but Republicans have clobbered Democrats across Long Island in recent years. Tuesday’s special election represents the Democrats’ first attempt to claw back some of that territory and test out messages that they hope can resonate in suburban swing districts across the country this fall.
Like other Democrats, Suozzi is emphasizing his support for abortion rights, an issue that has helped the party limit GOP gains since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But he’s also pitching himself as a bipartisan dealmaker—his campaign slogan is “Let’s fix this!” Suozzi is betting that voters are angered as much by congressional inaction on issues such as immigration and border security as they are by Biden or his policies. If he’s right, the GOP’s rejection this week of a bipartisan border deal that its leaders had initially demanded will play into his hands.
Whether Suozzi’s campaign proves effective next week will offer clues about the swing districts that could determine control of Congress. A win could point the way for Democratic candidates to redirect attacks on Biden’s record and ease fears that the border impasse could be an insurmountable liability this fall. But his defeat in a district that ought to be winnable for Democrats would suggest that the party is in real trouble as the general election begins.
Next week’s election will also serve as a test of whether Democrats can turn out voters for a candidate who, like Biden, doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm.
Suozzi, 61, is a familiar figure on Long Island; he became a mayor at 31 and then won two terms as a county executive overseeing a population of 1.3 million people in Nassau County. But he’s also suffered his share of defeats. Eliot Spitzer beat him by more than 60 points in the 2006 primary for governor. Suozzi then lost two campaigns for county executive before winning a House seat in 2016. “He felt that he was destined to be president of the United States,” former Representative Peter King, a Republican who served alongside Suozzi in the House and has known him for decades, told me. “Tom started off as the young superstar, and then suddenly you become old.”
On Saturday, local labor organizers amassed several hundred members of the carpenters’ union in a banquet hall for the rally. Most of them had been bused from outside the district, and many of them weren’t exactly excited to be there. “We’re here under protest,” one union member grumbled as I searched for actual Suozzi supporters in the crowd. The murmuring laborers showed so little interest in the speakers who were touting Suozzi that the candidate at one point awkwardly grabbed the microphone and implored them to pay attention.
Some of the attendees who did live in Nassau County weren’t thrilled about the Democrat, repeating attacks from GOP ads that have been airing nonstop in recent weeks. “Suozzi’s terrible on the border,” said Jackson Klyne, 44, who told me he didn’t plan to vote for either Suozzi or Pilip next week. A Biden voter in 2020, Klyne said that “it would probably be Trump” for him in November.
Suozzi must also win over Democrats who are unhappy that he abandoned his congressional seat to challenge Hochul, leading to the election of Santos. “It was a dangerous choice,” Stephanie Visconti, a 47-year-old attorney from New Hyde Park, told me. “I thought it was self-serving.”
Visconti volunteers with Engage Long Island, an affiliate of the progressive organizing group Indivisible that endorsed a primary challenger to Suozzi for Congress in 2020. But she fully backs him now; on Saturday, she and other members of the group were knocking on doors for his campaign. “He is the right candidate for right now,” she said, citing the need for Democrats to win back control of the House. “Looking at the global big picture, this for us is the first step toward making bigger and broader changes.”
Biden carried the district in 2020, but Republicans have been ascendant on Long Island ever since. They swept the House races in the midterms and won big local races again last year. Santos defeated the Democratic nominee in the third district by seven points in 2022, and Suozzi isn’t sure he would have won had he been on the ballot. When I asked him what he’d say to people who argue that he bears some responsibility for Santos’s election, Suozzi replied, “‘Thank you for your endorsement, because you’re saying I’m the only person who could have won.’”
Republican leaders are relying on Biden’s unpopularity and their party’s prodigious turnout machine to keep the seat. They picked Pilip as their candidate—the special election had no primary—in part because in the aftermath of October 7, they hoped that her connection to Israel would resonate in a district where about 20 percent of the electorate is Jewish. (Suozzi is also a longtime supporter of Israel. Within a week of Pilip’s selection, he traveled there to meet with the families of hostages held by Hamas.)
With only a few exceptions, Pilip has kept a low profile for a political newcomer. She’s agreed to just one debate with Suozzi, three days before the election, and she hasn’t held many publicly promoted campaign events. (Her campaign did not make her available for an interview.) Nassau County Republicans scheduled their biggest rally of the election for a Saturday, when Pilip, who observes the Sabbath, would not be able to attend. She filmed a short video to be played in her absence. “The strategy is intentional,” Steve Israel, a Democrat who represented the third district in the House for 16 years, told me. “She is untested, and Republicans fear that she will say something that could effectively lose the election. They’d rather take their lumps for hiding her.”
That approach could be risky given the district’s experience with Santos. “We’ve already had someone we didn’t know. We don’t want that again,” Judi Bosworth, a Democratic former town supervisor, said as she campaigned with Suozzi.
Abortion has been a central issue in the race; Democratic ads have warned that a vote for Pilip could lead to a national ban. But in the closing weeks, the migrant crisis has come to the fore. GOP commercials blame Suozzi and Biden for the “invasion” at the southern border, and Suozzi has criticized Pilip for opposing the bipartisan border-security deal unveiled this week in the Senate. Although national issues are dominating the race, neither candidate wants to be associated with their party’s leaders in Washington. Pilip, until recently a registered Democrat, has declined to say whether she voted for Trump in 2020 and has yet to endorse his comeback bid. When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke at a rally for Suozzi on Saturday, the Democrat’s campaign did not invite the press. The day before, the Pilip campaign kept quiet about an appearance by Speaker Mike Johnson.
The outcome next week could have an immediate impact in the narrowly divided House, where Republicans have only a three-vote majority. Earlier this week, Republicans fell just one vote short of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; a Suozzi victory would likely keep it on hold, at least for the time being. But Suozzi wants to make a deeper impression in a second stint in Congress. He has campaigned not as a dispassionate centrist but as an impatient negotiator anxious to get back to the bargaining table.
He had wanted a bigger job altogether, but he assured me that he would not be bored by a return to the House. I asked him what message his victory would send. He rattled off a list of bipartisan deals he wants to strike—on the border, Ukraine, housing, climate change, and more. “If I win,” he said, “I can go to my colleagues in Washington and say, ‘Wake up. This is what the people want.’”
The latest GOP presidential debate demonstrated again that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are pursuing utterly inimical strategies for catching the front-runner, Donald Trump.
The debate, on Wednesday evening, also showed why neither approach looks remotely sufficient to dislodge Trump from his commanding position in the race.
DeSantis delivered a stronger overall debate performance than Haley. But the evening mostly displayed the structural limitations of the theory that each campaign is operating under, and the limited progress either candidate has made toward surmounting those obstacles.
As he showed during the debate, DeSantis is grounding his coalition on the right by defining himself as an unflagging champion for the party’s most conservative elements. During the debate, the Florida governor’s frequent attacks on Haley, and more infrequent (and oblique) jabs at Trump, both represented variations on the charge that neither rival can be trusted to advance conservative priorities.
Haley, in mirror image, is grounding her coalition in the party’s center. She has focused on consolidating the centrist GOP voters and donors who have long expressed the most resistance to Trump. That includes moderates, people with at least a four-year college degree, GOP-leaning independents, and suburbanites.
DeSantis’s vision, in other words, has been to start on the right and over time build toward the center; Haley wants to grow in the opposite direction by locking down the center, and then expanding into the right.
Supporters of both Haley and DeSantis believe that the other’s approach lowers their ceiling too much to ultimately topple Trump. The problem for all Republicans looking for an alternative to the former president is that last week’s debate offered the latest evidence that each camp may be right about the other’s limitations. With the voting beginning only five weeks from Monday in the Iowa caucus, neither Haley nor DeSantis has found any effective way to loosen Trump’s grip on the party.
Neither, in fact, has even tried hard to do so. Instead, they have centered their efforts almost entirely on trying to squeeze out the other to become Trump’s principal rival. To beat Trump, or to come close, eventually either of them will need to peel away some of the roughly 60 percent of GOP voters who now say in national polls that they intend to support him for the nomination. But both have behaved as if they can leave that challenge for a later day, while focusing on trying to clear the field to create a one-on-one contest with the front-runner.
The theory in DeSantis’s camp has been that the only way to beat Trump is to aim directly at his core supporters with a conservative message. DeSantis advisers acknowledge that his positioning has not connected with many centrist voters. But his camp believes that if DeSantis can emerge after the early states as the last viable alternative to Trump, the moderates most resistant to the former president will have no choice but to rally around the Florida governor, even if they consider him too Trump-like himself.
The voters now drawn to Haley “share a goal in common with Governor DeSantis in that they want an alternative to Trump,” Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa religious conservative who has endorsed DeSantis, told me. “The more that DeSantis proves there is one alternative to Trump, he will start peeling off that lane as well.” By contrast, Vander Plaats argues, if DeSantis falls out of contention, his support is more likely to flow back to Trump than toward Haley. “I haven’t heard any supporter of DeSantis yet saying: ‘I’m deciding between him and Haley,’” he told me. “Basically, they are between Trump and him.”
DeSantis’s supporters anticipate that his strategy will pay off if he finishes strongly in Iowa. But so far, his decision to offer voters what amounts to Trumpism without Trump has returned few dividends. With his Trump-like agenda on immigration and foreign policy, and emphasis on culture-war issues such as transgender rights, DeSantis has alienated many of the centrist GOP voters most dubious of the former president while failing to dislodge many of his core supporters.
“Ron DeSantis should have consolidated the non-Trump wing of the party from the get go and then gone after soft Trump supporters,” Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me in an email. “Instead, he tried to out-MAGA Trump from the right and alienated not only soft-Trump voters but also the more pragmatic wing of the party. It was a strategic blunder.”
Haley has filled that vacuum with the elements of the party most skeptical of Trump. Her approach has been to start with the primary voters who like the former president the least, with the hope of eventually attracting more of those ambivalent about him. Her backers believe she has a better chance than DeSantis to reach those “maybe Trump” voters. As the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me, DeSantis “has tried to appeal to some of the ‘always Trump’ voters, but the ‘always Trump’ voters are always Trump for a reason. Nikki Haley seems to have figured out the job is to consolidate the ‘maybe Trump’ voters who supported Trump twice but now … want a different style and different temperament.”
DeSantis still leads Haley in most national polls, though that may be changing. And he remains even or ahead of her in the polls in Iowa, where he has campaigned relentlessly, won support from most of the state’s Republican leadership (including Governor Kim Reynolds), attracted broad backing in the influential religious-conservative community, and spent heavily on building a grassroots organization.
But DeSantis is in a much weaker position in the other early states. A recent poll by CNN and the University of New Hampshire found him falling to fourth in the Granite State. That poll found Haley emerging as a clear second to Trump, as did another recent CNN survey in South Carolina. In each state, she attracted about twice as much support as DeSantis did. Polls also consistently show Haley running much better than DeSantis, or Trump, in hypothetical general election match ups against President Joe Biden.
All of these positive trends largely explain why DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP contender, attacked Haley at the debate. Haley was right when she suggested that the attention reflected anxiety in DeSantis’s camp about her rise. But that motivation doesn’t necessarily make the attacks any less effective.
After delivering the most assured performances in the first three GOP debates, Haley seemed wobbly last week as DeSantis and Ramaswamy pummeled her from the right. Dave Wilson, a longtime Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me that Haley had not faced that kind of sustained ideological assault from the right during her career in the state. “It hasn’t been used against her in South Carolina,” Wilson said. “Nikki has never been some kind of mainstreamer or a shill for the big corporations. That’s not who she has portrayed herself as, or how she governed, when she was governor of South Carolina.”
At the debate, Haley never seemed to find solid ground when DeSantis accused her of resisting the hard-line approaches he has championed in Florida on issues affecting transgender people. Haley neither embraced DeSantis’s agenda nor challenged it and instead insisted he was mischaracterizing her own record, without entirely clarifying her views. “Especially on those types of cultural issues, it is probably always going to be advantage DeSantis,” Vander Plaats told me. “I think if you turned down the volume and just [looked at] the physical appearance, Nikki was very concerned at that point, like she knew she was in a tough space, and DeSantis was in a very confident space.”
Her uneasy response on issues of LGBTQ rights was a stark contrast to the confident course she has set on abortion. One reason Haley has gained favor with more centrist Republicans is that she has so clearly argued that the GOP cannot achieve sweeping federal abortion restrictions and must pursue consensus around more limited goals. “I think Nikki Haley talks about social issues the same way that real people do: not through demagoguery or hysterics like some candidates, but having real policy disagreements while showing compassion for those affected—and I think that’s the winning formula,” Stroman said.
But at the debate, Haley was unwilling to apply that formula to LGBTQ issues, even as she seemed to seek a more empathetic tone than DeSantis.
“She has clearly thought through a more moderate, nuanced position on abortion that would have greater appeal in a general election,” Alice Stewart, a longtime GOP strategist who has worked for leading social-conservative candidates, told me. “It appears she has not mapped out her position on other culture-war issues, such as transgender procedures and school bathrooms.”
Doubling down on his message at the debate, DeSantis’s campaign told me afterward that “within the confines of the Constitution” he would support nationalizing the key laws affecting transgender people that he has passed in Florida, such as banning gender-affirming care for minors. Haley’s campaign still appeared focused mostly on deflecting this argument: In comments to me after the debate, her aides stressed that although DeSantis criticized her for opposing legislation as governor requiring students to use the restroom of the gender they were assigned at birth, he similarly indicated that the issue was not a priority for him not long thereafter, during his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018. Their message was that DeSantis is stressing these issues now merely out of expediency. But in an email exchange with me after the debate, Haley’s campaign drew a clearer distinction with DeSantis than she did during the encounter: rather than national action to impose on every state the restrictions Florida has approved on LGBTQ issues, the campaign said Haley would “encourage states to pass laws” that ban classroom discussion of sexual orientation or regulate bathroom use for transgender kids. The one exception the campaign noted is that, like DeSantis, she would also support national legislation banning transgender girls from competing in school sports.
The debate drew only a small audience and is unlikely by itself to significantly change the trajectory of the DeSantis and Haley competition. Wilson and Stroman both said they doubt that DeSantis’s ideological attacks will hurt Haley much in the South Carolina primary. “It’s going to be harder in South Carolina than he thinks, because everyone knows what Nikki Haley did in this state,” Wilson said. “Under her leadership, a lot of strong conservative stands were taken.”
But, of course, GOP voters don’t know nearly as much about Haley in the cascade of states that will vote in early March, after South Carolina. DeSantis supporters view her unsteady response to his ideological assault at the debate as validation of their belief that Haley can never attract enough conservative voters to genuinely threaten Trump. “There’s just no path for her to win the nomination,” Vander Plaats argued. “That lane doesn’t exist.”
The path for any alternative to beat Trump is a rocky one, but it’s premature to assume that Haley cannot outlast DeSantis to become the last viable challenger to the former president. She still has time to formulate better responses to the charge that she’s insufficiently conservative for the Trump-era GOP. Portraying Haley as too squishy in the culture war might help her in New Hampshire, the state where she’s hoping to emerge as Trump’s principal rival.
But the debate underscored her need to sharpen her answers on those issues as the race moves on. And for Haley’s supporters, it raised an ominous question: If she couldn’t respond more effectively to an attack on her conservative credentials from DeSantis and Ramaswamy, how would she hold up if she ever becomes enough of a threat for Donald Trump to press that case himself?
Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.
Anyone watching the fourth Republican primary debate tonight would be forgiven for thinking that Nikki Haley was the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination next year.
Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy sure were acting like it. Neither man had finished answering his first question before he began attacking the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador. “She caves any time the left comes after her, anytime the media comes after her,” warned DeSantis, the Florida governor. Ramaswamy went much further. He called Haley “corrupt” and “a fascist” for suggesting that social-media companies ban people from posting anonymously on their platforms.
The broadsides continued throughout the two-hour debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama: DeSantis and Ramaswamy used every opportunity to go after Haley, even when they were prodded to criticize the Republican who is actually dominating the primary race, Donald Trump.
“I’m loving all the attention, fellas,” Haley said at one point. What she’d love even more is about 30 additional points in the polls. As well as Haley has been doing lately, she is capturing just about 10 percent of Republican voters nationwide, according to the polling average. Time is running out for her—or any other GOP candidate—to catch Trump. He skipped this meeting of the Republican also-rans, just as he did the three previous debates. This debate narrowed to four Trump alternatives, but the evening devolved into a familiar dynamic: Most of the challengers largely declined to criticize—or even discuss—Trump.
Chris Christie was the exception, as usual. The former New Jersey governor lit into Trump and mocked his rivals for being too “timid” to do the same. “I’m in this race because the truth needs to be spoken: He is unfit,” Christie said. Acting the part of pundit as much as candidate, Christie noted ruefully how little Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy wanted to talk about Trump and how fearful they seemed to be of angering him. DeSantis tiptoed toward criticism of Trump when he warned Republicans not “to nominate somebody who is almost 80 years old.” “Father Time is undefeated,” DeSantis said. But when he danced around the question of whether Trump was mentally fit to serve again as president, Christie bashed him. “This is the problem with my three colleagues: You are afraid to offend.”
Ramaswamy was next to speak. Instead of contradicting Christie and confronting Trump, he held up a handwritten sign that read, NIKKI=CORRUPT.
The reluctance of Trump’s rivals (aside from Christie) to attack the former president has frustrated Republicans who are rooting against his renomination. But on some level it makes sense. Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy aren’t actually running against Trump—at least not yet. The best way to think of these Trump-less debates is as a primary within a primary. The four Republicans on stage tonight were battling merely for the right to face off against Trump. In sports terms, these preliminary matchups are like the divisional round of the NFL playoffs, except that Trump has already earned a bye to the conference championship. (The general election would be the Super Bowl.)
The all-important question is whether one of these four can break away from the others in time to wage a fair fight against Trump. The window for doing so is closing fast, but it is not shut completely. Although Trump is capturing nearly 60 percent of Republican primary voters in the national polling average, he remains below 50 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, the early states where his challengers are campaigning most aggressively. A majority of Republicans in both Iowa and New Hampshire are backing someone other than Trump at the moment, suggesting at least the possibility that Haley or DeSantis could consolidate the anti-Trump vote and overtake him in one or both states. Trump’s lead has been consistent—and it has actually grown since the debates started without him—but historically, primary races are most volatile in the final few weeks before voters begin casting ballots.
The debate stage has shrunk by half since the first GOP primary forum in August, when eight candidates met the Republican National Committee’s criteria for participation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his bid after appearing in last month’s debate in Miami, as did North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who did not qualify.
Yet four candidates might be as small as it gets. No more RNC-sanctioned debates are scheduled before the Iowa caucuses on January 15 or the New Hampshire primary eight days later. If Trump wins both states against a divided field—as polls suggest he will—his nomination would probably seem unstoppable.
The most likely path to preventing Trump’s nomination is the same as it was when the primary began: for anti-Trump Republicans to agree on a single candidate to go up against him one-on-one. Nikki Haley is making her move. But if tonight’s debate revealed anything, it’s that her Republican competitors aren’t ready to let her have that chance.
For some Republican voters, to attend a Nikki Haley campaign rally is to dive headfirst into the warm waters of an alternate reality—a reality in which Donald J. Trump is very old news.
Last Thursday, this comfortable refuge could be found at the Poor Boy’s Diner in Londonderry, New Hampshire, where a few dozen white retirees wedged into booths adorned with vintage license plates and travel posters suggesting a visit to sunny Waikiki. The crowd, mostly Republican and “undeclared” voters wearing sundry combinations of flannel and cable-knit, clapped along as Haley—a youthful 51-year-old—outlined her presidential priorities: securing the border, supporting veterans, promoting small business, and “removing the kick me sign from America’s back.” Haley’s voice was steady; her words were studied; and the attendees beamed from their tables as though they couldn’t believe their luck: Finally, their relieved smiles seemed to say, here was a conservative candidate who didn’t sound completely unhinged.
The voters I met had had it up to here with the former president, they told me: the insults, the drama, the interminable parade of indictments and gag orders. They’ve been yearning for a standard-issue Republican with governing experience and foreign-policy chops, and Haley, the former accountant turned South Carolina governor turned ambassador to the United Nations fits their bill and then some. When Haley finished speaking, voters scrambled to secure a campaign button reading NH ♥ NH. Some of them waited in line for half an hour to shake her hand.
If you haven’t checked the scoreboard lately, Haley’s support has been ticking up steadily for weeks. New polling shows her at nearly 20 percent support in New Hampshire, up more than a dozen points since August, and knocking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis out of second place. She also leads DeSantis in her home state of South Carolina. In Iowa, Haley’s support has grown to double digits, putting her in third.
Haley is not exactly gaining on Trump. In all three states, he’s leading the pack by roughly 30 points, which is a heck of a lot of ground for any candidate to make up. But in New Hampshire, voters were hopeful—even confident—that Haley could win this thing. Maybe, some told me, with a hint of desperation in their eyes, their Trump-free alternate reality could soon be the one we all live in. “She’s normal,” Bob Garvin, a lifelong Republican who had driven up with his wife from Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me outside the diner. With a sigh, he said, “I just want somebody normal to run for president.”
Some of Haley’s new support comes from her strong performance in the first two GOP primary debates, where she often stood, stoic and unimpressed, as the dudes shouted over one another. When Haley did speak, she generally sounded more measured—and frankly, more relatable—than the others. In the second debate, she turned, eyes rolling, toward the cocky newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy and channeled the exasperation many watching at home felt: “Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”
Haley has a clear lane. She’s seeking to build a coalition of Never Trump Republicans who’d really rather not pull the lever for Biden and onetime Trump voters who now find him tiresome. She also seems to be appealing to the types of Americans the GOP needs to win in a general election: the college-educated, women, suburbanites. DeSantis, who was once expected to bring the strongest primary challenge to Trump, no longer seems to have a lane at all: Voters who love the former president don’t need DeSantis as an option, and many of the voters who hate Trump have come to see DeSantis as a charmless, watered-down version of the big man himself. “He’d be Donald Trump in a Ron DeSantis mask,” one GOP voter told me in Londonderry.
Haley and DeSantis are surely both well aware that they’re vying for second place. The two have traded attack ads throughout the past month, and a few days ago, Haley was on the radio mocking the governor’s alleged use of heel lifts in his cowboy boots. Overall, though, the trend seems to be that, as the candidates introduce themselves to more and more Americans, DeSantis is losing fans and Haley is gaining them.
At a town-hall event that Thursday evening in nearby Nashua, Haley channeled Stevie Nicks in a white eyelet top and flared jeans—a look that probably worked well for her audience of a few hundred more silver-haired New Hampshirites. The vibe was decidedly un-Trumpian. At one point, the audience burst into admiring applause when a scheduled speaker highlighted Haley’s past life as an accountant.
In a disciplined, 30-minute stump speech, she laid out her conventionally conservative plans for shrinking the federal government, securing the border, and lowering taxes—but she also tossed in a few ideas that might appeal to Democrats, including boosting childhood-reading proficiency, reducing criminal-recidivism rates, and adjusting policy to support “the least of us.”
She took questions from the crowd, and when abortion inevitably came up, Haley was ready. “I am unapologetically pro-life,” she said. “But I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice.” As president, she elaborated, she’d restrict abortion in late pregnancy and promote “good quality” adoption.
Haley tends to speak with such a straight face that she appears almost stern. And she begins many sentences as though she is imparting a very wise lesson: “This is what I’ll tell you.” The voters I met found this appealing. Three separate women told me that they like Haley because they see her as a “strong woman.” One of them, Carol Holman, who had driven from nearby Merrimack with her husband, had voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. But she’s ready for a change.
“People are getting tired of hearing about Trump’s problems,” Holman told me, as she buttoned up her leopard-print coat. Holman loved Haley’s performance in the second debate, and couldn’t wait to hear from the candidate in person. “She knows how to do it; she’s not just a blowhard,” she said, citing Haley’s time as a governor. “She made up my mind tonight!”
The unfolding war in the Middle East also seems to have prompted more voters to take a second look at Haley’s campaign, given her two years of experience at the UN. “People are nervous right now, and she acknowledged a little bit of that fear,” Katherine Bonaccorso, a retired schoolteacher from Massachusetts, told me.
Haley sees the attacks on Ukraine and Israel “as a security issue” for America, Jeanene Cooper, who volunteers as a co-chair for Haley’s campaign in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, told me. “She believes in peace through strength.” In a television interview after the Hamas assault in southern Israel, Haley advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish them.” Haley has long been hawkish on foreign policy; it’s one of the major differences she has with Trump and DeSantis, who tend to be more isolationist.
The more people hear Haley, the more she’ll rise, Cooper said. It’s time, she added, for the lower-polling candidates—such as former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Ramaswamy—to drop out and endorse Haley. As for DeSantis, she added, he can’t fall that far and “think that somehow it’s going to come back.” (The DeSantis campaign has countered such assessments recently, saying they’re confident in the governor’s potential in Iowa—and arguing that polling at this stage in the primary season is not always predictive.)
The third GOP primary debate, which will be held Wednesday in Miami, could give Haley a further boost. And new rules for the fourth debate in December would reportedly require candidates to have reached 6 percent in the polls, which, if their present numbers hold, would narrow the stage to three candidates: DeSantis, Haley, and Ramaswamy (assuming that Trump continues to boycott the debates).
The path for Haley to progress requires DeSantis to fall flat. If she can knock him out of the way, Haley could come in second to Trump in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, and then score strongly in her home state of South Carolina, where voters know her best. Trump’s legal standing is an important variable: At least one of the former president’s criminal trials is scheduled to begin just before Super Tuesday, which could cause some of his supporters to switch candidates. If the more mainstream Republicans drop out and endorse her, that could theoretically bring her close to beating out Trump to clinch the GOP nomination.
That’s a lot of ifs. The added national scrutiny that comes with being a primary front runner could send Haley’s star plummeting just as quickly as it rose. But the biggest problem for her and her supporters is the same conundrum that Republican candidates faced in 2020, and again in the 2022 midterm elections: The stubborn core of the GOP base wants Trump and only Trump, even if others in the party are desperate to wake up in an alternate reality.
A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.
“There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”
But after hearing Trump’s abortion comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dickson, who is one of the architects of Texas’s so-called heartbeat ban, feels differently. He’d been helping plan a big Trump rally in Lubbock. Now he’s worried. “What I want to do is get up onstage and brag about Trump. But at this point, his statements do not represent what we have worked for for 50 years,” Dickson said. “The goal of the movement was not overturning Roe v. Wade—it was ending abortion in all 50 states.”
Trump confounded Dickson and the rest of the anti-abortion coalition when he told NBC’s Kristen Welker not only that a federal abortion ban would be low on his to-do list during a second term as president, but also that six-week abortion bans like the one in Florida are “terrible.” The outrage from the movement was predictably ferocious. “This isn’t just evil, it is absolutely delusional,” the conservative podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey wrote. Live Action’s founder, Lila Rose, tweeted that “Trump should not be the GOP nominee.” In an email to supporters, Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said, “Trump just broke my heart.”
Dickson felt equally bruised. If Trump really thinks Florida’s six-week ban is so bad, he mused, “then what does he believe about Texas outlawing abortion from the moment of conception?” If he thinks that’s terrible too, Trump “is going to lose a whole lot of Texas support.”
A few advocates say that, like Rose, they’re writing Trump off. Others have called on the former president to retract his comments. Neither reflex does justice to Trump, who has on occasion demonstrated savvier political instincts than his GOP opponents. What appears to be his current operating assumption—that talking about abortion bans is a turnoff for many voters—is a smart one: Most Americans support access to abortion. Trump is the only real contender among Republican presidential candidates acting in a way that acknowledges this fact. The question is: Will it hurt him?
The MAGA faithful have so far seen nothing to make them withdraw their support from Trump—after each of his multiple criminal indictments, their devotion has only deepened. Trump’s remarks about abortion seem similarly unlikely to damage his standing. In a general election, they might even help.
That’s because of Trump’s unusual capacity for shape-shifting. “He can say, ‘I gave you the Supreme Court,’ but also ‘I’d look for a compromise on a national level,’” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. He can sound moderate, in other words, “in a way that Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence would not.”
The Meet the Press interview with Welker did not immediately ring alarm bells in the pro-life camp. Although Trump refused to commit to any federal anti-abortion legislation, he did appear to embrace some form of restriction. He said he’d work with Democrats to come up with a number of weeks that will bring “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.” Standard fare for Trump: vague, noncommittal, self-aggrandizing. But then he brought up the six-week ban that his main primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had signed into law as the Heartbeat Act.
“Would you support that?” Welker asked.
“I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” Trump replied. And, well, that was that.
Right away, Team DeSantis had campaign staff posting assurances that, as president, DeSantis would “NEVER sell out conservatives to win praise from corporate media or the Left.” Other Republican primary candidates jumped into the fray too. “President Trump said he would negotiate with the Democrats and walk back away from what I believe we need, which is a 15-week limit on the federal level,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told a crowd in Mason City, Iowa. On CNN, former Vice President Mike Pence accused Trump of wanting to “marginalize the right to life.”
The right-to-life activists certainly saw it that way. “Heartbeat Laws,” Hawkins wrote in an open letter to Trump, “should be an absolute minimum for any Republican candidate committed to protecting many from death by direct abortion.” I spoke with Steven Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life. “Any time a leader of a national party throws pro-life conservatives to the curb, it’s extremely disappointing,” he told me. “I hope that his comments were a temporary aberration from an otherwise excellent record.”
One can’t help being a little surprised at their surprise. This is Donald Trump, after all—a man not noticeably wedded to any principle but self-interest, and who, in a previous life, was an abortion-rights-supporting New York Democrat. No one would mistake Trump for a true believer in the vein of, say, Pence. Even Trump’s attempt to throw some red meat to the movement in 2016 when he expressed support for punishing women who sought abortions was clumsy and counterproductive, flouting all of the anti-abortion movement’s best practices. Not that this blunder seemed to faze voters, either.
Trump has continued to exercise stubborn independence on the issue. Last year, he blamed the GOP’s disappointing midterm losses on “the abortion issue” and the extreme positions held by some Republican lawmakers. At the time, this mainly looked like an attempt to shift blame, given the poor performance of several high-profile candidates he’d endorsed; with hindsight, it also begins to look like a foretaste of how he’ll campaign in 2024.
Rose, from Live Action, was disgusted with Trump in November; this week’s comments were the last straw. “He takes us for granted, and treats us like a punching bag,” she told me. “I think that’s a huge error on his part. The pro-life movement is one of the most important voting blocs, especially in Iowa and South Carolina.”
She’s right that because Republican-primary voters are more socially conservative than general-election voters, they are more likely to oppose abortion access. And it’s possible that Trump’s position on this single issue might spur some of those voters to change their allegiance to a DeSantis or a Pence. But Rose’s assumption about the anti-abortion movement’s clout seems wishful. Trump is up by about 40 points in the latest national polls—and by about 30 in Iowa. So far, no signs point to any imminent Republican realignment, let alone one led by the anti-abortion set.
Many of Trump’s opponents have imagined that they can beat him by exposing him as a fake conservative, like Velma ripping the mask off a Scooby Doo villain. The problem with this strategy is that it has never worked. Trump doesn’t talk or campaign like a conservative, even when he governs like one. And traditional conservatives, including many anti-abortion activists, have supported him because he promised to appoint judges they favored to the U.S. Supreme Court—and did.
None of this is great news for Democrats. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden’s party would very much like the 2024 campaign to center on abortion. They believe that the path to victory lies in framing Republicans as fanatics who want to ban abortion completely; they’re probably right, given how unsuccessful attempts to restrict abortion have been since the fall of Roe. v Wade—and how salient the issue is for voters who support abortion rights. But Democrats will have a harder time tarring Trump as an extremist if he’s talking mostly about compromise and accusing his own party of extremism. Trump may end up “muting some of the intensity of the issue,” Longwell said, “because he will sound like a moderate in a way that Ron DeSantis, Pence would not.”
That could explain why, since Trump’s Great Betrayal on Sunday, not all anti-abortion groups have adopted the bitter tone of the most zealous activists. Some have done no more than call half-heartedly for clarification—or, in the case of the Susan B. Anthony List, issue a tepid plea for the candidates to please stop attacking one another. In other words, alongside the anger of the movement’s radicals is the realism of its mainstream.
Everyone is keenly aware at this point that Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. And when he does, he knows he’ll have their votes.
The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.
In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.
Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.
“It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist who advises former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”
That conundrum will only intensify for Republicans, because it is highly likely that this is merely the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. As the first indictment against a former president, the New York proceeding has thrust the U.S. into uncharted waters. But the country today is not nearly as far from shore as it may be in just a few months. Trump faces multiple additional potential indictments. Those include possible charges from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been examining his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, as well as the twin federal probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to block congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
“I think I had a pretty good track record on my predictions and my strong belief is that there will be additional criminal charges coming in other places,” says Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think you are going to see them in Georgia and possibly [at the] federal” level.
The potential for such further criminal proceedings is why many political observers are cautious about drawing too many firm conclusions from polling around public reaction to this first indictment, which centers on Trump’s payment of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels late in the 2016 campaign.
The multiple legal nets tightening around Trump create the possibility that he could be going through one or even multiple trials by the time of next year’s general election, and conceivably even when the GOP primaries begin in the winter of 2024. In other words, Trump might bounce back and forth between campaign rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire and court appearances in New York City, Atlanta, or Washington D.C. And such jarring images could change the public perceptions that polls are recording now.
“You are just looking at a snapshot of how people feel today,” Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist, told me.
Yet even these initial reactions show how Trump’s legal troubles may place his party in a vise.
Polls consistently show that Trump, over the past several weeks, has widened his lead over DeSantis and the rest of the potential 2024 field. That may be partly because Trump has intensified his attacks on DeSantis, and because the Florida governor has at times seemed unsteady in his debut on the national stage.
But most Republicans think Trump is also benefiting from an impulse among GOP voters to lock arms around him as the Manhattan investigation has proceeded. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released this week, four-fifths of Republicans described the various investigations targeting Trump as a “witch hunt,” echoing his own denunciation of them. “There’s going to be some level of emotional response to someone being quote-unquote attacked,” Wilson said. “That’s going to get some sympathy points that will probably bolster poll numbers.”
Republican leaders, as so many times before, have tightened their own straitjacket by defending Trump on these allegations so unreservedly. House GOP leaders have launched unprecedented attempts to impede Bragg’s investigation by demanding documents and testimony, and even Trump’s potential 2024 rivals have condemned the indictment as a politically motivated hit job; DeSantis may have had the most extreme reaction by not only calling the indictment “un-American” but even insisting he would not cooperate with extraditing Trump from Florida if it came to that (a pledge that is moot because Trump has indicated he plans to turn himself in on Tuesday.)
As during the procession of outrages and controversies during Trump’s presidency, most Republicans skeptical of him have been unwilling to do anything more than remain silent. (Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot potential 2024 candidate, has been the most conspicuous exception, issuing a statement that urged Americans “to wait on the facts” before judging the case.) The refusal of party leaders to confront Trump is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because GOP voters hear no other arguments from voices they trust, they fall in line behind the assertion from Trump and the leading conservative media sources that the probes are groundless persecution. Republican elected officials then cite that dominant opinion as the justification for remaining silent.
But while the investigations may be bolstering Trump’s position inside the GOP in the near-term, they also appear to be highlighting all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters, especially those with college degrees. In that same NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, 56 percent of Americans rejected Trump’s “witch hunt” characterization and described the investigations as “fair”; 60 percent of college-educated white adults, the key constituency that abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, said the probes were fair. So did a slight majority of independent voters.
In new national results released yesterday morning, the Navigator project, a Democratic polling initiative, similarly found that 57 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of independents, agreed that Trump should be indicted when they read a description of the hush-money allegations against him.
The Manhattan indictment “may keep his people with him, it may fire them up, but he’s starting from well under 50 percent of the vote,” Mike DuHaime told me. “Somebody like that must figure out how to get new voters. And he is not gaining new voters with a controversial new indictment, whether he beats it or not.” Swing voters following the case in New York, DuHaime continued, “may not like it, they may think Democrats have gone too far, and that might be fair.” But it’s wishful thinking, he argues, to believe that voters previously resistant to Trump will conclude they need to give him another look because he’s facing criminal charges for paying off a porn star, even if they view the charges themselves as questionable.
The NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey underlines DuHaime’s point about the limits of Trump’s existing support: In that survey, a 61 percent majority of Americans—including 64 percent of independents and 70 percent of college-educated white adults—said they did not want him to be president again. That result was similar to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, which found that 60 percent of Americans do not consider themselves supporters of Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. The challenge for the GOP is that about four-fifths of Republicans said they did consider themselves part of that movement, and about three-fourths said they wanted him back in the White House.
The open question for Trump is whether this level of support, even in the GOP, may be his high-water mark as the investigations proceed. Eisner and John Dean, the former White House counsel for Richard Nixon, both told me they believe that the New York case may be more threatening to Trump than many legal analysts have suggested. “I think that the New York case is much stronger than people perceive it to be,” Dean told me yesterday. “We really don’t know the contents of the indictment, and we really won’t know for a much longer time the evidence behind the indictment.”
Whatever happens in New York, Trump still faces the prospect of indictments on the more consequential charges looming over him in Georgia and from the federal special prosecutor. Dean says that Bragg’s indictment, rather than discouraging other prosecutors to act “may have the opposite effect” of emboldening them. Trump “has escaped accountability literally his entire life and it finally appears to be catching up with him,” Dean says. Academic research, he adds, has suggested that defendants juggling multiple trials, either simultaneously or sequentially, find it “much harder to mount effective defenses.”
Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, the Democratic polling consortium that conducts the Navigator surveys, says the potential for multiple indictments presents Trump with a parallel political risk: The number of voters who believe he has committed at least one crime is very likely to rise if the criminal charges against him accumulate. “It’s hard to imagine any scenario where multiple indictments is useful” to him, Bennett told me.
DuHaime and Wilson both believe that multiple indictments eventually could weigh down Trump even in the GOP primary. “The cumulative effect takes away some of the argument that it’s just political,” DuHaime said. Each additional indictment, he continued, “may add credibility” for the public to those that came before.
Wilson believes that repeated indictments could reinforce the sense among Republican voters that Trump is being treated unfairly, and deepen their desire to turn the page from him. He likens the effect to someone living along a “Hurricane Alley,” who experiences not one destructive storm in a season but several.“The weight of a single hurricane blowing through is one thing,” Wilson told me. “But if you have several hurricanes of issues blowing through, you will get conservatives [saying], ‘I don’t know if I want to continue living in Hurricane Alley’ with Trump, and they are going to look at other candidates.”
Given Trump’s hold on a big portion of the GOP coalition, no one should discount his capacity to win the party nomination next year, no matter how many criminal cases ensnare him. And given the persistent public dissatisfaction with the economy and lackluster job approval ratings for Biden, no one dismisses the capacity of whoever captures the Republican nomination to win the general election.
The best-case scenario sketched by Trump supporters is that a succession of indictments will allow him to inspire even higher turnout among the predominantly non-college-educated and non-urban white voters who accept his argument that “liberal elites” and the “deep state” are targeting him to silence them. But even the heroic levels of turnout Trump inspired from those voters in 2020 wasn’t enough to win. For the GOP to bet that Trump could overcome swing-voter revulsion over his legal troubles and win a general election by mobilizing even more of his base voters, Bennett said, “seems to me the highest risk proposition that I can imagine.”
Outside the Maricopa County tabulation center last weekend, a few dozen outraged Arizonans paced single file along the sidewalk waving KARI LAKE flags. Through megaphones, some of them denounced imaginary corruption schemes and clamored for a “redo” election. Others chanted the Lord’s Prayer, like the musicians on the Titanic playing hymns to calm the passengers.
The noteworthy thing about the Maricopa protest, though, wasn’t the scene. It was its singularity. Two years ago, shouts of “Stop the steal!” could be heard across the country in nearly every state. This year, the refrain was largely limited to one block in downtown Phoenix, where at times reporters outnumbered the demonstrators.
If any state was going to devolve into chaos after a disappointing election for Republicans, it would have been Arizona—ground zero for election denial in 2020, and where this year, primary voters nominated an entire slate of fringe election cranks to all of the state’s major offices. Instead, the midterms delivered a sure blow to the election-denial movement, both there and everywhere else: The most prominent conspiracists, such as the Arizona secretary-of-state candidate Mark Finchem and Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, lost by significant margins; some of these candidates even acknowledged their losses by—surprise!—actually conceding. On Monday night, Lake was declared the loser in her race for Arizona’s governorship, adding a final note to what has seemed like a comprehensive repudiation of the denialists. And where experts and reporters had anticipated widespread election-fraud mayhem, nothing close to it has yet emerged.
It would be foolish, though, to pronounce “Stop the Steal” dead. The movement may have fizzled without Donald Trump, but if he runs again in 2024, we haven’t seen the last of it. Even if Trump isn’t on the ballot, an entire swath of the Republican Party is now open to the idea that any narrow loss can be blamed on fraud. Trust in elections among rank-and-file GOP voters remains low, and in some respects has gotten worse, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center. The damage inflicted in 2020 endures. “He’s broken the seal,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of TheBulwark, told me. Election denial “is part of our politics now.”
Things could have been so much worse.
Ahead of the election, poll workers in Arizona and beyond feared for their safety, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law reported an uptick in calls to its Election Protection hotline. In the Phoenix suburbs, armed men were patrolling ballot drop-off sites. The day before the election, I watched a group of women stake out a ballot box, studying voters through binoculars for signs of cheating. The central counting facility in downtown Phoenix was fenced off with a ring of plastic Jersey barriers, and police patrolled the streets on horseback.
Election officials in Maricopa County, who appeared very tightly wound, held a press conference to get ahead of any potential claims of election chicanery. A time-consuming vote count does not indicate fraud, they reminded the room full of reporters; ballots are processed and reviewed by bipartisan teams; tabulation machines work.
Unfortunately, events on Election Day quickly undermined those careful efforts at reassurance. The sun had not yet risen when the first handful of tabulation machines stopped reading ballots. By midday, dozens of machines were malfunctioning at polling sites throughout the county. Voters at those sites were told to feed their ballots into “Door 3,” a regrettably sinister-sounding name for a secure slot that would sort the misread ballots to be counted later. And they would be counted later, as officials reassured voters in a series of follow-up press conferences.
Voters I spoke with were understandably confused and frustrated. And the malfunctioning machines had state GOP leaders immediately taking to Twitter to suggest wrongdoing. “They are incompetent and/or engaging in malfeasance just like in 2020,” GOP Chair Kelli Ward posted. Those complaints spiraled into partisan hysteria as the counting went on. Frustrated MAGA commentators suggested that Maricopa County officials had engaged in outright corruption and “CIVIC TERRORISM.” Finchem accused them of “screwing with the election counts.”
Still, despite those initial glitches and dark mutterings, Election Day unfolded mostly without threats or funny business. Poll workers weren’t harmed, and voters were, for the most part, not intimidated. Almost everyone on the America First Secretary of State Coalition slate lost last week, including Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who’d described Democrats as having a “satanic agenda”; Finchem, the mustachioed Oath Keeper of Arizona; and the head of the coalition himself, Nevada’s Jim Marchant.
Parroting Trump’s election lies got many Republican candidates across the finish line in their primary. Finchem’s repeated election-fraud claims won him a regular spot on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. The former president has praised Lake’s commitment to the bit, too, reportedly telling donors that even if asked about the weather, Lake would find a way to bring the conversation back to 2020.But thesewild claims proved poisonous to moderates and swing voters—polling suggests that some went to the polls explicitly to vote against deniers. We know this because many Republicans who didn’t traffic in election lies performed well: Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams by almost eight points in the Georgia governor’s race. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 points.
Fans of democracy can take heart that only 14 out of 94 election deniers won in races for positions that oversee elections, including secretary of state, attorney general, and governor, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for election integrity. Of those 14, only five candidates were not incumbents. “The movement is still not gaining ground,” Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of States United Action, told me.
That things didn’t turn out worse is a relief, given the chaos of 2020. But the dynamic of this year’s election was different in a few important ways. Republicans were on the defensive back then: The general election was a national referendum on their president. This year, Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot—whereas, in 2020, he had spent months priming the base to blame polling fraud if he lost. It’s clear now that nobody does Stop the Steal like 45.
“The thing that gives you power as an election denier is that people believe you, and Trump was able to make people believe him,” Longwell told me. Few other candidates have that power, and none in this midterm election could nationalize the issue as he did in the presidential contest. This time, the GOP had no central character over whom Trump supporters could feel outraged.
Yet the election-fraud fires that Trump and his allies have fanned for so long will not be easily extinguished. If repeated audits and cold evidence haven’t done enough to deter conspiracists these past two years, then a disappointing midterm cycle won’t dissuade them either.
Election deniers didn’t win in swing states, but elsewhere they did. Four of them will oversee elections in Indiana, Wyoming, Alabama, and South Dakota. More than 200 Republicans running for Congress and statewide positions who’d questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election won or retained their office last week, including more than 180 in the House. Other election deniers won at the state level in ultraconservative districts across the country. These ruby-red areas might sink deeper into denial, creating islands where both voters and officials are debilitatingly distrustful of elections.
Take Cochise County, Arizona. There, 170 miles southeast of Phoenix, some GOP election officials have been hankering to do a full hand-count audit in the election. Paradoxically, Republican candidates won handily there both this year and in 2020, so no obvious motive for distrusting the results is apparent. But the years-long drumbeat of misinformation from the state GOP chair, Ward, and her allied band of election-fraud kooks have nurtured a deep suspicion of the whole process.
Republican leaders in Arizona don’t believe in machine tabulation and view hand counts as the purest, most accurate way to tally votes—never mind the extensive evidence that the opposite is true. This year, Cochise County tried to forge ahead with a full hand-count audit, even after a judge ordered local officials not to. Only a timely ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court last week kept them from carrying one out. “What I’ll be doing over the next two years is looking at these counties that have gone really hard to the right,” Jessica Huseman, the editorial director of Votebeat, a nonpartisan election-news outlet, told me. “Because there’s no one to push back.”
Even in states where election deniers lost, voters have been primed to suspect outcomes they don’t like, glitches they don’t understand, and delays in counting. “If [Lake] doesn’t announce that she’s going to win tonight, we might have to go through like a week or so of shenanigans—the same shenanigans that they pulled in 2020,” Stephen Tenner, a former actor from New York, told me at a lavish GOP Election Night party in Scottsdale. “We’re waiting for it this time; we weren’t ready last time. So we’re going to catch the fraud.”
Other Republicans I interviewed were less persuaded of the likelihood of fraud, but were comfortable entertaining the idea. “I’d like to go back to same-day voting and paper ballots. There are problems with machines,” a man named William from Phoenix, who declined to give his last name, told me at the party. Would he blame fraud if Republicans lost? I asked. “Well, there were problems with the elections two years ago,” he said, adding that, this time around, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs should have recused herself from official duties during the election. “I would be hesitant to say I thought [this one] was completely honest.”
The thing about trust is that it’s painstakingly hard to build and relatively easy to demolish. Election denial is now a chronic wound in America’s body politic, only partially healed, and ready to reopen—red and raw—whenever circumstances permit. Those circumstances may arise sooner rather than later if Trump is on the ballot again in 2024. Even if he isn’t, the former president has already broken the tradition of gracious presidential concessions and peaceful transfers of power. He’s encouraged a populist animus toward institutions that will likely remain a litmus test for future Republican candidates. And more than anything, Trump has created a blueprint for exploiting the messiness and complexity of America’s elections. An audience for this type of exploitation is still out there, if Republicans want to take advantage of it.
On Monday, after Maricopa County released a decisive batch of ballots that led all major news networks to declare Hobbs the next governor of Arizona, a few members of Team Lake sprang into action to ensure that any ballots with errors were quickly cured. That’s a standard and legitimate procedure in elections, and can be helpful in especially close ones. But other Republicans continued to follow the denialist script. Ward accused Maricopa County of voter suppression. Finchem, the failed secretary-of-state candidate, began to do the impossible calculations. “I should win by 3% and @KariLake should win by 11%,” he tweeted. “If that doesn’t happen you know the real story.”
Lake’s own account was silent for more than an hour after the networks had called the race. After all of this, would this cycle’s Stop the Steal standard-bearer actually concede? The answer came at 10:30 p.m. eastern, with a simple tweet: “Arizonans know BS when they see it,” Lake wrote.
On a hot D.C. Wednesday in the middle of July, an 11-foot statue honoring Mary McLeod Bethune—carved out of marble extracted from the same Tuscan quarry that Michelangelo used for his David—stood draped in a black cloak in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. A group of distinguished guests had gathered to honor Bethune, the prominent educator and civil-rights activist who founded a college for Black students in Daytona Beach, Florida, and later served as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She is now the first Black American to have a state statue in the hall.
The group, which included several members of Florida’s congressional delegation, smiled as cameras flashed. Two of those present, Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Val Demings, are opponents in the race for Rubio’s Senate seat—a race that could secure the Democrats’ control of the Senate. Together, they tugged at the sheet, revealing the white-marble figure clothed in academic regalia, holding a black rose—which, in life, Bethune viewed as a symbol of diversity.
One by one, speakers approached a lectern in front of the statue to offer remarks. “I remember as a little girl listening to my mother and my father talk about a Black woman, a woman who looked like us, who started a college,” Demings told those who had gathered in the amphitheater. “As I listened to my parents tell the story, it seemed impossible. But Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune made what seemed impossible possible.”
Demings hopes to conjure some of Bethune’s magic. The race has for some time been considered a long shot for the 65-year-old former Orlando police chief; to win she’ll need to make what seems impossible possible in a state where the voter rolls have flipped from a more-than-100,000-voter Democratic advantage in 2020 to a Republican lead of nearly the same size in less than two years. And for months the polls reflected that, showing Demings trailing Rubio; but in recent weeks, a new batch of polls has shown Demings pulling into an effective tie, or even a slight lead.
If the race does break her way, the Democrats will have the convergence of two separate story lines to thank. The first is the story of Val Demings herself: a centrist Black woman with a background in law enforcement—just the profile the party has placed its bets on in recent years. It’s no coincidence, after all, that Demings joined then-Senator Kamala Harris and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who both worked as prosecutors before seeking elected office, on Joe Biden’s shortlist for his running mate two years ago.
Political moderates could admire her centrism; people of color could identify with her race; women could identify with her gender. Demings has converted that appeal into a fundraising advantage, pulling in millions more in donations than Rubio so far this cycle, and spending more than twice as much as him on television ads.
And if the national Democratic Party’s unpopularity had been weighing on her fortunes, the events of recent weeks may have buoyed them. In early August, Democrats in Congress passed a mammoth bill on climate change, health care, and taxes. Though the Inflation Reduction Act is by nature full of compromises, as my colleague Robinson Meyer notes, it “will touch every sector of the economy, subsidizing massive new investments in renewable and geothermal energy, as well as nuclear power and carbon capture and removal, and encouraging new clean-energy manufacturing industries to develop in the United States.” Demings has contrasted her own legislative record with that of Rubio, who has one of the worst attendance records in the Senate. With Congress showing that it can actually function, voters might be more receptive to that argument.
Demings watches the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings in 2019. (Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux)
Demings likes to say she’s living the American dream. In 1957, when she was born, her family lived in a three-room shack in Mandarin, Florida—a rural part of Duval County, just south of Jacksonville. Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother was a housekeeper. A year later, they upgraded to a two-bedroom house, but the roof leaked and for several years it lacked working bathrooms.
In the sixth grade, Demings helped integrate Loretta Elementary School, which she used to ride past to get to the Black elementary school 15 miles away. Shortly after enrolling, Demings was chosen to serve on the school patrol. She loved it. “You had to have good citizenship and good grades—and I was selected. I had my little orange belt, and I just fell in love,” she told me in July. “It was such an honor to be selected, because it was a big deal.”
As soon as she was old enough to get a real job, she did: first washing dishes at a retirement home, and later working fast-food gigs. After high school, she went off to Florida State University to study criminology, with an eye toward becoming a lawyer. “My dad used to say, ‘You’re a pretty good talker. You need to make some money talking,’ and he thought being a lawyer was a pretty cool thing,” she said. But scraping her way through college meant she needed a job—not law school—after graduation. “I was broke broke,” she quipped. So she moved back to Jacksonville, where she became a social worker with the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. But she soon grew disillusioned, doubting how much good she’d ever be able to do with so little power.
“I had this 10-year-old boy on my caseload,” Demings said. “He started having some problems, exhibiting behavior that made him really a threat to himself.” She went to her supervisor to see if she could get a psychological evaluation for him, but was told it would be roughly three weeks before a referral could be made; the panel that made those decisions met only once a month.
Demings was shocked. “This kid would be dead by then,” she recalled telling her boss. So she went around her supervisor to the juvenile judge—waiting outside his chambers until she was able to plead his case. To Demings’s relief, the judge granted an emergency order. She saw it as a small victory in a tough system, until it backfired: Demings was reprimanded by her supervisor for subverting their structure. She felt deflated by the experience, and began to think about what she wanted to do next.
In 1983, Demings got word that the Orlando Police Department was recruiting at Edward Waters College, the historically Black college in Jacksonville, and she figured that she would go down to speak with someone. That ultimately led to a 27-year career at the department, where Demings worked her way through its ranks: patrol officer, juvenile-crime detective, community-relations officer, public-information officer, hostage negotiator, then supervisor of the patrol, investigations, and airport units. (Some aspects of her career were less deliberate: She always told herself that she’d never date a fellow officer—then she ended up marrying one.)
As a police captain, she developed a reputation as a tough-on-crime enforcer on everything from traffic violations to violent infractions. “The message has to be clear for the violators: There are no deals,” she said in 2005 after a string of dangerous-driving incidents.
But that approach, which continued after she was promoted to deputy chief, drew criticism from members of the Black community in the city. She was lambasted after an Orlando Sentinelstory examined the department’s overuse of tasers and aggressive traffic stops and she told the paper that her officers were “kicking butt” in the historically Black neighborhood of Parramore. “If that [vehicle or pedestrian] stop results in something greater and leads to drugs or drug paraphernalia, I call that good police work,” she said at the time.
Still, by late 2007, her policing record, and a succession of departures, led to her being selected as Orlando’s chief of police. She was the first woman and second Black person—after her husband, Jerry, who left that role in 2002 to become the county’s public-safety director—to lead the department.
From the start, she took an aggressive approach to the job. “We will be courteous to law-abiding citizens but relentless in our efforts to disrupt violent criminals who have no respect for the police, citizens or their property,” she wrote in a New Year’s Day Orlando Sentinel op-ed in 2008. Later that year, Jerry won his race for county sheriff, making the duo the first Black husband and wife to serve as sheriff and chief of police in the same county at the same time.
Demings often cites the fact that under her leadership, Orlando experienced a 40 percent drop in violent crime. But a string of excessive-force complaints—including a 2010 incident in which an officer broke an 84-year-old man’s neck by flipping him upside down—revealed some of the clear dangers of the aggressive policing tactics that were employed during her tenure. “Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable to break old men’s necks for no reason,” John Kurtz, the founder of the blog Orlando CopWatch, said at the time. Demings initially defended the officer’s actions in the incident, but eventually modified the department’s use of the technique that led to the octogenarian’s fractured vertebrae. In 2011, after 27 years with the department, Demings stepped down and set her sights on a new challenge.
Elected office wasn’t something Demings had initially been interested in. But as she was about to retire, Mayor Buddy Dyer called her to let her know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thought she would be a good candidate to run for the House seat that represented Orlando. “I just burst out laughing,” she told me. “And the mayor’s like, ‘Chief, are you okay?’” She thought he must have been joking. “You know your police chief. I’m a little rough around the edges,” she recalls telling him. “And I don’t know if I’d make a good politician.” Still, she met with Representative Steve Israel, who was the committee chair at the time—and ultimately decided that running for Congress was a logical next step.
She lost her first campaign and suspended another run for mayor two years later. But her defeats only raised her public profile. By 2016, court-ordered redistricting meant that the Tenth District was significantly more Democratic than it had been when she first ran for office—which meant that her biggest hurdle would be her primary opponent. She won 57 percent of the vote in a four-person primary—and received 15,000 more votes than her nearest competitor. She then won in the general election by nearly 100,000 votes.
Thirty-three years after Demings had packed everything she owned in the trunk of her Oldsmobile Firenza and headed to Orlando for her new job with the police department, she would be taking her tough-on-crime bona fides to Washington.
Across two terms, Demings has sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of bills that have become law—though a divided Congress means she does not have a signature piece of legislation to hang her hat on. But her most significant moment came when, in January 2020, she served as an impeachment manager during the first Senate trial of then-President Donald Trump. Though the Senate ultimately acquitted Trump—voting along party lines except for the sole defection of Senator Mitt Romney—Demings’s prominence continued to grow. She was profiled by The Washington Post,NPR,and other national outlets. “Was it worth it? Every day it has been worth it,” she said of the trial after its conclusion. “Just like when I was a law enforcement officer, when I saw someone breaking the law, I did not stop and think about, well, my goodness, what will the judge do? … I did my job to stop that threat and then go to court and plead my case.”
After that, she landed on Biden’s shortlist for vice president—evidence of both her meteoric rise and the Democratic Party’s relentless search for its next phenom who can capture the national imagination the way Barack Obama did.
Demings makes phone calls to constituents from the Pinellas County Democratic headquarters in Florida. (Octavio Jones / Getty)
“Florida, vota por la jefa de la policía, no por el politiquero,” Demings’s first Spanish-language ad, aired in June, said. Vote for the chief of police, not the politician. Demings is trying to define herself for voters she hopes will form her coalition—particularly the Latino voters who have been tilting Republican in recent years She’s on the defensive: The Rubio campaign has tried to pin the Democratic Party’s most left-wing sensibilities on her.
In a campaign ad of his own, Rubio touts his endorsement from Florida’s Fraternal Order of Police and 55 sheriffs, and suggests that Demings supported the “Defund the Police” movement—or, at the very least, did not reject it fiercely enough. “Senator Rubio has not only tried not to defund the police; he’s defended the police,” Al Palacio, the Miami Dade public-schools Fraternal Order of Police president, says in the ad. “And we’re here to defend him.” Rubio’s campaign believes that this is a winning issue; an October 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 47 percent of Americans want to see more spending on police, compared with 15 percent who would like to see budgets reduced.
Demings dismissed the ad out of hand, responding with a brief statement: “I am the police. This is ridiculous.”
Though Florida has not seen the same jumps in crime rates as some other parts of the country over the past two years, the race has focused on policing and crime issues. The irony is, were she running as a Republican, Demings would be seen as emblematic of the tough-on-crime policies some voters say they want.
But because she’s running in a state that is turning redder and redder, Demings has to strike the right balance of being the police enforcer she’s always been while appearing open to reform, and being unrelentingly liberal on issues such as access to abortion while emphasizing her Christian faith so as not to isolate Catholic voters. And she has to highlight her identity—her family’s economic status growing up and, perhaps most important, her race—while not making it the central plank of her campaign. Over the past several years, Florida Republicans have passed laws that limit discussions of identity in classrooms and other public spaces—a bit of a contrast with the political campaign Demings has run, explaining to voters how being a Black woman has shaped her life and informed her policy preferences.
That’s been a difficult sell: How do you convince voters that you’ll be a senator who can get stuff done if the Democrats can manage to keep their Senate majority, when the Democrats had—at least in the public’s view—gotten so little done? But with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the party’s chances look different now, and maybe, just maybe, Demings will be the beneficiary. If Demings pulls off an upset, it will be not solely because she’s a Black woman, but because the Democrats finally figured out how to rack up some wins in D.C. And what could be a greater crowd-pleaser than that?
The defiant speech from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming after her defeat in yesterday’s Republican primary could be reduced to a single message: This is round one.
Cheney didn’t specify how, or where, she intends to continue her struggle against former President Donald Trump, after Harriet Hageman, the candidate Trump endorsed, routed her by more than two to one in the primary for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat.
The magnitude of Cheney’s defeat yesterday underscores how strong Trump remains within the party, and how little chance a presidential candidacy based explicitly on repudiating him would have of capturing the nomination.
Yet many of Trump’s remaining Republican critics believe that a Cheney candidacy in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries could help prevent him from capturing the next nomination—or stop him from winning the general election if he does. “Of course she doesn’t win,” Bill Kristol, the longtime strategist who has become one of Trump’s fiercest conservative critics, told me. But, he added, if Cheney “makes the point over and over again” that Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy and “forces the other candidates to come to grips” with that argument, she “could have a pretty significant effect” on Trump’s chances.
In some ways, a Cheney 2024 presidential campaign would be unprecedented: There aren’t any clear examples of a candidate running a true kamikaze campaign.
Cheney would have no trouble assembling the building blocks of a traditional presidential campaign. Her name identification is extremely high, for both her familial ties and her prominence as a Trump critic. Her potential fundraising base is strong: Through late July, she had already raised more than $15 million in her House race, and in a presidential run, she could tap into a huge pool of small-dollar donors (many of them Democrats) determined to block Trump. And with her unflinching attacks on the former president, she would be ensured bottomless media coverage.
Cheney could face other logistical hurdles. She reduced her in-person campaign appearances in Wyoming because of security threats, and that problem would undoubtedly persist in any presidential campaign. Dave Kochel, a longtime Republican consultant with extensive experience in Iowa, told me that Cheney could likely find ways to deliver her message even amid such threats. “You would need a lot of security, no doubt about that,” he said. “But remember, these days you can do a lot of this stuff from the green room. You don’t have to be going to the diner or the Hy-Vee or the state fair. It’s essentially a media strategy.”
More difficult to overcome would be obstacles erected by the national and state Republican parties. The laws governing which candidates can appear on a presidential primary ballot vary enormously across the states. For instance, in New Hampshire, anyone who meets the legal requirements for the presidency, fills out a one-page form, and pays $1,000 can appear on the venerable first-in-the-nation ballot. But in other states—including Iowa and South Carolina—the state party controls whose name can be included on the primary ballot. And in at least some of those places, either the state party or the Republican National Committee, which has subordinated itself to Trump under Chair Ronna McDaniel, would likely move to keep Cheney off the ballot as a means of protecting him.
Debates could be another challenge for Cheney. The general feeling among Republicans I spoke with this week is that the RNC would go to almost absurd lengths to avoid allowing Cheney to appear on the same debate stage as Trump. Kristol predicted that the party might try to exclude her by requiring any candidate participating in a RNC-sanctioned debate to commit to supporting the party’s eventual nominee in the general election—something Cheney’s determination to stop Trump would not allow her to do. (In 2016, the RNC imposed such a loyalty oath primarily out of fear that Trump wouldn’t endorse the nominee if he lost. Trump signed it but characteristically renounced it in the race’s latter stage.)
Even so, it would be difficult for any media organization that sponsors an RNC debate to agree to keep her off the stage. And if Cheney is registering reasonable support in the polls—say 5 percent or more—even state parties might think twice about barring her. “Every other candidate not named Trump is going to want Liz Cheney on the debate stage,” the GOP consultant Alex Conant, the communications director for Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, told me.
No one I talked with thinks Cheney could come anywhere close to winning the GOP nomination behind an anti-Trump message. The widespread success of Trump-endorsed candidates, almost all of whom overtly echo his lies about the 2020 election, in this year’s GOP primaries has made clear that the former president remains the party’s dominant figure (despite occasional losses for his picks). With Cheney’s defeat yesterday, four of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 attack on the Capitol have now been ousted in primaries, and four others have retired; only two have survived to face voters in November. “Trump continues to own a majority share of the Republican Party and the GOP has remade itself in his image,” Sarah Longwell, founder of the Republican Accountability Project, a group critical of Trump, told me in an email.
But many Republicans resistant to Trump believe that Cheney could rally the minority of party voters who continue to express reservations about the former president. In public polls, as many as one-fourth of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents reject Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, or criticize his efforts to overturn the result and his role in the January 6 insurrection. The share of Trump critics is usually slightly higher among Republicans holding at least a four-year college degree—a group that was notably cooler toward him during his first run to the nomination in 2016 and that sharply moved away from the GOP in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Some of those voters have since soured on President Joe Biden and the Democrats, but Cheney could spend months reminding them why they rejected Trump in the first place. “Especially among college-educated and donor-class Republicans, I think she continues to just chip away at Trump,” Kristol said.
Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, believes that the core of Republican-leaning voters hostile to Trump is smaller—only about one in 10, rather than the roughly one in five suggested by some poll questions. But he believes a Cheney candidacy could reach beyond that circle to raise doubts among a much bigger group: Republicans who are neither hard-core Trump supporters or opponents, but are focused mostly on winning in 2024. Although Cheney might appeal solely to the thin sliver of die-hard Trump opponents “with a prophetic-moral case … about the importance of devotion to our democratic institutions and the U.S. Constitution,” Ayres said, that larger group might respond to “a very practical utilitarian case” that Trump has too much baggage to win a general election.
The best-case scenario for the Trump critics if Cheney runs is that her battering-ram attacks weaken him to the point that someone else can capture the nomination. As Longwell told me, even if “Liz likely cannot win a Republican primary (though anything can happen!) … she can play a significant role in helping someone else beat Trump in a Republican primary.”
The worst-case scenario raised by some Trump critics is that a sustained attack on him will encourage GOP voters, and even other candidates, to rally to his defense more than they would otherwise.
But even those sympathetic to Cheney recognize that the 2024 primaries may offer only so much opportunity to change the party’s direction. Many of them view Trump’s strongest competitor in early polls, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, as little improvement over Trump in his commitment to a pluralistic democracy; Cheney recently told The New York Times that DeSantis has aligned himself so closely with Trump that she would find it “very difficult” to support him in 2024 either.
These dynamics explain why many Cheney supporters believe that the real leverage for her—and other Trump critics—would come from working to defeat the former president, or a like-minded alternative, in the 2024 general election. The only plausible way to break Trump’s hold on the GOP, these critics believe, is to show that Trump, or Trumpism, cannot win national elections. Even if Cheney cannot deny Trump the nomination, she could still ultimately loosen his hold on the party, this thinking goes, if she persuades enough centrist and white-collar voters to reject him and ensure his defeat in a general election. To save the party, in other words, Cheney might first have to be willing to destroy it.
Cheney signaled her willingness to accept such a mission yesterday, when her remarks condemned not only Trump but Republicans who have enabled him, especially those echoing his noxious discredited claims of fraud in 2020. But how she may pursue her goals remains unclear. Though most Republicans sympathetic to Cheney think she should run in the 2024 GOP primaries, others believe she might have more influence leading an outside movement against Trump. Cheney’s GOP supporters are even more divided over a possible general-election strategy; some sympathizers believe she would hurt Trump most by running as an independent third-party presidential candidate in the general election, and others worry that such a bid would help Trump by splitting voters resistant to him.
Cheney has many months to resolve those choices. What she indicated yesterday is that when she talks about a long battle, she is looking not only past the Wyoming House GOP primary but even past the struggle for the next GOP presidential nomination. The real prize she’s keeping her eyes on is preventing Trump from ever occupying the White House again, whatever that takes.
