A Thursday night town hall in D.C. saw judges and attorneys offer insight on how residents should interact with federal law enforcement amid the surge in the District.
D.C. courtrooms have seen an influx of low-level offense and gun possession cases since the start of the federal law enforcement surge, several judges said during a community town hall on Thursday night.
The event, which featured a panel made up of judges and attorneys, also offered residents insight into what their rights are during interactions with federal law enforcement.
Milton Lee, chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court, said judicial vacancies are complicating matters. By January, there will be 15 vacancies on the Superior Court, Lee said.
Lee described a significant increase in “lower-level misdemeanor cases” — things such as fare evasion, unlawful possession or use of marijuana in public, possession of an open container of alcohol and gambling.
While the surge didn’t result in a significant change in the serious crime cases appearing in court, “we saw an influx of gun possession cases coming in. It was just the raw numbers that were significantly higher than before,” Lee said.
The boost in cases has meant arraignment court is running later than usual, and there’s a “significant increase” in new cases on misdemeanor and general felony calendars, Lee said, adding that the spike has also increased the caseload for defense attorneys.
Separately, the panelists offered tips for how to engage with federal law enforcement, after a Homeland Security officer fired into a car during a traffic stop earlier this month.
The incident, which happened on Benning Road in the District’s Northeast, came as officers said they tried to pull a car over for not displaying a front license plate. But the car fled, and once it was stopped, a Homeland Security officer fired multiple rounds into the car.
Phillip Brown was the driver but none of the bullets struck him. D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith denied allegations that officers tried to cover the incident up in their reports.
Knowing your rights
“People are afraid to let their children walk to school alone,” advocate Russell Ellis, who also goes by the name “Jolly Good Ginger” online, said. “People are afraid to just be out and about like they normally do.”
If the public is witnessing a situation involving federal law enforcement escalating, Ellis recommended filming what’s happening.
“I make it a habit of, I film them, and I show what they’re doing, and I have found that to be very effective,” Ellis said. “They don’t want to be exposed for what they’re really doing, which is next to nothing.”
ACLU Attorney Michael Perloff said people don’t have to answer questions if they get stopped.
“You have a constitutional right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions,” Perloff said.
There’s an exception in D.C. law for pedestrian or traffic offenses, in which providing a name and address is required if asked, Perloff said, but otherwise, “the Constitution is very clear about your ability to refuse to answer.”
Noncitizens do have to carry paperwork and share it if an immigration official asks, Perloff said.
Federal Public Defender Alexis Gardner, meanwhile, said if stopped, the only question to ask is, “Am I free to go? Never answer, just return that question. And if they say yes, then calmly walk away. If they say no, well, then now you’re being detained.”
If arrested, Gardner said the only question that has to be answered is for a name.
“If you want to get the full benefit of these rights, you actually have to say, ‘I’m invoking my right to remain silent. I want to speak with a lawyer,’” Perloff said. “You need to use pretty much that exact language. There’s some really unfortunate court decisions where people have said things that are a little bit different.”
And if mistreated by a federal officer or agent, Perloff said the ability to seek compensation is limited. However, he said, the officer’s agency name is enough to file a claim.
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In the dog days of August in Washington, D.C., with Congress off on its district-work period, the House still convenes biweekly pro-forma sessions, in which a handful of straggler representatives assemble in front of an empty chamber. When I watched one unfold on a recent morning, the Speaker pro tempore presided over the customary reading of a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, and the legislative day concluded within five minutes. The halls were quiet without Hill reporters waiting to chase lawmakers down; the action had temporarily relocated from the Capitol. After Mike Johnson called for an early start to the House’s August recess, this year, in order to prevent a vote on releasing the Epstein files, he sent Republicans home with the directive to sell the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to their districts. This sometimes took the form of town-hall meetings.
Town halls, which originated in the New England colonies in the seventeenth century, often devolve. In 1795, a Philadelphia town hall held to debate the Jay Treaty ended with attendees throwing rocks; two hundred and thirty years later, angry protesters at the Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s town hall were tased and shot with stun guns. This summer, in Nebraska, Representative Mike Flood, one of a handful of Republicans to host a town hall about the “Big Beautiful Bill,” was booed for the duration of his PowerPoint presentation. He tried to recite talking points over shrieks of “Liar!,” and was then asked why he wouldn’t “stand up to fascism” or release the Epstein files. In rural Northern California, Representative Doug LaMalfa was heckled for ninety minutes by six hundred seniors at an Elks Lodge. (“Is this how you get stuff? By yelling?” he asked them.) The forums held in progressive-leaning cities within Republican districts were thankless. In deep-red locations, they could serve as useful self-promotion. Representative Nancy Mace, of South Carolina, went on a “Mother of All Town Halls” tour as the branded launch for her gubernatorial campaign, pitching herself as “Trump in heels” and inviting protesters to debate her, presumably to generate footage that could be clipped into campaign-ad videos. The Michigan representative Lisa McClain, the chairwoman of the House G.O.P., embarked on a “Big Beautiful Tour,” a series of choreographed appearances—wearing protective eyeglasses on the floor of a manufacturing plant before retiring to a diner stop, and the like. She brushed off concerns about being tasked with promoting what polls show is unpopular legislation. “It’s always easier to find something wrong with something than it is to find something right,” she told the Washington Post. “You know, I can be lying on a beach and I can be complaining because it’s too windy. I’m still lying on a beach.”
Earlier this month, Harriet Hageman, a conservative congresswoman from Wyoming, invited her constituents to a town hall at the National Museum of Military Vehicles, in Dubois, to hear about what she’d achieved in Washington. The meeting was held in a squat building in the middle of the sagebrush-steppe landscape. Outside, it looked more like a graveyard—old vehicles and parts scattered everywhere, including the skeleton of a Soviet fighter jet. Visitors wandered through an assortment of historic tanks spread across a rock basin. After pulling up near a historic war ambulance, I passed a parking area for motorized scooters and a display of rifles and bayonets on my way into the town hall. Five sheriffs manned the door. Several dozen people sat at folding tables facing Hageman’s lectern; a woman in the row ahead of me fiddled with military action figures.
Hageman was elected in 2022 as a Trump-backed primary challenger to Liz Cheney, who lost her seat after voting to impeach the President and serving as the vice-chair of the House January 6th committee. Hageman is the state’s sole congressperson. The location of the event was a reminder of the range of constituents she represents in Washington—Dubois is the next mountain town over from the billionaire wilderness of Jackson Hole, where people stand to benefit enormously from the bill’s tax cuts, and it sits just beyond the border of the Wind River reservation, the seventh largest in the nation, where residents rely heavily on federal assistance. On the day of my visit, the New York Times featured a travel guide for thirty-six hours in Jackson Hole, which is in the country’s richest county; an independent Wyoming newspaper ran a story on the effect that the bill’s Medicaid cuts would have on rural health. (Mike Johnson happened to be outside Jackson Hole, taking a gondola from Teton Village to a fund-raiser he was hosting at a mountaintop bistro.)
When Hageman arrived, she launched into remarks about the GENIUS Act—legislation recently passed to regulate stablecoins—reading aloud from a packet about the importance of the dollar continuing to be the world’s reserve currency. At least a few people looked at one another as if to ask, What is she talking about? Eventually, Hageman inched her way to the topic of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Much of what they’d heard was likely to be “just fearmongering,” she told them. “It’s incredibly complicated.” There was ambient tension in the room when she opened up the floor to constituents. A woman who introduced herself as a veteran approached the mike. “When I was in the military, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution and insure that I follow the Constitution,” she said. She was worried about the funds cut from PBS—the only radio she can get in her rural area is public broadcasting. (The Rescissions Act of 2025, which the House passed in June, rescinded billions in previously approved funding, including for foreign aid and public broadcasting.) “I’m concerned that some of the reasons the funding has been cut is because we’re trying to stop the narrative that may be in conflict with the current agenda of our politicians,” the woman said “What are you doing to insure that we are upholding our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech?” Hageman responded, “You don’t have the First Amendment right to federal funds.” A woman waiting in line to ask a question, wearing a “Liberté et Égalité” T-shirt, shook her head as Hageman complained about how NPR had ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story.
A man named Clint raised his hand to ask about veterans’ services. He had run out of medication two months ago, which typically comes to him, via mail, from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Hageman pointed out three of her staff members who could help with opening a case file for any constituent having an issue with the federal government. They could give him a business card for a man in her office named Nicholas.
“Have you spoken with Nicholas?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, last year,” he said.
“O.K., why don’t you get back in touch with Nicholas,” she replied.
A woman who introduced herself as a Northern Arapaho from the Wind River asked about a former uranium-processing facility on the reservation. “I live about a mile away from the site where they processed uranium,” she said. “They did not think about our people that lived there. I’m a double breast-cancer survivor that had a double mastectomy, because I live so close to that plant, and I look at all my relatives in that land surrounding it, and they are all passing away from cancer,” she said. (The site left massive amounts of radioactive tailings, and, after a flood in 2010 contaminated the groundwater, a 2013 tribal epidemiological study showed that four in ten Wind River reservation residents had had a family member die from cancer.) “The only care that we come under is the clinic in Arapahoe and the surrounding Indian clinics, and they’re getting really cut back. Also, a lot of our elder people don’t seek treatment when they get their cancer diagnosis because they think it’s a drain on the economy.”
“Let’s get ahold of my office,” Hageman responded.
The questions that followed toggled from personal logistics to concerns about the future of democracy. Why had Congress abdicated its power to set tariffs? Is it going to be seven dollars for a coffee? Do you believe in due process? Why is online-trading fraud not being taken seriously by the F.B.I.? What are you going to do about property damage from deer being hit by cars? “It’s part of the process of being a constitutional republic,” Hageman told me, of the whole thing, afterward. She seemed a little perturbed to meet a reporter in the receiving line, but also somewhat touched that I had come to see her event in person. “There was discourse. It was civil,” one attendee told me. Another said, “It was bullshit. She’s a liar. She deflected everything.” The latter constituent, who had driven several hours for the event, told me he was certain that the non-critical questions were scripted and prepared in advance. Nearby, a man in a black MAGA hat, named Alfred, told me that the critical questions were just “opinions on false premises.” He was waiting to ask Hageman’s staff if there was something he could pray about on the congresswoman’s behalf. He went on, “I haven’t watched the news since the Carter Administration. I’ve been questioning everything since then. I can’t even watch sports anymore because of the bullshit with the kneeling. There are a lot of people against Trump still, and it drives me crazy. I can’t even watch commercials anymore because they’re so biased.”
Los Angeles Council District 14 (CD-14) candidates Ysabel Jurado and Kevin de León sparred over their qualifications in what could have been their last in-person debate before the November election.
Wednesday’s CD-14 debate, a district home to approximately 265,000 people, 70% of them Latin American, offered the public a chance to hear from both candidates and their stand on issues such as homelessness, public safety and affordable housing, among other things.
CALÓ News was one of the media outlets that were present inside Dolores Mission Catholic Church in Boyle Heights, where the debate was held. Below are our reporter’s main takeaways.
People showed up and showed out. More than 300 people attended the debate, which was organized by Boyle Heights Beat and Proyecto Pastoral. More than 260 people gathered inside the church and the rest watched via a livestream projected on the church’s patio.
The debate was bilingual, with translation services available for all, honoring the many Spanish speakers that live in the district, as Brendan P. Busse, pastor of the church, said in the opening statement.
As part of the event guidelines, Busse also shared that no applause or booing was to be permitted, a rule that was broken within the first ten minutes of the forum. “Where you are tonight is a sacred place. People who are in need of shelter sleep here and have for the last 40 years,” he said when referring to the church transforming into a homeless shelter at night for over 30 adults. “Power and peace can live in the same place.”
That was the most peaceful and serene moment throughout the two-hour forum.
What followed was traded insults and competing visions from both candidates.
One of the first stabs occurred when De León accused Jurado of wanting to “abolish the police” and when Jurado reminded the public of De Leon’s “racist rhetoric,” referring to the 2022 scandal over the secretly recorded conversation with Gil Cedillo and Nury Martínez where they talked about indigenous Mexicans, Oaxacans, the Black and LGBTQ+ communities and councilman Mike Bonin’s adopted son.
“I made a mistake, and I took responsibility. I have been apologizing for two years,” De León said. “Just as in the traditions of the Jesuits, love, reconciliation [and] peace, one must choose if we are going to be clinging to the past or move forward. I choose to move forward.”
When Jurado was asked about her stance on police, she said she had never said she wanted to abolish the police. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” she told De León. “I have never said that,” she said. “We put so much money into public safety into the LAPD yet street business owners and residents in these communities do not feel safer. The safest cities invest in communities, in recreation and parks, in libraries [and] youth development.”
De León and Jurado also discussed their plan to work with the homeless population, specifically during the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles County, an estimated 75,312 people were experiencing homelessness, as stated in the 2024 homeless count. For CD-14 the issue of homelessness takes a higher level as it is home to Skid Row, which has one of the largest homeless populations in the U.S.
“We should continue to house our unhoused,” De León said.
He followed this by saying that under his leadership, CD-14 has built the most interim housing than “in any other place in the entire city of L.A.” He made a reference to the Boyle Heights Tiny Home Village and 1904 Bailey, both housing projects in CD-14.
“We need safety when the Olympics come,” he added.
Jurado said De León’s leadership has fallen short in his years in office, specifically when it comes to the homeless population and said that housing like the tiny homes is not sufficient for people in the district to live comfortably.
“My opponent has governed this district, Skid Row, for over 20 years. Has homelessness in this district gotten better? We can all agree that it hasn’t,” she said. “County Supervisor Hilda Solís put up 200 units that are not just sheds; they have bathrooms, they have places and they have support services. Why hasn’t [CD-14] gotten something better than these tiny homes?”
One of De León’s repeating arguments in various of his answers was the fact that Jurado has never held public office before. “I’ve dedicated my whole life to public service, to the benefit of our people. My opponent, to this day, has not done one single thing,” De León said in the first few minutes of the debate.
In one of the questions about low-income elders in the district, he listed some of his achievements when helping this population, including bringing free vaccines for pets of seniors of this district and food distributions, which, as De León noted, help people with basic food needs, including beans, rice and chicken. “The same chicken sold in Whole Foods,” he said.
Jurado defended herself against the reality of never holding public office and said her work as a housing rights attorney and affordable housing activist have given her the tools and experience to lead the district in a different direction than the incumbent, De León. “We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results,” Jurado said. ‘We need long-term solutions,” she said.
Last month, The L.A. Times also reported on Jurado’s past political experience, including working on John Choi’s unsuccessful 2013 run for City Council, as well as her work as a scheduler in Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office and how she was appointed by Garcetti to the Human Relations Commission in 2021.
She later added that she was proud to already have the support of some of the L.A. City Council members, such as Eunisses Hernández, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martínez, which De León later referred to as the “socialist council members.”
After the debate, CALÓ News talked to both candidates and asked how they thought the debate went.
“It was a spirited debate, no question about it,” De León said. “Sometimes elections can take a real ugly twist that is very similar to Trump-ian characteristics. Like Donald Trump just says whatever he wants to say, no matter how outlandish [or] inaccurate it is.”
When asked the same question, Jurado said, “ I think my opponent said a bunch of lies and said that he has plans for this district when he’s had four years to execute all of them. It’s really disappointing that only now he suddenly has all these ideas and plans for this district.”
Both candidates told CALÓ News they will continue working until election day and making sure CD-14 residents show up to vote.
“But I think past the debate[s], it’s just [about] keeping your nose to [the] grindstone, working hard, and taking nothing for granted, knocking on those doors and talking directly to voters,” De León said.
Jurado said she still has a couple other events that she and her team are hosting before election day. “I’m out here talking to voters. We want to make sure that people know who I am and that they have other options. People are disappointed. We’re going to keep folks engaged and make sure that [they] turn out to the polls,” she said.
Jorge Ramírez, 63, from Lincoln Heights, said he has been supporting De León since his time in the State Senate and said he will continue to vote for him because he doesn’t know much about his opponent. “He is the type of person we need. He’s done a lot for immigrants,” he said. “The other person, we don’t know much about her and she’s not very well known. She doesn’t have much experience in this field.”
Alejandra Sánchez, whose daughter goes to school in Boyle Heights and lives in El Sereno, said she believes CD-14 has been in desperate need of new leadership and worries that many people will vote for De Leon just because he is who they have known for so long. “It’s very powerful to see a woman leader step in… It’s been an incredible year to see a woman president elected in Mexico, a woman running for president in the U.S. and a woman also running for leadership here in our community,’ she said. “That’s part of the problem… we are afraid to think about something new, about the new leadership of someone doing things differently.”
General election day will take place on Tuesday, November 5, 2024. Early voting began on October 7. You can register to vote or check your registration status online on the California Online Voter Registration page.
Vice President Kamala Harris plans to lay out her campaign’s closing argument by returning to the site near the White House where Donald Trump helped incite a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 — hoping it will crystalize for voters the fight between defending democracy and sowing political chaos.Her campaign says Harris will give a speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday — one week before Election Day — and will urge the nation to “turn the page” toward a new era and away from Trump.The site is symbolic since it’s where Trump delivered a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was convening to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the election that past November. In it, Trump lied repeatedly about widespread voter fraud that had not occurred and urged supporters to fight. Hundreds then stormed the Capitol in a deadly riot.Word of the speech came from a senior Harris campaign official who insisted on anonymity to discuss an address that is still in development. The Harris campaign is betting that her speaking at the Ellipse can provide an opportunity for the vice president to stress that the country no longer wants to be defined by a political combativeness that Trump seems to relish.Trump has promised to pardon those jailed for their role in the Capitol attack should he reclaim the presidency during the election on Nov. 5.Closing arguments are important opportunities for candidates to sum up their campaigns and make a concise case for why voters should back them. Trump’s campaign suggested he’d begin framing his closing argument while addressing a rally last weekend in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Instead, the former president spent more than 10 minutes talking about the genitals of the late, legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, who was born in Latrobe.Her team announced the coming Ellipse addressed before Harris attended a CNN town hall in suburban Philadelphia on Wednesday night, where she took questions from an audience of undecided voters as part of what was once envisioned as a debate with Trump. Harris had said she would participate in a CNN debate but the two sides never worked out a formal agreement. CNN said it also invited Trump to a town hall. but that it didn’t happen.Harris told the audience that Jan. 6 saw a “president of the United States defying the will of the people in a free and fair election and unleashing a violent mob who attacked the United States Capitol.”The first audience question was from a self-described “anti-Trump Republican” who was concerned about the Jan. 6 attack.“I believe the American people deserve better, and they deserve a president who is focused on solutions, not sitting in the Oval Office plotting every day,” Harris said.When it comes to Jan. 6, about 4 in 10 likely voters in a CNN poll from September said the economy was their most important issue when deciding how to vote, and about 2 in 10 said protecting democracy was. That compared to about 1 in 10 who named either immigration or abortion and reproductive rights.Protecting democracy also seems to be more important to Democrats and Harris supporters. Roughly 4 in 10 voters who back Harris call it their top issue, compared to about 2 in 10 who say that about the economy. For Republicans and Trump supporters, about 6 in 10 name the economy as their top voting issue, followed by immigration. Only 5% of Trump supporters said protecting democracy was their top issue.During the town hall, Harris said Trump is “increasingly unstable and unfit to serve.” Asked directly if she thought her opponent was a fascist, Harris responded, “Yes, I do.”A short time later, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded, “Kamala will say anything to distract from her open border invasion and record high inflation.”During the event, Harris was asked how her presidency would be different from Biden’s given that she’s been a part of his administration for nearly four years — a question she’s answered in recent weeks without naming major contrasts. This time, Harris seemed better prepared to talk about how things would be different, saying, “My administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and saying she represented a “new generation of leadership on a number of issues.”“I’m pointing out things that haven’t been done that need to be done,” the vice president said of Biden’s policies, also noting, “I’m not going to shy away from saying, ‘Hey, these are still problems that we need to fix.’” She pointed specifically to her promises to increase federal grants for small businesses and to expand government funding for home health care to people caring for their elderly parents and children simultaneously.One audience member pressed Harris on key issues where she’s flip-flopped. That includes hydraulic fracturing, which she suggested that she’d support banning while running in the 2020 Democratic primary but now says should be allowed to continue. Harris said Wednesday that the U.S. can invest in a greener energy economy without halting fracking, which is key to the economy of parts of Pennsylvania.She added that she sees many key policies differently now: “Frankly I now have the experience and perspective of having been vice president.”Asked about the greatest weakness she’d bring to the White House, Harris offered, “I’m kind of a nerd sometimes, I confess” while admitting to making “parental mistakes” with her two stepchildren.The vice president also mentioned praying every day, saying, “I was raised to believe in a loving God, to believe faith is a verb.”__Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report from Washington.
PHILADELPHIA —
Vice President Kamala Harris plans to lay out her campaign’s closing argument by returning to the site near the White House where Donald Trump helped incite a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 — hoping it will crystalize for voters the fight between defending democracy and sowing political chaos.
Her campaign says Harris will give a speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday — one week before Election Day — and will urge the nation to “turn the page” toward a new era and away from Trump.
The site is symbolic since it’s where Trump delivered a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was convening to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the election that past November. In it, Trump lied repeatedly about widespread voter fraud that had not occurred and urged supporters to fight. Hundreds then stormed the Capitol in a deadly riot.
Word of the speech came from a senior Harris campaign official who insisted on anonymity to discuss an address that is still in development. The Harris campaign is betting that her speaking at the Ellipse can provide an opportunity for the vice president to stress that the country no longer wants to be defined by a political combativeness that Trump seems to relish.
Trump has promised to pardon those jailed for their role in the Capitol attack should he reclaim the presidency during the election on Nov. 5.
Closing arguments are important opportunities for candidates to sum up their campaigns and make a concise case for why voters should back them. Trump’s campaign suggested he’d begin framing his closing argument while addressing a rally last weekend in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Instead, the former president spent more than 10 minutes talking about the genitals of the late, legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, who was born in Latrobe.
Her team announced the coming Ellipse addressed before Harris attended a CNN town hall in suburban Philadelphia on Wednesday night, where she took questions from an audience of undecided voters as part of what was once envisioned as a debate with Trump. Harris had said she would participate in a CNN debate but the two sides never worked out a formal agreement. CNN said it also invited Trump to a town hall. but that it didn’t happen.
Harris told the audience that Jan. 6 saw a “president of the United States defying the will of the people in a free and fair election and unleashing a violent mob who attacked the United States Capitol.”
The first audience question was from a self-described “anti-Trump Republican” who was concerned about the Jan. 6 attack.
“I believe the American people deserve better, and they deserve a president who is focused on solutions, not sitting in the Oval Office plotting every day,” Harris said.
When it comes to Jan. 6, about 4 in 10 likely voters in a CNN poll from September said the economy was their most important issue when deciding how to vote, and about 2 in 10 said protecting democracy was. That compared to about 1 in 10 who named either immigration or abortion and reproductive rights.
Protecting democracy also seems to be more important to Democrats and Harris supporters. Roughly 4 in 10 voters who back Harris call it their top issue, compared to about 2 in 10 who say that about the economy. For Republicans and Trump supporters, about 6 in 10 name the economy as their top voting issue, followed by immigration. Only 5% of Trump supporters said protecting democracy was their top issue.
During the town hall, Harris said Trump is “increasingly unstable and unfit to serve.” Asked directly if she thought her opponent was a fascist, Harris responded, “Yes, I do.”
A short time later, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded, “Kamala will say anything to distract from her open border invasion and record high inflation.”
During the event, Harris was asked how her presidency would be different from Biden’s given that she’s been a part of his administration for nearly four years — a question she’s answered in recent weeks without naming major contrasts. This time, Harris seemed better prepared to talk about how things would be different, saying, “My administration will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and saying she represented a “new generation of leadership on a number of issues.”
“I’m pointing out things that haven’t been done that need to be done,” the vice president said of Biden’s policies, also noting, “I’m not going to shy away from saying, ‘Hey, these are still problems that we need to fix.’” She pointed specifically to her promises to increase federal grants for small businesses and to expand government funding for home health care to people caring for their elderly parents and children simultaneously.
One audience member pressed Harris on key issues where she’s flip-flopped. That includes hydraulic fracturing, which she suggested that she’d support banning while running in the 2020 Democratic primary but now says should be allowed to continue. Harris said Wednesday that the U.S. can invest in a greener energy economy without halting fracking, which is key to the economy of parts of Pennsylvania.
She added that she sees many key policies differently now: “Frankly I now have the experience and perspective of having been vice president.”
Asked about the greatest weakness she’d bring to the White House, Harris offered, “I’m kind of a nerd sometimes, I confess” while admitting to making “parental mistakes” with her two stepchildren.
The vice president also mentioned praying every day, saying, “I was raised to believe in a loving God, to believe faith is a verb.”
__
Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report from Washington.
LOS ANGELES – As the world gets a little warmer and we settle into the Spring season, the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation is proud to announce the return of our Youth Baseball and Softball Leagues for the Spring 2023 season.
BASEBALL & SOFTBALL ARE BACK!
Sign up for our Spring Sports Leagues, Coming to an LA County Parks Near You!
Baseball season is right around the corner, now’s the perfect time to sign up your young athletes for our Youth Baseball Leagues! Our Baseball Leagues will provide an emphasis on learning fundamentals of Baseball, skill development, sportsmanship, teamwork, and fun. League will run for 10 weeks and consist of one weekday practice and one game every Saturday. Game score and league standing will be kept. Rules will be enforced. Registration fee will include uniform, award, and umpire. Qualifying teams will advance and participate in the playoffs.
Girl’s Softball League will provide an emphasis on learning fundamentals of Softball, skill development, sportsmanship, teamwork, and fun. League will run for 10 weeks and consist of one weekday practice and one game every Saturday. Game score and league standing will be kept. Softball rules will be enforced. Registration fee will include uniform, award, and umpire. Qualifying teams will be advance and participate in the playoffs.
Divisions & Dates
D3 – D6: April 15 – June 12
AVAILABLE AT THE FOLLOWING PARKS DIVISIONS 3 – 6
NORTH AGENCY
George Lane Park: 5520 W. Avenue, L-8, Quartz Hill, 93534 | (661) 722 7780
Through an exciting partnership with the Dodgers Foundation, Dodgers Dreamteam (formerly Dodgers RBI) brings the sport of Baseball and Softball at a lower price! The goal of DDT is to provide an inclusive, barrier-free sports-based youth development program for communities that have historically been left out of consideration.
Divisions & Dates:
April 15 – June 12
Divisions 3 – 6
AVAILABLE AT THE FOLLOWING PARKS
EAST AGENCY
Belvedere Park: 4914 E. Cesar Chavez Ave. Los Angeles, 90022 | (323) 260 2342
Obregon Park: 4021 E. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90063 | (323) 260 2344
Florida voters to engage directly with Senate hopeful in groundbreaking virtual town hall.
NEW YORK, July 8, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Social media platform Spoutible announced today that it will host a virtual town hall for Florida Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell using its innovative Pods technology.
Mucarsel-Powell, a former U.S. Representative for Florida’s 26th congressional district, will engage directly with voters to discuss her campaign platform and answer questions from constituents. The town hall marks the second major political event to utilize Spoutible’s Pods feature for large-scale virtual gatherings.
“We’re excited to provide a platform for open dialogue between candidates and voters,” said Christopher Bouzy, CEO of Spoutible. “Our Pods technology enables seamless, interactive discussions that can bring people together from across the state.”
About Spoutible Pods Launched earlier this year, Spoutible Pods allow users to create virtual rooms for real-time audio conversations. The feature supports up to 20,000 concurrent listeners, making it ideal for town halls, panel discussions, and other large events. Pods also incorporate moderation tools and audience participation features like hand-raising and text-based questions.
About Debbie Mucarsel-Powell Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is a dedicated public servant and advocate for the people of Florida. As a former U.S. Representative for Florida’s 26th Congressional District, she has a proven track record of championing issues such as healthcare, education, and environmental protection. Raising her family in Miami, Debbie understands the diverse needs of her community and has worked tirelessly to represent their interests. During her tenure in Congress, she fought to expand access to affordable healthcare, improve public education, and protect Florida’s natural resources. Now, as a Senate candidate, Debbie is committed to bringing her passion and experience to the Senate to continue fighting for Floridians.
Join us for this unique opportunity to engage with Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, ask questions, and learn more about her vision for Florida’s future. This virtual town hall is a chance for voters to connect directly with the candidate and discuss the issues that matter most to them, ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard and valued.
To participate in the virtual town hall, users can join the event on Spoutible by following the provided link on the day of the event. Make sure to mark your calendars for Monday, July 8th, at 7 p.m. EDT, and be a part of this important conversation.
For more information about the event and to join Spoutible, visit Spoutible’s website.
PORTLAND, Ore. — The site where Alpenrose Dairy used to sit off SW Shattuck Road in SW Portland will soon be home to a new housing development. A meeting to discuss how the proposed housing development will be built is set for tonight from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm at Hayhurst Elementary School in Portland.
Henry Cadenaugh founded Alpenrose Diary in the 1950’s and built the first Little League style baseball field to support and entertain his family. Eventually, other things were built there and it became a community center for baseball, softball, racing and Christmas cheer.
A rift between family members was formed and after several court cases, the unique location was sold. A new community called Raleigh Crest is set to be built in phases with some single family, multi-family and green space. Of the approximate 51 acres of prime real estate 4 acres are set to be donated for parks.
Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina governor, made the comments during a CNN town hall at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire.
CNN moderator Jake Tapper said Haley’s political group, Stand For America, once referred to a previous version of the child tax credit as “no-strings-attached welfare handouts.” After noting these credits “cut child poverty in half,” Tapper asked Haley if she’s against expanding child tax credits to help more low-income families.
“I’m for child care tax credits for everyone. If you’re going do it, do it across the board and make sure that it’s fair,” she said.
Republican presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Thursday speaks during a campaign stop at the historic Robie Country Store in Hooksett, New Hampshire. During a later CNN town hall, Haley discussed what she would do about the child tax credit if she wins the presidency. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Haley continued by saying that when evaluating welfare systems, “the goal that I want to look at is what are we doing to lift them up.”
She then spoke of her time as governor, saying she worked to help people on welfare find work with businesses that would train them.
“We moved 35,000 people from welfare to work. We had family parties so that we could celebrate the fact that they were now contributing members of society,” she said.
“Don’t just give handouts. What are you doing to lift them up to? And if you’re going to do tax credits, do it for everybody. Don’t play favorites. Don’t pick winners and losers,” she continued. “That’s not what we do in America.”
The GOP hopeful then described how tax credits could have a negative impact on some Americans.
“When you just throw out a tax credit and say, ‘We’re going give it to these people or give it to these people’—that’s not sustaining anything, that’s actually harming them. Instead, let’s do the harder work and say, ‘What can we do to get them into a better situation?’” Haley said.
CNN’s town hall with Haley took place days before New Hampshire’s Tuesday primary. Her campaign will look to benefit from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie withdrawing from the GOP race last week.
A CNN poll released on January 9 conducted by the University of New Hampshire (UNH) pointed to how Christie’s followers could help Haley. The poll found Haley had shaved Trump’s lead in the New Hampshire primary race to 7 percentage points. If Haley gains a sizable portion of Christie’s supporters, she may take the win in the state during its January 23 primary.
The CNN/UNH poll found 39 percent of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire said they would vote for Trump, compared to 32 percent who support Haley. However, the same poll showed 12 percent of the GOP voters said they would back Christie.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
The former Fox News host Megyn Kelly spoke out on Monday to blast the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley for refusing to say if a man can become a woman.
Nikki Haley trots out the small government line on transgender question:
“We want to make sure people can live any way they want to live. You should be free to live the way you want to live, government and everybody else can stay out of your way.” pic.twitter.com/44QQTpXsRP
During Monday’s episode of her eponymous SiriusXM talk show, Kelly played a clip in which Haley was asked “Can a man become a woman?” during a town hall in Iowa on Sunday.
“There’s been a lot that’s been talked about when it comes to, um, all of these roles and all of these issues,” Haley replied. “I strongly believe that we should not allow any gender change surgeries to anyone before the age of 18. Period.”
“We — kids now, can’t get a tattoo until they’re 18,” she continued. “We shouldn’t have them permanently change their body until they’re 18. And that includes puberty blockers. That includes any sort of hormones that would do that. After the age of 18 — we want to make sure people can live any way they want to.”
Kelly, however, was not having any of it.
“That’s a dodge,” Kelly said response to Haley’s comments. “The answer’s no.”
Kelly’s guest Dave Rubin agreed with her, pointing out that sex change surgeries do not change the patient’s gender.
“If I chopped my wang off live while we were doing this live, that wouldn’t make me a woman, and if you chopped some tissue off your arm and gave yourself one, that wouldn’t make you a man,” Rubin said. “I’m sorry, I know it’s a little early in the day. I’ve been under a lot of pressure with this caucus thing, but you get the point.”
Kelly could not help but laugh at this.
“Oh my god, this is like an X-rated show. Wangs and caucuses,” she said.
Kelly previously talked to The Washington Examiner about the transgender issue, saying that children are the ones “paying the price” with the uptick in young people identifying as trans and undergoing medical procedures such as hormone replacement therapy at early ages.
“It’s exploded from a very small niche mental health issue into something that is a social justice dangerous contagion that is leading to sterility,” Kelly said, going on to detail “the voluntary removal of healthy body parts [and] removal of custody from well-meaning parents who love their children” occurring as a result of this social movement.
“I really see this as the women’s rights issue of our time,” she said.
Kelly revealed in June of last year that though she was once protective of transgender people, she will no longer be using “preferred pronouns” because of how out of control this movement has gotten.
Last month, Haley said that she will “always fight” against biological boys playing girls sports.
“They can find a place for trans kids to play sports, but biological boys should not be playing in girls’ sports,” Haley said, according to The Advocate. “My daughter ran track in high school. I don’t know how I would even have that conversation with her. How do we tell our girls that it’s OK to have a biological boy in their locker room? It’s not. In no scenario.”
“You’ve got women who have worked so hard all their life to really get to points in high school and college where they want to, and to have a biological man, who’s physiologically different, athletically, go and take that away from those women, no, we’re not gonna erase the women like that,” she continued. “You can’t do that. You can find other ways of dealing with this, but it doesn’t have to be on the backs of our girls, who we’re trying to make strong. It’s the wrong thing to do, and I’ll always fight against that.”
Nikki Haley clarifies she’s against gender transition before age of 18, men in women’s sports, men getting into women’s bathrooms, and all the transgender woke movement. 👏🏻
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The arctic chill that upended the final weekend of the Iowa Republican caucus provided a fitting end to a contest that has seemed frozen in place for months.
This caucus has felt unusually lifeless, not only because former President Donald Trump has maintained an imposing and seemingly unshakable lead in the polls. That advantage was confirmed late Saturday night when the Des Moines Register, NBC, and Mediacom Iowa released their highly anticipated final pre-caucus poll showing Trump at 48 percent and, in a distant battle for second place, Nikki Haley at 20 percent and Ron DeSantis at 16 percent.
The caucus has also lacked energy because Trump’s shrinking field of rivals has never appeared to have the heart for making an all-out case against him. “I think there was actually a decent electorate that had supported Trump in the past but were interested in looking for somebody else,” Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP activist who chaired Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign in Iowa, told me. But neither DeSantis nor Haley, he adds, found a message that dislodged nearly enough of them from the front-runner. “Trump has run as an incumbent, if you will, and dominated the media so skillfully that it took a lot of the energy out of the race,” Gross said.
In retrospect, the constrictive boundaries for the GOP race were established when the candidates gathered for their first debate last August (without Trump, who has refused to attend any debate). The crucial moment came when Bret Baier, from Fox News Channel, asked the contenders whether they would support Trump as the nominee even if he was convicted of a crime “in a court of law.” All the contenders onstage raised their hand to indicate they would, except for Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, two long shots at the periphery of the race. With that declaration, the candidates effectively placed the question of whether Trump is fit to be president again—the most important issue facing Republicans in 2024—out of bounds.
That collective failure led to Christie’s withering moral judgment on the field when he quit the race last week: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that he is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.” But even in practical political terms, the choice not to directly address Trump’s fitness left his principal rivals scrambling to find an alternative way to contrast with the front-runner.
Over time, DeSantis has built a coherent critique of Trump, though a very idiosyncratic one. DeSantis runs at Trump from the right, insisting that the man who devised and articulated the “America First” agenda can no longer be trusted to advance it. In his final appearances across Iowa, his CNN debate with Haley last week, and a Fox town hall, DeSantis criticized Trump’s presidential record and 2024 agenda as insufficiently conservative on abortion, LGBTQ rights, federal spending, confronting the bureaucracy, and shutting down the country during the pandemic. He has even accused Trump of failing to deport enough undocumented immigrants and failing to construct enough of his signature border wall.
On issues where politicians in the center or left charge Trump with extremism, DeSantis inverts the accusation: The problem, he argues, is that Trump wasn’t extreme enough. The moment that best encapsulated DeSantis’s approach came in last week’s CNN debate. At one point, the moderators asked him about the claim from Trump’s lawyer that he cannot be prosecuted for any presidential action—including ordering the assassination of a political rival—unless he was first impeached and convicted. DeSantis insisted the problem was that in office, Trump was too restrained in using unilateral presidential authority. He complained that Trump failed to call in the National Guard over the objections of local officials to squelch civil unrest in the Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. When DeSantis visited campaign volunteers last Friday, he indignantly complained “it’s just not true” that he has gone easy on Trump in these final days. “If you watched the debate,” DeSantis told reporters, “I hit on BLM, not building the wall, the debt, not draining the swamp, Fauci, all those things.”
Perhaps the prospect of impending defeat has concentrated the mind, but DeSantis in his closing trek across Iowa has offered perceptive explanations for why these attacks against Trump have sputtered. One is that Trump stifled the debates by refusing to participate in them. “It’s different for me to just be doing that to a camera versus him being right there,” DeSantis told reporters. “When you have a clash, then you guys have to cover it, and it becomes something that people start to talk about.” The other problem, he maintained, was that conservative media like Fox News act as “a praetorian guard” that suppresses criticism of Trump, even from the right.
Those are compelling observations, but incomplete as an explanation. DeSantis’s larger problem may be that the universe of voters that wants Trumpism but doesn’t think Trump can be relied on to deliver it is much smaller than the Florida governor had hoped. One top Trump adviser told me that the fights Trump engaged in as president make it almost impossible to convince conservatives he’s not really one of them. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical leader who has endorsed DeSantis, likewise told me that amid all of Trump’s battles with the left, it’s easier to try to convince evangelical conservatives that the former president can’t win in November than that he has abandoned their causes.
The analogy I’ve used for DeSantis’s strategy is that Trump is like a Mack truck barreling down the far-right lane of American politics, and that rather than trying to pass in all the space he’s left in the center of the road, DeSantis has tried to squeeze past him on the right shoulder. There’s just not a lot of room there.
Even so, DeSantis’s complaints about Trump look like a closing argument from Perry Mason compared with the muffled, gauzy case that Haley has presented against him. DeSantis’s choice to run to Trump’s right created a vacuum that Haley, largely through effective performances at the early debates, has filled with the elements of the GOP coalition that have always been most dubious of Trump: moderates, suburbanites, college-educated voters. But that isn’t a coalition nearly big enough to win. And she has walked on eggshells in trying to reach beyond that universe to the Republican voters who are generally favorable toward Trump but began the race possibly open to an alternative—what the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres calls the “maybe Trump” constituency.
The most notable thing in how Haley talks about Trump is that she almost always avoids value judgments. It’s time for generational change, she will say, or I will be a stronger general-election candidate who will sweep in more Republican candidates up and down the ballot.
At last week’s CNN debate, Haley turned up the dial when she that said of course Trump lost the 2020 election; that January 6 was a “terrible day”; and that Trump’s claims of absolute immunity were “ridiculous.” Those pointed comments probably offered a momentary glimpse of what she actually thinks about him. But in the crucial days before the caucus, Haley has reverted to her careful, values-free dissents. At one town hall conducted over telephone late last week, she said the “hard truths” Republicans had to face were that, although “President Trump was the right president at the right time” and “I agree with a lot of his policies,” the fact remained that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” Talk about taking off the gloves.
Jennifer Horn, the former Republican Party chair in New Hampshire who has become a fierce Trump critic, told me, “There’s no moral or ethical judgment against Trump from her. From anyone, really, but we’re talking about her. She says chaos follows him ‘rightly or wrongly.’ Who cares? Nobody cares about chaos. That’s not the issue with Trump. He’s crooked; he’s criminal; he incited an insurrection. That’s the case against Trump. And if his so-called strongest opponent won’t make the case against Trump, why should voters?”
Gross, the longtime GOP activist, is supporting Haley, but even he is perplexed by her reluctance to articulate a stronger critique of the front-runner. “I don’t know what her argument is,” Gross told me. “I guess it’s: Get rid of the chaos. She’s got to make a strong case about why she’s the alternative, and it’s got to include some element of judgment.”
The reluctance of DeSantis and Haley to fully confront the former president has created an utterly asymmetrical campaign battlefield because Trump has displayed no hesitation about attacking either of them. The super PAC associated with Trump’s campaign spent months pounding DeSantis on issues including supporting statehood for Puerto Rico and backing cuts in Social Security, and in recent weeks, Trump’s camp has run ads accusing Haley of raising taxes and being weak on immigration. In response, DeSantis and Haley have spent significantly more money attacking each other than criticizing, or even rebutting, Trump. Rob Pyers, an analyst with the nonpartisan California Target Book, has calculated that the principal super PAC supporting Trump has spent $32 million combined in ads against Haley and DeSantis; they have pummeled each other with a combined $38 million in negative ads from the super PACs associated with their campaigns. Meanwhile, the Haley and DeSantis super PACs have spent only a little more than $1 million in ads targeting Trump, who is leading them by as much as 50 points in national polls.
Haley’s sharpest retort to any of Trump’s attacks has been to say he’s misrepresenting her record. During the CNN debate, Haley metronomically touted a website called DeSantislies.com, but if she has a similar page up about Trump, she hasn’t mentioned it. (Her campaign didn’t respond to a query about whether it plans to establish such a site.)
“Calling him a liar right now is her strongest pushback, but I just don’t think GOP voters care about liars,” Horn told me. “If she engaged in a real battle with him for these last days [before New Hampshire], that would be fascinating to see. The fact that she’s not pushing back, the fact that she’s not running the strongest possible campaign as she’s coming down the stretch here, makes me wonder if she is as uncertain of her ability to win as I am.”
Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to this careful approach to Trump, especially from Haley. A former top aide to one of Trump’s main rivals in the 2016 race told me that “nobody has found a message you can put on TV that makes Republicans like Trump less.” Some other veterans of earlier GOP contests believe that Haley and DeSantis were justified in initially trying to eclipse the other and create a one-on-one race with Trump. And for Haley, there’s also at least some argument for preserving her strongest case against Trump for the January 23 New Hampshire primary, where a more moderate electorate may be more receptive than the conservative, heavily evangelical population that usually turns out for the caucus.
“She has to draw much sharper contrasts,” Gross told me. “And to be fair to her, once she gets out of here, maybe she will. What she strikes me as is incredibly disciplined and calculating. So, I do think you’re going to see modulation.”
DeSantis has the most to lose in Iowa, because a poor showing will almost certainly end his campaign, even if he tries to insist otherwise for a few weeks. For Haley, the results aren’t as important because whatever happens here, she will have another opportunity to create momentum in New Hampshire, where polls have shown her rising even as DeSantis craters. Still, if Haley is unable or unwilling to deliver a more persuasive argument against Trump, she too will quickly find herself with no realistic hope of overtaking the front-runner, whose lead in national polls of Republican voters continues to grow. That’s one thing common to winter in both Iowa and New Hampshire: It gets dark early.
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N
ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.
Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?
I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida GovernorRon DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)
On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And how she was determined to “humanize” the fractious issue of abortion and, rest assured, “the days of demonizing that issue are over.”
Haley is a gifted political performer, particularly in a certain kind of room. This was one of those, a politely boisterous gathering of a few hundred people, serious and professional, many still dressed for work. She came off as reasonable and solicitous, holding the same authority as she did at the various Trumpless debates she has rated so well in. You can see how Haley could rise to the level she has, the most formidable alternative to Trump or (if you prefer) first among the Republican also-rans.
After completing her set remarks to a standing ovation, Haley took audience questions, greeted a 30-minute lineup of supporters, and satisfied their various selfie and autograph needs, nailing eye contact, small talk, and drive-by rapport. “She understands that kind of customer-service approach,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu raved to me after telling the Manchester crowd that he was endorsing Haley. (“You bet your ass I am!”)
At the end of the night, Sununu stood to Haley’s left as she faced a clot of television cameras and microphones and shouted questions from reporters. She is good at this too—parrying pointed inquiries with self-assurance, then moving on before anyone can really reflect on what she said, or didn’t say.
But Haley’s sturdy pronouncements belie a certain wobbliness. Wait, what did she say exactly?
Nikki Haley supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley at the Manchester event
Beyond her expertly rendered deliveries, Haley’s actual answers can be mushy or even nonsensical, with strange constructions and frequent malaprops. In Manchester, Haley praised Sununu for having his “pulse to the ground” in his state and boasted that her campaign already had momentum before his endorsement “just gave it a speed bump.” At a November debate, she ordered Ramaswamy to “leave my daughter out of your voice” (as opposed to her daughter’s name out of his mouth). “We have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” she declares in her town halls when the subject arises (mental health, not cancer).
Later in the session, a reporter asked Haley about Trump’s then-most-recent flare-up, his statement to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on day one,” long since overshadowed by Trump’s “rot in Hell” Christmas message and his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In the moment, the “dictator” comment did feel germane, as did the question to Haley about whether that should perhaps preclude him from leading the world’s most powerful democracy.
“First of all, that’s for the voters to decide,” Haley declared, “if they want a dictator on day one.”
Yes, unquestionably. But what about Haley, the candidate we were speaking to—what did she decide?
“I’m not going to be a dictator on day one,” she assured everyone, not answering.
“I’ve always spoken in hard truths” is one of Haley’s trademark claims. In reality, the bluntness she discharges is reserved mostly for easy targets: the media, President Joe Biden, and “Kamala” (first name only, per GOP style). When it comes to speaking the hardest Republican truths of all—about Trump—Haley’s words fall feebly (wounded-bird-like), and her voice acquires a slightly halting tone and slower cadence.
Her preferred pose is one of pronounced exasperation. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough; pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough,” Haley said at the press gaggle. She shook her head and flashed a Man, I just can’t win look before escaping into a smoke screen of platitudes (“at the end of the day, I just put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may”).
For all her cultivated brashness, Haley, whose campaign declined my requests to interview her, can also convey an impression of being terrified—of saying the wrong thing, of offending too many MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters, or certainly of Trump himself.
The most excruciating example of this occurred a few days after Christmas, when a New Hampshire voter asked Haley to explain why the Civil War was fought. She provided a stem-winder of vague conservative assertions (“government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life”) while omitting the obvious cause: slavery. She appeared to be sensitive to the fact that some Americans might be sick of being reminded about the nation’s shameful, bloody history. Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has said that as president she would not play into the “national self-loathing” that she is always lamenting, “this idea that America is bad, or rotten, or racist.”
But trying to talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like trying to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 while barely touching the all-encompassing, front-running figure at the center of it all.
One of Haley’s niftier moves occurs later in her stump speech, when she builds to a seemingly dramatic revelation.
“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she reassures her audience. It is an imprecise and puzzling statement—what “time” exactly? (Charlottesville? COVID?) But Haley delivers the line with a force that sets a few heads bobbing in the crowd and leads her safely into her next credential. “I had a good working relationship with him when I was in his administration,” she further affirms.
“But …”
The words that follow this inevitable but are as fraught as any that a Republican candidate can utter. Say something like “He’s becoming crazier,” as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did of Trump last month, and you might win candor points but probably not any Republican primaries.
Haley’s next line barely deviates a word, speech to speech: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” You could construct a tidy diagram to illustrate the perfect passivity she achieves here. Haley assigns no judgment (“rightly or wrongly”) and makes no suggestion that Trump might have ever said or done anything that actually caused this “chaos”—a euphemism for, say, the events of January 6 or whatever else is embedded in those 91 criminal counts. All of this “chaos” somehow comes randomly to rest upon the 45th president.
“Chaos follows him,” Haley said again at a December 14 town hall in the southern–New Hampshire town of Atkinson. “You know I’m right” was the extent of her elaboration.
“It just does.”
Haley’s soft landing at “chaos follows him” comes after a zig-zagging and sometimes turbulent journey with Trump. The odyssey began during the 2016 campaign, when Haley called him “scary” and the embodiment of “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio—like Haley, a child of immigrants—by saying she was excited to support a candidate who “was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
Haley speaks at the Manchester town hall.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley said, reluctantly, that she would vote for him. Trump asked her to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations reportedly as a favor to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, a big Trump supporter, who wanted Haley out of the way so he could become governor. The UN job allowed Haley to burnish her foreign-policy résumé, and being in New York kept her removed from the daily discord of Trump’s White House. She served until 2018. “I got out of the administration without a tweet,” she likes to say.
Following Trump’s 2020 defeat and the January 6 insurrection, Haley sounded eager to bury her former boss and get on with her pursuit of his job. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” she declared in a January 7 speech at a Republican National Committee meeting. Haley said there was no chance Trump would ever run for federal office again. When those predictions proved premature, she reportedly tried to pay a quick make-up visit to Mar-a-Lago but was told by the proprietor not to bother. Less than three weeks after the insurrection, she told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham that everyone should “give the man a break.”
That April, Haley promised that she would support Trump if he ran for president again in 2024. And if he did, she said, she would not run herself.
Until … never mind.
As a candidate, Haley, whom Trump has taken to calling “Birdbrain,” frequently mentions how much better she would fare against Biden than Trump or DeSantis would. She often cites a Wall Street Journal poll from last month that shows her leading Biden by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup (Trump wins by four points). No doubt “electability” is a compelling argument, but this hypothetical Haley blowout is also premised on a dubious assumption—that Trump would be a gracious loser and urge his supporters to vote for their Republican standard-bearer, Ambassador Birdbrain.
When it comes to Trump’s indictments, Haley can’t bat away questions fast enough. “A lot of these cases have been politicized, we all know that,” she said in Manchester. Haley has promised to support the GOP nominee, whether it’s Trump or someone else. And in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the end of December, she said that if she were elected president and Trump were convicted, she would likely pardon him “so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”
Such flaccid scolding is of course a big part of why Trump is still here. Appeasement has been the Republican business model since 2015. “It’s like what happened last time—nobody wanted to criticize Trump,” Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. Sanford, who declined to speak about Haley on the record, lost his 2018 House primary after becoming a strident Trump critic. “They figured he would go away,” Sanford said, referring to Trump’s Republican opponents over the years. “And they sort of waited and waited and waited, and he didn’t go away.”
Eight years later, Haley seems to be of a similarly passive mindset: put up tepid resistance to Trump, at least early on; stay alive; and hope that someone, or something, comes along to take care of the problem. “Maybe she catches a break from a jury,” Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican strategist in South Carolina told me, referring to the possibility of Trump being convicted in the coming months. Felkel, who is not affiliated with Haley’s campaign, says that he’s no fan of hers but that he’s hugely hostile to Trump, so he’ll support his former governor.
Chris Christie offers a different specimen of Trump alternative: a former friend and longtime ally of the 45th president whose unambiguous denunciations were the centerpiece of his campaign. Christie has held back little, calling Trump a “coward,” a “fool,” and a “self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”
In other words, Christie has been the rare candidate willing to tell actual hard truths about Trump. He will also not be the Republican nominee: He suspended his campaign last night.
Will Haley be the nominee? Are her pillowy “attacks” on the front-runner simply the undignified price of Republican viability today? Has this approach at least given her the best shot of any Republican to defeat Trump—an extremely long shot, but a shot nonetheless?
Her theory of the race is straightforward enough: Beat DeSantis for second in Iowa; be competitive with Trump in New Hampshire, where she’s gained in recent polls but still trails by double digits in most; and then parlay that momentum into defeating Trump in her home state (where the former president also remains well ahead).
Both Christie and Haley are pragmatic former governors who appeal to independents and college-educated moderates. Polling this past fall showed that a significant portion of his backers in New Hampshire would migrate to Haley if he bowed out of the race before the state’s January 23 primary.
A week before Christmas, Christie faced growing public pressure, much of it from people backing Haley, to drop out in the name of stopping Trump. The former New Jersey governor had made a sustained and effective case against Trump over several months, but struggled to boost his support into the teens and was strongly considering it.
But he held off for a few weeks. Christie has been frustrated, even appalled, by Haley’s unwillingness to say how she really feels about Trump, according to sources close to Christie. He has become less and less shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with her in public. He has taunted Haley for not ruling out a role as Trump’s running mate, as he and DeSantis have. “I don’t play for second” has been Haley’s standard answer to the vice-presidential question, an emphatic non-denial. “That’s why she’s not saying strong things against Donald Trump,” Christie said on Face the Nation.
His reaction to Haley’s slavery misadventure was especially pointed. “She’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” he said in Epping, New Hampshire. “It’s worse to be able to be dishonest with people, and that’s what’s happening here.”
Now that Christie’s out of the primary, Haley will surely get some of his voters, though an endorsement seems unlikely anytime soon. Shortly before Christie announced his exit last night, at a town hall in New Hampshire, a hot mic caught him saying of Haley: “She’s gonna get smoked … She’s not up to this.”
Christie’s quandary over Haley is one that many Trump-skeptical Republicans identify with. “It’s the Nikki Haley dilemma,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican media consultant who has deep loathing for Trump and would love to see him lose, told me. He finds Haley’s cynicism depressing and is disgusted by her willingness to pander to “the latest insipid GOP crowd-pleasing trope,” as he recently wrote on Substack.
“Still, compared to Trump, she’s Gandhi,” Murphy continued. And he thinks she has a real chance to beat Trump in New Hampshire, where Murphy helped John McCain upset George W. Bush in 2000. “If I lived in New Hampshire, I’d vote for Haley in a heartbeat,” he told me.
Left: Haley signs an autograph. Right: Supporters leave after the town hall.
Haley’s knack for connecting one-on-one with voters does not always extend to political peers. On the contrary, her career has featured an array of disposable alliances, stubborn grudges, and a sense of paranoia about opponents, as my colleague Tim Alberta, then of Politico, documented in a 2021 profile of Haley. “She cut me off,” Sanford told Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki,” he continued. “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”
“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust,” Haley told Alberta. “Friend,” she added, “is a loose term.” She is fond of saying she wears heels not as a fashion statement but “for ammunition.”
No doubt Haley comes to this worldview honestly, having grown up as an Indian American in the Deep South of the 1970s and ’80s. She has faced discrimination, racism, sexism, and smears—not subtle ones, either. When she ran for governor, in 2010, a South Carolina political blogger and a lobbyist working for one of Haley’s rivals in the race both claimed to have had affairs with Haley (she denied them), and a Republican state senator called her a “raghead.”
“Every South Carolina politician here has been through that, all of us,” Katon Dawson, the former chair of the South Carolina GOP and a Haley supporter, told me. “We’re from South Carolina, and it is a bare-knuckled brawl.”
For Haley to win, Felkel, the South Carolina strategist, said he thinks she will have to channel some of that South Carolina pugilism and “open up a can of whoop-ass” on Trump. “We need to see more stiletto weaponry from her, and less ‘bless your heart,’” Felkel said.
In recent days, Haley has taken a somewhat more combative tack against Trump, after a pro-Trump super PAC released a campaign ad in New Hampshire that accused her of supporting a gas-tax increase in South Carolina and dubbed her “‘High Tax’ Haley.” (Haley had backed a gas-tax hike coupled with an income-tax cut.) “In his commercials and in his temper tantrums, every single thing that he’s said has been a lie,” she told an audience at a January 2 town hall on the New Hampshire coast.
“So if he’s gonna lie about me,” Haley went on, “I’m gonna tell you the truth about him.” The line drew the biggest applause of the event. Haley delivered it slowly, clearly, and with authority—like a candidate to be reckoned with, who might just be willing to escalate things.
But wasn’t Haley supposedly telling “hard truths” all along? Isn’t that kind of her signature thing? “She’s admitting that her retaliation to Trump’s lying about her is that she will stop lying about him,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in TheBulwark. Last dubbed Haley’s line “the most complete exposure to a politician’s subconscious I’ve ever seen.”
Or maybe this was always Haley’s conscious plan—to gradually parcel out her clever “hard truths” if convenient and when openings arise, and impress the right people and donors while doing so. Perhaps Haley already views this foray as a success. Even if she never seriously threatens Trump, she’s likely to perform respectably in the early states, win a second place or two, outlast DeSantis, and land some breezy swipes at Trump. Then, when his nomination becomes inevitable again, she can safely endorse her old boss (they always had a good working relationship!) and move on to her next campaign, to be Trump’s vice president or to try again in 2028.
Related Podcast
Listen to Mark Leibovich discuss Nikki Haley on Radio Atlantic:
This week, embattled and struggling 24/7 news network CNN hosted a town hall for GOP Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Mr. Ramaswamy is not one to turn down a media appearance, including one guaranteed to be hostile, so no doubt CNN felt it was an easy way to try to attract viewers they so desperately need.
Even with the writing on the wall that CNN is quickly losing its foothold in the all-day, all-night news arena, their reporters voiced their displeasure at the network’s decision to host Mr. Ramaswamy.
After all, it’s not the news media’s job to provide balanced coverage of elections and those candidates hoping to cinch the support of the American public, at least not according to Oliver Darcy.
CNN’s media reporter, @oliverdarcy, on CNN’s decision.
“Handing Ramaswamy a microphone and putting him on a stage affixed with CNN’s iconic branding to answer audience questions helps validate him…” https://t.co/DSCPpcQPdf
Sure, sunlight disinfects. It also makes things grow.
Wednesday, CNN hosted an hour-long town hall for GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. CNN’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy was none too happy about the decision, writing about his frustrations with his own employer in his CNN newsletter.
“The notion that the infotainer, who CNN has reported ‘struggles for relevance’ as he polls in the low single digits and remains exceedingly unlikely to be the Republican Party’s nominee, deserves an hour-long national platform to sell his personal brand and insidious talking points to the masses taxes the imagination.”
It taxes the imagination how such outrageous, open, and hostile bias still manages to garner a paycheck from CNN. But perhaps he has a point; maybe it doesn’t make sense for CNN to provide so much air time to someone who isn’t in the top two positions in most polls for the GOP nomination.
In that case, it would square with Mr. Darcy’s argument that CNN provide an hour for former President Donald Trump, who by every measure is the front-runner and more than likely will be the Republican nominee. However, when CNN did just that in May, Mr. Darcy also railed against that.
Is there anything that would make Mr. Darcy happy at CNN, or perhaps, like the famous Jane Austen character by the same name, he is too prideful or prejudiced? It’s hard to recall which.
In 2018 @RealAlexJones was banned on X for saying CNN reporter Oliver Darcy has “the eyes of a rat”
Today Oliver Darcy is melting down in front of his tiny following on something called “threads”
Mr. Darcy seems particularly incensed that his employer would want to attach their brand to the ideas Mr. Ramaswamy espouses, writing:
“Handing Ramaswamy a microphone and putting him on a stage affixed with CNN’s iconic branding to answer audience questions helps validate him and provides oxygen to the menacing wildfire of delusions he has pushed into the public discourse.”
Delusions such as stricter immigration policies, elevating concepts like patriotism and faith, and thinning out the administrative branch of government that no citizen ever voted into power, or that there were FBI informants in the crowd at the Capitol riot.
The best part of the above statement is Mr. Darcy’s assertion that the CNN “iconic” brand means anything anymore.
Before the terrorist attacks by Hamas, CNN was raking in only about 55,000 viewers for their weekend lineups, including for their shows State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and Fareed Zakaria GPS. Their Sunday numbers were even worse, only bringing in about 43,000 viewers for The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper and Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.
MSNBC dominated CNN in major dayparts in 2023, even doubling CNN in total viewership across mornings and primetime for the year. https://t.co/d2SNdJ9fSo
Those ratings are the worst CNN has ever had since the dawn of tracking viewership in 1991. Since the war in Israel began, CNN has only attracted roughly 619,000 viewers as of mid-November Monday tracking.
Compare that to two million that tuned into Fox News on that same tracked Monday and 1.7 million that switched on MSNBC. Maybe tossing the millennial conservative provocateur on a stage with a microphone and the beleaguered CNN brand is a good idea.
In response to Oliver Darcy’s tirade, a CNN spokesperson explained that Vivek Ramaswamy is a legitimate guest for a town hall given that he is a:
“…significant candidate for the GOP nomination, having made every debate stage thus far.”
A true statement, however, is still missing the reason why Vivek should get a town hall appearance. Mainstream news networks like CNN should have newsmakers on their networks because the idea behind claiming they report the news would indicate including those who generate news.
But that’s not really what employees at CNN want to do; they want to drive public discourse and shape American opinions. Legacy news isn’t about and hasn’t been about reporting facts and presenting engaging, compelling counterarguments for a long time.
X Marks The End. Twitter is dead.
This platform only reluctantly lives on as a zombie.
Warped and disfigured, it marches on like a White Walker, an ugly shell of its former self under the command of a loathsome leader.
Legacy news is about entertainment and power. Dialing into the most extreme viewer’s most basic needs and controlling the group-think of the agreed upon audience.
It taxes the imagination why legacy news media and print keep wondering why American viewership and readership have plummeted in the last few years, and reliance on citizen journalists on social media has increased.
Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust. The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”
Like many politicians, Representative Dean Phillips likes to look people in the eye. And because he’s a politician, Phillips can glean things, just as President George W. Bush did when he peered into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul.
“I’ve looked Benjamin Netanyahu in the eye,” Phillips told a group of students at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, last week.
And?
“I did not like what I saw,” Phillips said of the Israeli prime minister. “I do not like his government. He’s got to go.”
Philips has also looked into Donald Trump’s eyes. That, too, was ominous. It was a few years ago, and the former president had invited a bunch of new House members to the White House for an introductory visit.
“I looked him in the eye for the better part of an hour,” Phillips told me.
And?
“I saw right through him,” Phillips said. “I know exactly how to handle weaklings like Donald Trump.”
How?
“You’ll see,” he said. “Why would I give away my special sauce?”
Phillips was telling me this while tucked into the back of a minivan, having just set off on a 90-minute ride from Hanover to Manchester. He wore a down vest over a blue dress shirt and looked me straight in the you-know-what as he described the “gravity of this entire circumstance” he was now embarked upon.
He had just concluded one of his early days as an official primary challenger to President Joe Biden, the incumbent he must first dispatch before he can douse Trump with his proprietary Dean Sauce. Phillips is pursuing this mission despite long odds and an unsurprising chorus of how dare yous and not helpfuls from various Democratic gatekeepers. He has already said plenty about why he is doing this—about how Democrats are desperate for a Plan B to Biden, who Phillips says has no business seeking reelection at his age (81 on Monday), with his poll numbers and the catastrophic threat of his likely GOP opponent (yes, him). Phillips agonized over his decision and unburdened himself in multiple forums, including, quite expansively last month, to my colleague Tim Alberta.
I was in New Hampshire because I wanted to see Phillips transition from theoretical to actual challenger. It is one thing to scream warnings about alarming data, and another to segue into the granular doings of a campaign. “This is an all-hands-on-deck initiative,” he told me, his words landing somewhere between hyper-earnest and naive, with occasional tips into grandiose. Phillips, 54, is a figure of uncommonly big plans and weighty burdens, especially given his relatively modest station (he has represented Minnesota’s Third Congressional District since 2019). He seems sincere about what he’s doing, especially compared with the two-faced default of so many elected Democrats who tout Biden’s reelection in public while privately pining for some other candidate, like Gretchen Whitmer, the Rock, or whomever they want instead. In this sense, Phillips’s gambit is noble, even necessary. It can also be lonely and awkward to watch up close.
Since entering the race a month ago, Phillips has held a series of mostly low-key events in New Hampshire and has made a stop in South Carolina. I first encountered him during a heartfelt give-and-take with half a dozen members of the Dartmouth Political Union. “This is a beautiful American moment,” Phillips declared after a dialogue about abortion policy with a polite young Nikki Haley supporter. Later, at a town hall across campus, Phillips described that bridge-building exchange as “one of the most profound hours of engagement” he’s had in a long while and something “I will remember for years to come.”
Phillips told me that his initial campaign forays have only—surprise—reaffirmed the premise of his errand: “Other than some Democratic elected officials, and only a few of them, I’ve not yet encountered a single person who doesn’t feel the same way,” he said, about the need for a Biden alternative. His go-to weapon against the president is public opinion, for which Phillips keeps getting fresh ammunition. “I want to give you some simple data,” he said during a meet and greet with about 50 students, faculty, and community members before the town hall. He mentioned a recent survey of voters in battleground states that had Biden trailing Trump by four points, 48–44. “But then you look at how Trump does against a ‘generic Democrat,’” Phillips said, “and the generic Democrat wins 48–40.” Heads bobbed in the classroom; Phillips shook his in exasperation.
Phillips himself is polling at just 10 percent among likely New Hampshire Democratic-primary voters, according to a CNN survey released last week that had Biden at 65 percent. During our car ride, I suggested to Phillips that maybe he should change his name to “Generic Democrat.”
“I never in my life aspired to be generic,” he replied, chuckling.
Primary challenges to incumbent presidents have historically been associated with signature causes and fiery rhetoric. They tend to be ideologically driven—such as Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter from the left in 1980 and Pat Buchanan’s to President George H. W. Bush from the right in 1992. No one will mistake Phillips for a brawling populist. He is affable, well mannered, and extremely rich, with a net worth of about $50 million, some portion of it derived from the gelato-and-sorbet company—Talenti—that he co-owned before it was sold.
Still, Phillips frequently brings up the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, a fellow Minnesota Democrat, whose uprising against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 helped push Johnson to not seek reelection. The comparison is fraught in that Democrats wound up nominating another Minnesotan, Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose to Richard Nixon. Carter and Bush also lost their general elections. This tends to be the main critique of Phillips: that his project could weaken Biden against Trump.
One student at Dartmouth questioned Phillips about the 1980 example, arguing that Kennedy was the reason that Carter was ultimately blown out by Ronald Reagan. Phillips came back with a lengthy and somewhat defensive response. “Ted Kennedy didn’t cause Carter’s problems any more than I’ve caused Joe Biden’s problems,” he said. The student nodded and thanked the candidate, who in turn thanked the student—and another beautiful American moment was forged.
“I am the anti-defeat candidate,” Phillips said, describing his enterprise to me later. “I am the truth-telling candidate.” “Truth-telling” is of course subjective, in campaigns as in life. Phillips then told me about a visit he’d made to a Hanover restaurant that day. After a series of “wonderful conversations” with random diners, he’d encountered a young woman who “I sensed was not showing any compassion for butchered Israelis”—a reference to the Hamas attacks on October 7. So Phillips, who is Jewish, paused the conversation and asked a question of his own. “I said, ‘Are you telling me that you support Hamas?’” Phillips said. “And she goes, ‘Yes.’” At which point, he’d heard enough.
“I said, ‘Look, I really enjoyed our conversation, but I can’t continue this.’”
“Wait, did you really enjoy that conversation?” I interrupted, questioning his truth-telling.
“I’ll tell you what, that’s a good point,” Phillips acknowledged. “I did not enjoy it.”
In that spirit of engaging with people of different backgrounds and persuasions, Phillips frequently invokes his friendship with Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, who was censured by the House this month for her comments about Israel. Phillips refers to Tlaib as “my Palestinian sister” and to himself as “her Jewish brother.”
I pressed Phillips on the state of his relations with Tlaib. “It’s as difficult as ever and more important than ever,” he said. He then raised the stakes even higher. “I believe that as Rashida Tlaib and Dean Phillips go, so will the Middle East,” he said. (A lot of pressure there!)
As our nighttime ride persisted southeast down Interstate 89, the conversation took some quick turns.
“Is Kamala Harris prepared to step in if something happened to Biden?” I asked Phillips.
“I think that Americans have made the decision that she’s not,” he said.
I replied that I was interested in the decision of one specific American, Dean Phillips.
“That is not my opinion,” Phillips clarified. He said that every interaction he’s had with the vice president has been “thoughtful” and that “I’ve enjoyed them.”
“That said …” Phillips paused, and I braced for the vibe shift.
“I hear from others who know her a lot better than I do that many think she’s not well positioned,” he said of Harris. “She is not well prepared, doesn’t have the right disposition and the right competencies to execute that office.” Phillips also noted that Harris’s approval numbers are even worse than Biden’s: “It’s pretty clear that she’s not somebody people have faith in.”
But again, Phillips is not one of those people: “From my personal experiences, I’ve not seen those deficiencies.”
If Phillips had looked me in the eye at that moment—and granted, it was dark in the back of the van—he would have seen a slightly confused expression. Why was he hiding behind these Trumplike “many people are saying” attributions? Similarly, he often speaks in glowing terms about Biden’s performance in office—“his administration has been quite extraordinary”—while leaning heavily on “the opinion of others” or “the data” to make his case that the president himself needs to go. Phillips can seem torn at times as he attempts to hedge his way through somewhat contradictory impulses: to give Biden his proper due while also trying to end his career.
I asked Phillips what would happen if his campaign really takes off—he wins a bunch of primaries—and then Biden tries to placate the insurgents by dumping Harris in favor of their hero, Dean Phillips. Would he agree to serve as Biden’s new understudy?
I anticipated the “I’m not answering hypothetical questions” blow-off that they teach in Candidate School. But Phillips apparently skipped class that day. “That’s a really interesting question,” he said, before letting me down gently.
“President Biden will never replace Vice President Harris on the ticket, ever,” he said.
For the record—bonus nugget—Phillips predicts that Trump will select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his running mate. “And they will be very difficult to beat,” he fears. These are the kinds of empty punditing calories that get passed around during long drives on chilly campaign nights.
As we approached Manchester, Phillips flashed back to reality, or something. “I am the best positioned to defeat Donald Trump,” he said. “All I’m focused on right now is to run a spirited, thoughtful, and energetic campaign.”
“What about ‘vigorous’ and ‘robust’?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” Phillips said, nodding. It was getting late, and we were both getting a bit punchy.
“And bold,” he added.
Our van pulled into the Manchester DoubleTree just before 10 p.m. Phillips had to wake up in a few hours to catch a 6:15 a.m. flight back to Washington. He looked me in the eye. I’m not sure what he saw, or what I saw, but I wished him luck.
The phrase one percentcould be used to describe Doug Burgum’s socioeconomic status and, less gloriously, his national-polling average. On a recent Thursday night in New Hampshire, the North Dakota governor squared up to the reality of his presidential campaign: “The first question I get is ‘When are you going to drop out?’”
He was speaking to about 100 people in a private back room at Stark Brewing Company, in downtown Manchester. Republicans had come together to celebrate the state GOP’s 170th birthday, sheet cake and all. Burgum was the biggest star on the program, along with former Representative Will Hurd, who was a no-show after ending his own campaign three days earlier. The next-biggest name? Perry Johnson, a businessman who attempted to deliver his remarks by phone and, about a week later, would also drop out.
Burgum is an affable midwestern guy with virtually zero national name recognition. He spins his long-shot bid for the Republican nomination as “an entrepreneur’s dream”—huge market potential. Like another one-percenter, Succession’s Connor Roy, Burgum is fighting for his 1 percent in the polls: “Polling trails, you know, people’s impressions.” He’s been running for president for about five months. His campaign profile on X (formerly Twitter) has just over 13,000 followers. He’s not a fixture on Fox News. He hasn’t written a best-selling book, or any book, offering voters a glimpse of his life. As you’re reading this sentence, can you even conjure what his voice sounds like?
This summer, to qualify for the first Republican debate, each candidate had to secure at least 40,000 individual donors. As July 4 approached, Burgum’s campaign had the idea to sell American flags for donations as a way to boost his numbers. But they soon pivoted to a savvier pitch: free money. Burgum’s team would mail anyone who donated $1 a $20 prepaid Visa or Mastercard, dubbed a “Biden inflation relief card,” netting the supporter $19 in profit. Burgum, who made millions in the software business, has described this plan as “a hack.” Though he was criticized for it, he’s executing it again as he hopes to qualify for this month’s debate in Miami. The new thresholds are stricter: at least 70,000 donors and 4 percent of support in two national polls to make the cut. Currently, Burgum has the donors but not the polls. “We are optimistic he will make it,” his spokesperson told me.
“Newt Gingrich said it the other day, twice to two different news outlets: Everybody should drop out because the race is already over. I heard that Newt’s already picked the Super Bowl winner. So we’re gonna cancel the NFL season. No games need to be played,” Burgum told the brewery crowd. Most people in the room laughed. The woman standing next to me, scrolling through her phone, muttered that he had just reminded her to set her fantasy-football lineup.
Former President Donald Trump enjoys a ridiculously large lead in what has come to feel almost like a Potemkin primary. Burgum is among a handful of candidates who seem to earnestly believe that Republicans are still maybe, possibly, you never know, searching for an alternative. But whereas someone like Ron DeSantis has fashioned himself into a wet-blanket version of Trump, Burgum refuses to support book bans or cosplay as MAGA. He does not appear to be courting members of the old guard in the manner of Nikki Haley or Tim Scott. He’s not firing off rhetorical napalm like Vivek Ramaswamy, or casting himself as the anti-Trump, like Chris Christie. What, then, is he doing? I spent a few days following him in New Hampshire, trying to figure that out.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, and first lady of North Dakota, Kathryn Burgum, at the New Hampshire state house filing the paperwork to be on the 2024 Presidential ballot in New Hampshire.
B
urgum presents as a down-to-earth, slightly nerdy guy who spent most of his life in business and speaks softly, with a thick Fargo accent. (He’s heard all of your wood-chipper jokes.) He has the requisite ego to run for president but freely admits that pretty much nobody outside North Dakota has any clue who he is. He insists that the modern electoral system is broken, and that, if he is to find any national GOP success, he’ll need to be his honest, authentic, inoffensive self—nothing more. He says he is committed to avoiding the ugly reality-TV tropes of modern electoral politics. It is a noble goal. Is it doomed? Week after week, he presses on, spreading the gospel of Doug Burgum to small groups of people.
I watched Burgum and his entourage roll into Airport Diner, in southern Manchester. (Another long-shot candidate, the Democrat Marianne Williamson, had her campaign bus parked in the adjacent Holiday Inn lot; Burgum was traveling in a black SUV.) He stopped to chat with an elderly couple in matching blue shirts, but the conversation didn’t seem to go anywhere. (“We’re Democrats,” the wife sheepishly told me a few minutes later.) At another table, a 78-year-old woman told me that some man had just come by, but she had no idea who he was. She said that God speaks to her and has told her that Trump is returning to office, but that there won’t even be an election next year—Trump will merely resume his prior presidency. She was reluctant to share her name on the record. “I have lost a lot of friends,” she said. Because of Trump? “Oh, yeah. But, hey, that’s life.”
Out on the trail, Burgum rolls his eyes at The Narrative—capital T, capital N—and scoffs at what he sees as the “nationalization” of the primary system. Cable news, coastal elites, anyone trying to pull a lever inside the Beltway—these are the forces stripping power away from regular people, in Burgum’s view. In almost every speech, he takes umbrage at what he describes as the Republican National Committee’s “clubhouse rules.” Burgum disagrees with, among other things, the RNC’s apparent eagerness to narrow the presidential field. He counters that Americans benefit from a large pool of qualified applicants, and that early-state voters should do the winnowing themselves. He often quotes his favorite president, Theodore Roosevelt: “Let the people rule!”
Like Roosevelt, Burgum projects an Americana-heavy image. He usually steps out in blue jeans and brown cowboy boots. He has praised those who take a shower at the end of the day versus at the beginning. He’s eager to talk about his experience working at his family’s grain elevator and his stint as a chimney sweep. He has a mop of thick hair, a strong jawline, and a hard-to-explain “just happy to be here” vibe. In August, on the eve of the first Republican debate, Burgum blew out his Achilles while playing pickup basketball. (“The skies were clear, but it was raining threes,” he told a reporter.) He’s been using a knee scooter to get around ever since, and told me that when he encounters long ramps, he likes to “let it rip” on his way down. His name is embroidered in big block letters on the blue puffer vest he wears almost every day. He’s rarely in a rush to get out of interactions with strangers, and will be sure to ask, with genuine curiosity, “Where’s home for you?” Burgum himself is from Arthur, North Dakota, population 323. No one from North Dakota has ever won the presidency or, for that matter, been a major party’s nominee.
After finishing at the diner, he traveled north to Hanover, specifically Dartmouth College, where he sat for an interview with a reporter from the school’s conservative newspaper, The Dartmouth Review, and taped an episode of a campus podcast. Later, during a town hall at the college’s public-policy school, he told students that, thanks to AI, they were all “going to live to be a hundred.” This sort of techno-optimism is something that separates Burgum from his competitors. Whereas Trump paints a picture of a failing, dystopian country in need of a supreme leader, Burgum’s focus remains narrow and future-oriented. He waxes long about energy, the economy, and national security. His stump speech isn’t exactly thrilling, yet it can be refreshing—if only because he avoids campaigning on the standard GOP culture-war themes.
Still, as governor, he’s signed several hard-right bills: a near-total abortion ban, a bathroom bill, legislation preventing transgender children from receiving gender-affirming surgery. Additionally, in North Dakota, teachers must now notify parents or guardians if one of their students identifies as trans, and they are permitted to misgender their students. North Dakota is a deep-red state, and many of these bills reached his desk veto-proof. When I asked Burgum to help me understand the motivation behind all of this legislation, he grew defensive, insisting that it’s not about discrimination.
“But like other things,” he said, “what goes on in one state, it’s not going to go in another … As president, I’m focusing on economy, energy, national security, and the limited set of things the federal government is actually supposed to do.”
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Dartmouth College speaking at a town hall with students.
In high school, basketball was Burgum’s passion, and it served as the backdrop of one of the defining moments of his life. He told me about a particularly cold Friday night during his freshman year. He was climbing aboard the team bus to an away game when the school principal pulled him aside. Burgum’s father was in the hospital battling brain cancer; Doug had planned to visit the following day. The principal told him that he had to go to the hospital right away. Burgum was shocked; he’d believed that his dad was on the path to recovery. “No one was being honest with me about the fact that it was imminent,” he said. His father died that night.
As Burgum told me this story, his stoicism slipped. His eyes welled up, and he let out a deep exhale. His family was not wealthy, and his stay-at-home mother immediately started working full-time more than 30 miles away in Fargo, at North Dakota State University. His two elder siblings were now also living in Fargo. His mom wanted to move there, but he says he was stubborn, and refused to leave the basketball team in Arthur. “I didn’t understand the level of economic insecurity,” he said. In practical terms, this meant that his mom would often stay in Fargo overnight instead of commuting back and forth. Burgum told me he spent most of his high-school years alone, fixing things around the house in his father’s absence.
“My mom was good at all these things, but she didn’t know how to grieve. Her solution to grieving was to go back to work and just kind of bury it,” he said, later adding, “So I developed this incredible work ethic that kind of mirrored my mother, which was: Just work your way through.”
After finishing his undergraduate degree at North Dakota State, Burgum went on to Stanford for business school, spent two years in Chicago working for McKinsey, then returned home. He likes to say he “literally” bet the farm when he mortgaged his family farmland in order to get a computer-accounting business, Great Plains Software, off the ground. “There is a bit of, I think, geographic bigotry that actually exists in our country, where people that haven’t been to places, they assume that we’re still, you know, plowing fields with horses or something.”
His wife, Kathryn, is the sister of one of Burgum’s fraternity brothers from North Dakota State. Burgum almost always uses the first-person plural pronoun we when discussing his political career. On the campaign trail, he praises his wife’s courage.
She later told me some of her story. When the couple first started dating, about two decades ago, Kathryn was newly in recovery. She had begun drinking during high school, using alcohol to self-medicate. “I had anxiety and depression and didn’t really have anybody to talk to about it,” she said. She then spent 20 years trying, and failing, to stop. She was constantly blacking out. She told me she didn’t know people who could have only a single glass of wine, or who could choose not to drink, because they were driving home. “I didn’t have deep relationships even with my family, because addiction gets in the way of all that,” she said. During her darkest days with booze, she became suicidal.
For years, Kathryn worked to keep her recovery a secret from most everyone in her life, and she credits Burgum with being supportive throughout her sobriety. In 2016, when he told her about his plan to run for governor, she had a flash of panic: How am I going to handle all these people all the time? All of these events have alcohol. The couple reached an agreement: She could leave, or simply skip, any event she wanted to. When Burgum won the election, Kathryn decided to finally talk publicly about her addiction.
At a USA Today–network town hall in Exeter, Burgum described his wife’s journey as she looked on from the front row. He also made a plea for more compassion toward people with drug addiction who have committed crimes. He decried the obstacles that nonviolent offenders face after they leave prison, including trouble finding housing and employment: “We have legalized discrimination against people who had a disease—a brain disease that led them into that spot.” His stance is forward-thinking. It’s also out of step with much of the GOP. Were he to move up in the polls, he’d almost certainly be attacked by his peers as soft on crime.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Dartmouth College speaking at a town hall with students.
While Trump continues to float miles above his Republican competitors, the rest of them dutifully show up to various “cattle calls” in the early states. One such event, the New Hampshire GOP’s First in the Nation Leadership Summit, took over a Sheraton the weekend I was following Burgum. Reporters and camerapeople and the cast of Showtime’s The Circus stalked the grounds looking for something—anything—resembling a story. As Burgum and Mike Pence momentarily exchanged pleasantries in the lobby, journalists materialized en masse, then vanished; no meat to be had. (Pence would drop out just over two weeks later.)
Burgum navigated the crowded hallways on his scooter. He recorded a podcast next to an area where Kevin Sorbo, the Hercules actor turned right-wing culture warrior, sold copies of his books. He also sat on a national-security panel with Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. (At one point, Burgum fired off a seemingly improvised joke about how Iowa is “Canada’s Florida.”) During the Q&A, an audience member asked what could prevent someone like Bill Gates from buying up all of America’s farmland. Burgum gently pointed out that agriculture is far less concentrated than people believe. Gates, he said, is already among America’s largest private owners of farmland, but that means he has a fraction of a percent of what’s out there. It was a surprising statistic—though perhaps not as surprising as watching Burgum instinctively defend one of the GOP’s biggest bogeymen.
In 2001, Burgum and his associates sold Great Plains to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. That deal has led many people to infer that Burgum himself is a billionaire. During our interview, after he continually sought to portray himself as an underdog, outsider candidate, I asked him if the phrase billionaire underdog might be considered an oxymoron. He strongly denied that he’s worth $1 billion. Even after much prodding, though, he refused to share his exact net worth. (It’s reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.) So far this year, he’s lent his campaign more than $12 million of his own fortune. His super PAC, Best of America, has raised about that same amount, notably with the help of his cousin Frederick Burgum, who donated $2 million. But I was most interested in his relationship with Gates, the single biggest donor to Burgum’s 2016 gubernatorial bid.
I asked Burgum what Gates is like as a person.
“It’d be a good question for him, I suppose.”
“Well, I mean, aren’t you friends?”
He said that he has observed an “evolution” in Gates over the four decades they’ve known each other, then remarked, “He’s the most, you know, one of the most misunderstood people that we have in America right now.”
Burgum said that Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda, have saved more lives than anyone “probably in the history of the planet.” I asked Burgum how he plans to reckon with the portion of the GOP electorate—those who adhere to conspiracies such as QAnon and Pizzagate—who believe that Gates drinks the blood of children.
Burgum said that he knows how to talk to voters “of all stripes and beliefs,” and that, if you’re going to lead people, you have to meet them where they are. Still, he said, “there are some people that believe things, and they believe ’em like it’s religion. And you’re sort of asking me, What would I say to them? Well, you can’t tell them to stop believing [their] religion if they believe it. In politics, you have to say, then, that that voter may or may not be available.”
I found his willingness to draw lines admirable, but it didn’t extend to Donald Trump. He likes to say that, as governor of North Dakota, nukes are in his backyard. (“I have friends who, literally, they farm here and the nuclear silo is right there,” he told me.) I asked him if voters can trust Trump with the nuclear codes. He paused. “Voters will have to decide that,” he said. I asked him if he, Doug Burgum, trusts Trump with the nuclear codes. He dodged: “Nuclear weapons exist for one reason.” I asked him for a yes-or-no answer. He responded, “So when you say ‘trust him,’ what does that mean?” I noted that people in the Department of Defense—including former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—have specifically said that Trump can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes, and that although many questions understandably have gray answers, this one seemed black-and-white. He paused again, then eventually offered another trained-politician answer.
“I think it’s a question of, do we think that nuclear weapons act as a deterrent for our country? And if you think we have a president that will never use them, then they don’t work. If you have a president that will use them, they do work. And it’s partly not what we think. It’s partly what the enemy thinks. And if the enemy thinks that we have a president that will actually launch a nuclear weapon, then the deterrents work. And so, I think we have to look at who they’re pointed at, not just who’s pulling the trigger.”
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, and his wife, Kathryn, at Stark Brewing Company in Manchester, NH for a GOP 170th birthday event.
The next morning, Burgum and his team wandered among rows of tailgaters outside a University of New Hampshire football game. A Fox News reporter filmed a quick-hit interview with the governor while students played touch football in the background. (One wide receiver dramatically spiked the ball after completing a slant route that took him right past Burgum and toward a Dumpster.) Tailgaters looked on quizzically, or not at all, as Burgum and his entourage sauntered by.
“Oh, it’s Doug!” someone in dark sunglasses called out. The man, 28, told me that he’s from Boston and has the type of job where he can’t share his political views with his name attached. He said he voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but lost respect for him after he appeared to go back on his implicit promise to serve only one term. He added that he appreciates how Burgum seems like “a genuinely good person” and isn’t a career politician, though he’d like to see him move up in the polls.
A middle-aged woman offered Burgum a homemade cheesesteak. He accepted, and held the greasy bread in his bare hand for minutes before another tailgater offered him a napkin. He took a bite, but not before wisely asking the Fox News person not to film him eating.
Kickoff was soon approaching. The tailgaters showed no signs of packing it in. Grills sizzled; beers were pounded; beanbags thunked against cornhole sets. Burgum waved and smiled.
Three girls were standing at a distance, alternately watching him with the cheesesteak and fiddling with their phones.
I asked one of them if she knew anything about Doug Burgum.
“What’s he running for?” she asked.
“President.”
“Good for him,” she said.
Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, at Stark Brewing Company in Manchester, NH for a GOP 170th birthday event.
On a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denver’s South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible was sponsoring a mayoral-candidate forum. Five candidates had been invited to attend. The moderator asked the usual questions about crime and public safety, homelessness and guns. Then came a question comprehensible only to a close observer of Denver politics: “Do you support releasing the city-owned conservation easement on the Park Hill Golf Course to allow the currently proposed redevelopment of this site?”
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Four candidates raised their hands, a couple only halfway, as if that sign of reluctance might lessen the coming disapproval. It didn’t. The crowd booed.
On April 4 of this year, voters declined to lift the easement. The split was 59–41, not exactly close. Some observers have taken this outcome as a signal that the people of Denver (or, at least, the fewer than 100,000 who voted down the proposal) reject new development. But in that same election, voters sent two candidates who supported the proposal to a mayoral runoff. Back in the 2022 statewide election, almost a quarter million Denver voters supported Democratic Governor Jared Polis, who campaigned on increasing housing supply and dismantling local roadblocks to construction in order to get a handle on Colorado’s housing-affordability crisis. Also that year, nearly 1.3 million Coloradans voted to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to increasing affordable housing. In Denver, the measure won 70–30. Deciding “what the people believe” is not so easy.
Colorado is short an estimated 127,000 homes. The Denver metro area alone is short nearly 70,000 homes. The housing shortage is the main driver of the region’s affordability crisis, and housing-policy experts—though they remain divided on many questions—are nearly unanimous in their belief that resolving it will require bringing many more homes to market. From 2012 to 2017, the region permitted only one new home for every 5.4 new jobs; over the same period, home prices in Denver jumped by 50 percent.
When someone who favors new development in theory opposes a specific project near where they live, we call them a NIMBY. NIMBYism is regularly characterized as a case of revealed preferences: Talk is cheap, and support for policies in the abstract is worthless. Voting for a candidate who champions pro-housing policies is one thing; agreeing to new development in your neighborhood is another.
Conflicting desires do not by themselves prove hypocrisy, however. Some people really do want to see more housing in general, even if they don’t want construction next door. The problem is that the local institutions charged with land-use decisions are attuned to parochial complaints, not large-scale needs.
The level of government at which we choose to resolve a conflict shapes public opinion and the eventual outcome. The same question posed at a town hall, at a county-council meeting, in the governor’s office, or by Congress will not be answered the same way in each venue. The tools available, the norms of debate, and the architecture of accountability change drastically from place to place. Americans believe that housing is a local issue. And it is a local issue. But it is also a regional issue, a state issue, and a national issue. By restricting the debate to the hyperlocal level, we’ve blocked out our big-picture values.
Across metro areas, in states led by Democrats and Republicans alike, the same pattern emerges: Local governments decide what gets built and where, and they use that power to ban multifamily housing, entrench economic segregation, and perpetuate a national affordability crisis.
It’s tough to admit, but sometimes NIMBYs have a point. In Denver, I spoke with dozens of community leaders, elected officials, and voters who live near the Park Hill Golf Course. Opponents of the project raised concerns about preserving open spaces, about gentrification, about the democratic process itself.
Former Mayor Wellington Webb told me he opposes developing the Park Hill site because it’s “the last piece of open space, land, in Denver.”
Leslie Herod, a Colorado state representative and an unsuccessful candidate in this year’s mayoral race, also opposes the proposal. She told me she had identified more than 80 underutilized city-owned lots already zoned for residential development where she would rather see housing built.
The Denver city-council member Candi CdeBaca made a version of the “other places” argument too, questioning why development efforts are never focused on wealthy neighborhoods. “We’re not talking about development in places where people have privilege,” she told me. “Those places are protected with their zoning, those places are protected with their level of engagement, those places are protected by the people they have elected to represent them.”
Some voters told me they simply distrusted the process. “There’s no guarantee that if the conservation easement is lifted that the [developer] will honor what they’ve said with creating a park, creating affordable housing,” a landscape architect with an antidevelopment yard sign said.
Of course, no project can solve every problem or skirt every concern. Comparison shopping for umbrellas is fine on a sunny day. When you’re caught in a torrential downpour, it’s wise to take what’s available and run for cover.
For their part, proponents of the Park Hill project, in their eagerness to win votes, tended to oversell what it could accomplish. Some described it as a blow against racism or climate change, or a way to help the working class. In my conversations with the plan’s backers, I sometimes had to remind myself that we were talking about a 155-acre lot, not the fate of the republic.
Land-use regulations and development patterns are a key driver of inequality, pollution, and financial strain. But whether or not the Park Hill plan was approved would have a negligible impact on these larger crises, which will require collective action beyond the scope of any one project. Asking a neighborhood or municipality to bear the responsibility for a housing crisis and its knock-on effects is asking for failure. Local government simply wasn’t built to do this.
Local government is about what you can do for me, right now. Because local officials have a narrow jurisdiction, engaged voters have a direct line to them and significant influence on their decisions. This tight relationship is good for handling issues like broken streetlights and potholes, but it doesn’t lend itself to managing society-wide problems, such as a housing crisis. This is why the political logic of building a lot more housing rarely carries the day at the local level.
Who would have lived in the Park Hill housing development, had voters approved it? No one knows. It could have been a recent University of Colorado at Boulder graduate or empty-nesters from the suburbs looking to downsize. Many of the people who would most benefit from the new housing don’t yet live in Denver—so they don’t have a vote.
Local housing-policy debates are thus asymmetrical. Construction projects have no readily identifiable beneficiaries, but they do levy clear harms, in the form of excessive noise and street closures and changing neighborhood aesthetics.
Just a small fraction of people even engage in local housing fights. Many of those who do are extreme voices or otherwise unrepresentative of the broader community. Look at Fort Collins, Colorado. After more than five years of community engagement, and many months of work by city planners, a 5–2 majority on the city council voted to liberalize land-use policies to allow more housing. But a small group of opponents pressured the council to reverse itself, gathering 6,500 petition signatures—this in a city of more than 160,000. And they won. The council voted again, this time 7–0 to repeal the change.
In interviews, both the head of the Colorado Municipal League, Kevin Bommer, and Denver’s current mayor, Michael B. Hancock, touted regional collaboration as a solution to the affordability crisis. But just as one town cannot ensure that the entire region maintains adequate green space while increasing density, it cannot force neighboring towns to work together to find the right balance. The incentive is too strong for an individual government to say to its neighbor, “You can have all the apartments—we’ll just keep our parks.”
In addition to the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado has several influential regional associations, including the Metro Mayors Caucus and Colorado Counties Inc. Yet greater Denver is still tens of thousands of housing units short of its needs.
The Denver metro area is particularly desperate for small multifamily dwellings (two to nine units) to meet the demand for affordable housing. According to Carrie Makarewicz, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, roughly 10 percent of homes in the region meet this criteria. By contrast, 85 percent of residentially zoned land is reserved for single-family homes. By this measure, too, the regional associations have come up short.
Collective-action problems require a body that can hold everyone accountable. Regional associations—which rely on voluntary participation—aren’t going to cut it.
The democratic process begins by defining the democratic body. And when it comes to housing, the body of concern does not end at a town’s boundary line. People moving to the Denver metro area look across the city and into the suburbs for a place to live. One suburb’s opposition to building more housing directly affects prices miles away, because it constrains the supply in a market that spans municipalities. Local governments, in seeking to satisfy local concerns, undermine statewide goals. At least, they do in the absence of state intervention.
State government is also about what you can do for me, but on average: That’s the electoral reality of representing voters across geographic constituencies. Governors and other statewide officials are forced to see the bigger picture because they’re accountable not only to the people who live in a particular community, but also to past residents priced out of and displaced from that community, and to future residents as well. (Nor are newcomers overwhelmingly from out of state, as many seem to believe; census data reveal that about 82 percent of moves happen within states.) Denver’s city council represents the people of Denver, not Aurora, and vice versa. The state represents them all. And in recent polling, 60 percent of registered voters supported eliminating local restrictions to allow for multifamily housing.
The Colorado state capitol is just a short drive from Park Hill and a brisk walk from city hall, but feels miles away from the thrum of local politics. I went there two days after the Indivisible forum to interview Governor Polis. From across a large round table in his office, Polis told me that “housing, transit, travel, roads: These are interjurisdictional issues because really, very few Coloradans live their whole lives in one jurisdiction.” Unencumbered by the need to defend any one project or developer, the governor reiterated a simple point: “Demand has exceeded supply for the last couple decades, and prices have gone up.” Colorado has to “create more housing now.”
Soon after providing that clean summary of what Colorado needs, Polis announced his best shot at providing it. Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, and Massachusetts have, to varying degrees, pulled authority for land-use decisions up to the state level. Following their lead, he proposed a bill compelling local governments to adjust their land-use policies to meet housing goals, a process that state officials would oversee. The bill addressed climate, infrastructure, and equity concerns; included provisions for increasing and preserving affordable and multifamily housing; encouraged development near transit; and removed onerous parking requirements.
I asked the governor how he would deal with the political opposition to his bill. “People across the board—Republican, Democrat, independent—housing costs is one of the top items of concern,” he replied. I asked again. “People understand that housing needs to be built,” he told me.
Polis’s original proposal was greeted by fierce opposition from local governments, though not because of objections to open space, affordability, or new parking rules. The fight was over where the power to make land-use decisions should lie.
Kevin Bommer, of the Colorado Municipal League, offered a pithy synthesis of local governments’ position: “Respectfully, get off our lawn,” he told me.
I asked Bommer about his policy disagreements with the governor, but he kept stressing the issue of local control. “My members statewide don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of [Polis’s] goals, but to start with saying that the state gets to set a model code and the state gets to regulate and the state will be in charge of land use going forward is a nonstarter,” he said.
Bommer pointed me to an old amicus brief filed in defense of a local moratorium on fracking by then-Representative Polis. It defended local government’s authority over land-use decisions as both a state-constitution matter and a policy matter. Polis wrote that local democracy allows for “widespread citizen input and broad stakeholder involvement,” as well as “more opportunities for public participation.”
The fact that Representative Polis disagrees with Governor Polis is exactly the point. A congressman represents his district; he has little reason to care that local control can harm the rest of the state. A governor has a wider remit. If Polis the representative was right, and localities really are the best transmitters of their residents’ housing preferences, then what explains clear, widespread discontent with the outcomes of those decisions? Colorado’s housing crisis is undeniable, and its land-use authority has rested with local government virtually unquestioned for decades.
Colorado’s legislative session ended on May 8. The bill died in the Senate without a final vote.
Afterward, the governor told me he intends to keep fighting. States that have passed land-use reforms, such as California and Washington, suffered multiple defeats before seeing a first victory. Polis told me he’s frustrated by communities that said, No, we should do it. “The thing is, they’re not doing it!” he said with a laugh. Polis returned again to his central argument: “It’s beyond the capabilities of [local government] even if there’s a city council or mayor with the best of intentions … We have to figure this out together.”
Two citywide votes, multiple lawsuits, and accusations of racism, classism, and harassment that divided Denver. What was the point? The property owner is now promising that the former golf course will become … an active golf course. (This despite the fact that the company has never developed a golf course; its founder told me they’re “doing research on it now.”) Well-meaning objectors judge proposals against a hypothetical better option, but in reality, the alternative to a decent project is often no project at all.
Kelly Brough, who supported the development project and was in the runoff to become Denver’s next mayor, is nevertheless hesitant to embrace state interference. “I can’t say Denver should not control its destiny … I’m just not ready to give it up yet.”
This power struggle is playing out across the country. It’s ostensibly a struggle over housing affordability, but it is also a fight over how we see voters. In polls and interviews, voters express deep empathy for people experiencing homelessness and deep frustration with widespread housing unaffordability. But that’s not the part of us that local government can hear. Instead local politics magnifies our selfish concerns: How will this affect my parking availability? What will this do to my view?
Everyone has a little NIMBY in them. It doesn’t have to be the part that wins.
This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “Local Government Has Too Much Power.”
The third graders were not interested in meeting the state auditor.
It was career day at Samuelson Elementary School in Des Moines, and Rob Sand had assembled a table in the gymnasium alongside a dozen other grown-ups with jobs. All the other adults had brought props: the man from the bathroom-remodeling company handed out yellow rubber ducks, a local doctor let the kids poke and prod a model heart, and an engineer showed off a long, silly-looking tube that had something to do with the mass production of hot dogs.
Sand had packed only a stack of fliers, and for an hour, the rail-thin auditor stood alone while most of the children gave him a wide berth. At one point, a little girl with braids approached him cautiously: “What’s auditing?” she asked. Sand was excited. “Auditing, well, it’s about finding the truth,” he told her, crouching down. “And it usually has to do with where money’s going or whether people are following the rules.” But the little girl wasn’t listening anymore. She was staring at the hot-dog tube.
Sand has spent the past two months practically begging people to care about his job. Iowa Republicans passed a bill in March limiting the auditor’s access to information, against the Democrat’s loud objections, and the governor is expected to sign it soon. People on both sides of the political aisle told me that the bill is a blatantly partisan move meant to defang the last remaining Democrat in a statewide elected position. Republicans in Iowa are so determined to crush their opponents, in other words, that they’re going after a man whose office most of their constituents don’t even know exists.
But as the lone Democrat in state office, Sand is a glimmer of hope for his party in Iowa, where the past several years have brought only defeat after miserable defeat. “They’re trying to clip his wings, but they paid him a compliment,” David Yepsen, a former chief political reporter at the Des Moines Register, told me, referring to Sand’s Republican adversaries. “He’s [got] an early leg up to be the Democratic nominee” for governor.
Sand’s office in the Capitol building occupies a stately chain of rooms decorated with the heads of dead animals. I gasped when I walked in, suddenly face-to-face with an enormous bison. “North Star Preserve, Montour, Iowa,” Sand said. He pointed at the other trophies mounted on the walls and recited where in Iowa he’d shot them with his compound bow. “Madison County. Madison County. Des Moines city limits.”
Sand is a Democrat, but he is a Democrat who hunts. Bowhunting may be a genuine passion, but it’s also part of the myth he’s built up around himself: a duty-bound centrist, who will hold everyone in government to account, no matter their party.He wears camo and seed-company hats. He goes to church every Sunday. He went out of his way to appoint a Republican, a Democrat, and an independent to serve on his leadership team in the auditor’s office.
Sand often says that he hates political parties, and he constantly paraphrases John Adams: “My greatest fear is two great parties united only in their hatred of each other.” Sand registered as a Democrat in 2004 because of his Christian faith’s social gospel, he said; they do “a better job of looking out for those that are on the bottom rungs of society.”
The auditor is 40 but looks 20. He’s lanky, with eyes that crinkle at the corners and a big forehead. Good-looking in an impish way, and a little preachy aside from the occasional expletive, Sand is part Pete Buttigieg, part youth pastor. Like Buttigieg, he was a young achiever. He grew up in Decorah, Iowa, then moved East to major in political science at Brown University. Somewhat incongruously, given his down-to-earth image today, Sand did some fashion modeling in college, appearing in runway shows in Paris and Milan. Today, he likes to say that he chose the University of Iowa over Harvard Law for his law degree. He worked for seven years under Democratic Attorney General Tom Miller, for whose office Sand successfully prosecuted, in his 30s, the Hot Lotto scandal, in which a man had rigged lottery tickets in five states.
Sand can sometimes sound self-righteous—his wife’s brothers refer to him as “Baby Jesus.” But the job of auditor requires being a Goody Two-Shoes about the rules—and having a solid backbone. Sand seems to fit that bill. He didn’t drink until he was 22, and he stopped again for more than a decade as part of a commitment to a friend who was struggling with alcoholism. “He’s kind of a square, and he can come across as a little bit arrogant,” a personal friend of Sand’s, who asked for anonymity to speak more candidly, told me. “But he’s a hugely decent person.”
Sand’s wife, Christine, the CEO of an agri-science business, comes from a wealthy family; her relatives have provided much of the funding for his campaigns. When Sand first ran, in 2018, his bid was notable for its dad humor—and his pledge to “wake up the watchdog,” bringing more action to the auditor’s office and cracking down hard on waste, fraud, and abuse. He did that: During the coronavirus pandemic, Sand’s office discovered that the Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, had misspent federal relief money on twooccasions. But he also defended the governor on other occasions: When some residents accused the Iowa Department of Public Health of fudging COVID numbers, Sand’s office reported that the state’s data were accurate.
Last year was not a good one for Democrats in Iowa. Sand won his reelection campaign by two-tenths of a percentage point; the two other Democrats in state office—the attorney general and the treasurer, each the longest-serving in their office in Iowa history—were knocked out of their seats. Reynolds was heard on tape in the spring of 2022 saying that she wanted her “own” attorney general and “a state auditor that’s not trying to sue me every time they turn around.”
The governor got the former. Now her party’s working to deliver the latter.
GOP lawmakers claimed that the new auditor bill was about protecting privacy. But the final version of the legislation prevents Sand from being able to subpoena state agencies for records. Disputes over information would instead be settled by an arbitration panel comprising one representative from Sand’s office, one from the governor’s office, and one from the agency being audited—most likely someone appointed by the governor. Sand would be outnumbered every time.
The bill was the punctuation mark at the end of the most consequential legislative session Iowans have seen since 1965, Yepsen said, in which Republican lawmakers dutifully passed almost every item on the governor’s wishlist, including bans on gender-affirming care for minors, prohibitions on sexuality and gender discussions in school, and new limits on SNAP and Medicaid eligibility. Republicans have a lock on the legislature now in Iowa, and they’re using it.
The auditor bill stands out most, though, for its almost comically obvious targeting of Sand. It is, in the phrase of my colleague David A. Graham, another example of “total politics”—a growing phenomenon in which politicians “use every legal tool at their disposal to gain advantage” without regard for democratic norms or long-term effects. We’ve seen similar moves in Tennessee, where Republicans in the state House expelled two Democrats over their gun-violence protests, and in Montana, where GOP lawmakers are trying to rewrite election laws for a single cycle to make it easier to defeat Democratic Senator Jon Tester.
Well-respected, nonpolitical organizations such as the American Institute of CPAs and the National State Auditors Association have spoken out against the Iowa bill affecting Sand. Even six Republicans in the Iowa statehouse voted against it: “It opens the door to corruption,” one of them, Luana Stoltenberg, who represents the Davenport district and who attended the pro-Trump Stop the Steal protest near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, told me. “It doesn’t matter who’s in [the office]—that’s wrong.”
“If Rob Sand were a Republican, would this bill have been introduced, and would it have passed?” Mike Mahaffey, a former chair of the Iowa Republican Party who endorsed Sand in 2022, told me. “I think we all know—or we can plausibly argue—it probably wouldn’t have.” The legislation is shortsighted, he and other Republicans I talked to agreed. “Some of these Republican legislators (and it’s not just Iowa) are acting like they’ll never be in the minority again,” one Iowa GOP strategist, whom I agreed to grant anonymity so they could speak candidly, texted me.
But for many Democrats, the Republicans’ targeting of Sand seems less about owning the libs than about neutralizing any political threat, however slight. Right now the auditor “is the entire Democratic bench. He’s their main hope,” Sand’s friend told me. “He’s their Luke Skywalker.”
The Iowa Democrats’ Luke Skywalker drives a white Ford F-150 pickup, because of course he does. Sand picked me up in it last weekend on his way to two events in the conservative southwest corner of the state. Every year, he holds a town hall for each of Iowa’s 100 county seats; auditors don’t normally do that kind of thing. But Sand thinks it’s important for Iowans to hear what his office is up to. Or maybe he feels it’s important for people to know who he is.
We stopped in Treynor, population 1,032, for what was billed as a bipartisan fundraising event; most attendees were Republicans, and Sand was one of three Democrats invited to speak. When he walked in, people flocked to him with questions. “Oh, Rob,” Shawnna Silvius, the mayor of nearby Red Oak, said. “You’ve really been going through it out there. You’re like a lone swan.” Sand laughed: “I haven’t gotten ‘lone swan’ before.”
I watched as the auditor mingled for a while, looking fairly comfortable despite the fact that at least two of the lawmakers who’d voted to limit his power were sitting at a nearby table. People were finishing up their pork chops and cheesy potatoes when it was Sand’s turn to speak. He walked up to the podium, and went for it.
The auditor bill “is a disaster in waiting for this state,” Sand told the room. Everyone was silent. He laid out the changes that the new legislation would make, and the consequences those changes would have. “The purpose of the Office of the Auditor of State is to prevent abuses of power that destroy our trust in our ability to have a system where we govern ourselves,” Sand concluded. “That was a revolutionary idea a little while back. If we want to keep it, we need to maintain those checks and balances.”
When Sand finished, everyone clapped. A few Republicans came up to ask questions. They had no idea the bill did this, they said. How could they help? Was it too late? Sand wrote down his email and handed out business cards. He urged them all to reach out to the governor, share their concerns, and ask her not to sign the bill. “I didn’t vote for you,” one woman told Sand. “But I would have.”
When we got back in the truck, I asked Sand what the point of all of it was. Of course Reynolds would sign. Was he possibly that naive? “Even if it’s finished, and the bill is done, this is really fucking important,” Sand said. People “need to know what is going on.” We sat while he thought out loud about whether anyone in that room would actually reach out to the governor, or email him to ask more questions—whether they’d care enough to follow through. “How else do I do this?” he asked me. “What else am I supposed to do?”
Sand has been making many such speaking visits lately—and posting regularly on Twitter and Instagram—to broadcast his concerns to Iowans. But this moment has also provided an opportunity for Sand to broadcast himself. It’s obvious that he has bigger political ambitions. You can tell, in part, because he’s so eager to market himself. When a New York Times reporter asked him for suggestions of interesting Iowans to profile in 2020, Sand proposed that she write about him. He has taken at least two national reporters with him on hunting trips, just as he invited me along to watch as he stood up for his current cause. When I met Sand last week, he told me he was reading The Man From Ida Grove, the autobiography of Harold Hughes, a former Democratic senator and governor of the state—a little on the nose.
Sand said he had thought about challenging Reynolds in 2022, but didn’t run because he didn’t want to miss out on time with his two young sons. Left unsaid was the political reality that last year would have been a terrible year to run. Reynolds crushed her Democratic opponent, Deidre DeJear, by nearly 20 points. Sand would probably have done better, but maybe not by much.
He doesn’t have to decide now. Reynolds isn’t up for reelection until 2026, and by then, she may have decided not to run again—or maybe, if a Republican becomes the next president, she’ll have accepted a federal appointment. If Sand does run, he’ll have some trends in his favor: Most Iowa governors also grew up in small towns and served at least a term in public office. “In the field of Iowa Democrats, he’s the shiny light, and we don’t have a lot of light switches on right now,” Jan Norris, the chair of the Montgomery County Democrats, told me.
But the broader political current would be pushing against him. For decades, Iowa was purple. Voters here sent Democrat Tom Harkin and Republican Chuck Grassley to the Senate, together, every chance they had. But in 2016, 31 counties that Barack Obama had won twice swung to Donald Trump—more than in any other state in the union. Six years later, Iowa elected an entirely Republican delegation to Congress for the first time in more than 60 years. Sand might have had a good shot at the governor’s mansion in that old version of Iowa. Whether he would in this one is not clear.
“His fate is tied to the macro picture of what’s going on in the Midwest,” Yepsen, the former reporter, told me. Rural America is getting redder, and that’s a serious problem for Democrats, even one as demonstrably centrist as Sand. “Harry Truman couldn’t get elected anymore in Missouri,” Yepsen said. “George McGovern couldn’t win in South Dakota.”
Our final stop on the truck tour of southwest Iowa was a church in Red Oak, population 5,362, where Sand gave a quick pep talk to the Montgomery County Democrats. He was casual, calm. He rolled up his sleeves and sat on the edge of a folding table to face them—youth-pastor mode. “Losing sucks—and that is what we have been doing at the top of the ticket for the last 10 years,” Sand acknowledged to the group of mostly older Iowans.
One man asked what three issues Sand would emphasize if he were in charge of messaging for the Iowa Democratic Party. The auditor bill, Sand replied. People nodded. Plus the private-school vouchers and the way that Republicans are “criminalizing abortion.” The attendees took notes as Sand described an app they could download called MiniVAN that would help them with their door-knocking efforts.
Sand urged the group of Democrats to have hope. He rattled off some stats: There were more split-ticket voters in Iowa than in any other competitive state in 2022, outside of Vermont. More than 48 percent of Iowans voted for three Democrats for statewide office in November. Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart lost her race in the Second Congressional District by only six votes in 2020—one of the closest House races in American history. Hearing it all, group members seemed to sit up taller in their chairs, like wilting plants getting a little water.
“Democrats can win in the state of Iowa,” Sand said. “I’m not a unicorn.” But in Iowa, right now, he sort of is.
News that CNN will hold a town hall with former President Donald Trump in New Hampshire next Wednesday came as a surprise on multiple fronts. For one, Trump, who repeatedlydismissedCNN (among several other outlets) as “fake news” throughout his presidency, has not done an interview with the network since his 2016 presidential campaign. Plus, it’s a risky move for CNN, given the challenge of responsibly platforming the twice-impeached, indicted, insurrection-inciting former president. Trump still refuses to accept the results of the election he lost nearly two and a half years ago to Joe Biden, which begs the question: Does CNN plan to fact-check Trump in real time? What happens if Trump repeats the lie that the 2020 election was “rigged,” as he did just last week from the rally stage? I put such questions to CNN political director David Chalian on Tuesday, as the network prepares its program.
“We obviously can’t control what Donald Trump says—that’s up to him,” said Chalian. “What we can do is prod, ask questions, follow up, and try to get as revealing answers as possible.” Chalian added that it’s “not new for CNN journalists to question Donald Trump” (though he didn’t specify whether this would take the form of a live fact-check). Ultimately, it’s CNN’s view that while Trump is “a unique candidate,” who “since being president has a series of investigations around him”—and “there was how he left the presidency,” Chalian also noted, ostensibly referencing the January 6 insurrection—the network is going to treat him like any other presidential candidate. While “all of that context makes him a unique candidate,” it “does not make our approach any different, in the sense that we hold every candidate who comes to CNN accountable for their words,” Chalian said. He added that CNN has approached every major presidential candidate and potential candidate about participating in CNN’s coverage—the presidential town hall being a part of that.
Moderators will be coming in with follow-up questions, which Chalian said is part of CNN’s “typical standard” for holding candidates accountable. “But the primary focus of a presidential town hall is to have the candidate interact with the voters, and that’s why we convene these things—because we think it’s so important to the process of voters making their choices,” he said.
Trump’s appearance on CNN signals a shift in the former president’s campaign strategy heading into 2024. Per Politico, those in Trump’s orbit “believe that by giving interviews and access to mainstream outlets, they can broaden Trump’s message—and create a contrast with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.” The Trump team has reportedly “been in talks with sit-downs with several other notable outlets, including NBC.” (NBC also got a spot on Trump’s campaign plane recently, though it hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing: I recently reported how Trump tossed NBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard’s phones during a tirade on the plane home from a March rally.) DeSantis, Trump’s biggest rival, who has yet to officially announce a presidential run, has mostly ignored mainstream news organizations, giving access instead to a handful of conservative outlets, from Fox News to fringe publications.
“Going outside the traditional Republican ‘comfort zone’ was a key to President Trump’s success in 2016. Some other candidates are too afraid to take this step in their quest to defeat Joe Biden, and are afraid to do anything other than Fox News,” a Trump adviser told Vanity Fair. “CNN executives made a compelling pitch.”
Chalian would not get into specifics about what that pitch was, but suggested it was no different than the one CNN has made to other candidates. “The heart of the pitch is that this has been a central part of our campaign coverage, and it’s something we take really seriously and that we really do quite well,” he said.
The town hall will be moderated by Kaitlan Collins and feature questions from New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters who plan to vote in the GOP presidential primary. Questions from voters will go through a “thorough vetting process,” Chalian said. “We want to make sure that everything being asked is factually accurate and on a topic that seems widely of interest,” he added, though questions won’t be tweaked. “It’s entirely a question that is written by the questioner and submitted by them.”
Collins, a fast-rising star at the network, covered the Trump White House and has a reputation as a tough interviewer—one she’s continued to cement in her current role as a cohost on CNN This Morning. But this will be a particularly difficult one to get right; she has to engage with someone who is both a violence-inciting liar and the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.
However it pans out, the prime-time event is sure to bring eyes to CNN at 8 PM. CNN’s viewership has dwindled amid its attempt to reinvent itself following Trump’s presidency and under the new leadership of CEO Chris Licht. Part of that reset has involved turning down the decibel levels from the Jeff Zucker years by moving into what can be perceived as politically neutral territory.
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“How many different ways are you gonna ask the same fucking question, Mark?” Chris Christie asked me. We were seated in the dining room of the Hay-Adams hotel. It’s a nice hotel, five stars. Genteel.
Christie’s sudden ire was a bit jolting, as I had asked him only a few fairly innocuous questions so far, most of them relating to Donald Trump, the man he might run against in the presidential race. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, was visiting Washington as part of his recent tour of public deliberations about whether to launch another campaign.
Color me dubious. It’s unclear what makes Christie think the Republican Party might magically revert to some pre-Trump incarnation. Or, for that matter, what makes him think a campaign would go any better than his did seven years ago, the last time Christie ran, when he won exactly zero delegates and dropped out of the Republican primary after finishing sixth in New Hampshire.
But still, color me vaguely intrigued too—more so than I am about, say, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson. If Christie runs again in 2024, he could at least serve a compelling purpose: The gladiatorial Garden Stater would be better at poking the orange bear than would potential rivals Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley, who so far have offered only the most flaccid of critiques. Over the past few months, Christie has been among the more vocal and willing critics of Trump. Notably, he became the first Republican would-be 2024 candidate to say he would not vote for the former president again in a general election.
Christie makes for an imperfect kamikaze candidate, to say the least. But he does seem genuine in his desire to retire his doormat act and finally take on his former patron and intermittent friend. Which was why I found myself having breakfast with Christie earlier this week, eager to hear whether he was really going to challenge Trump and how hard he was willing to fight. Strangely, he seemed more eager to fight with me.
It was a weird breakfast. Shortly after 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Christie strolled through the ornate dining room of the Hay-Adams, where he had spent the previous few nights. He was joined by his longtime aide Maria Comella. We sat near a window, with a view of the White House across Lafayette Square, and about 100 feet from the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Trump had staged his ignominious Bible photo op three springs ago.
I started off by asking Christie about his statement that he would not vote for Trump, even if the former president were the Republican nominee. “I think Trump has disqualified himself from the presidency,” Christie said.
So what would Christie do, then—vote for Joe Biden? Nope. “The guy is physically and mentally not up to the job,” Christie said.
Just to be clear, I continued, this hellscape he was currently suffering under in Biden’s America would be as bad as whatever a next-stage Trump presidency would look like?
“Elections are about choices,” Christie said, as he often does. So whom would he choose in November 2024, if he’s faced with a less-than-ideal choice? “I probably just wouldn’t vote,” he said.
Interesting choice! I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a politician admit to planning not to vote, but it’s at least preferable to that cutesy “I’m writing in Ronald Reagan” or “I’m writing in my pal Ned” evasion that some do.
I pressed on, curious to see how committed Christie really was to his recent swivel away from Trump, or whether this was just his latest opportunistic interlude before his inevitable belly flop back into the Mar-a-Lago lagoon. Say Trump secures the nomination, and most of his formal “rivals”—and various other “prominent Republicans”—revert to doormat mode. (“I will support the nominee,” “Biden is senile,” etc.) What’s Christie going to be saying then, vis-à-vis Trump?
We were exactly seven minutes into our discussion, and my mild dubiousness seemed to set Christie off. His irritation felt a tad performative, as if he might be playing up his Jersey-tough-guy bit.
“I’m not going to dwell on this, Mark,” Christie said. “You guys drive me crazy. All you want to do is talk about Trump. I’m sorry, I don’t think he’s the only topic to talk about in politics. And I’m not going to waste my hour with you this morning—which is a joy and a gift—on just continuing talking, asking, and answering the Donald Trump question from 18 different angles.”
I pivoted to DeSantis, mostly in an attempt to un-trigger Christie. Christie has made a persuasive case that DeSantis has been a disaster as an almost-candidate so far, especially with regard to his feud with Disney. But would Christie support DeSantis if he were to somehow defeat Trump and become the nominee?
“I have to see how he performs as a candidate,” Christie said. “I really don’t know Ron DeSantis all that well … I’m going to be a discerning voter,” Christie added. “I’m going to watch what everybody does, and I’m gonna decide who I’m gonna vote for.” (Reminder: unless it’s Trump or Biden.)
I had a few more follow-ups. “So, I know you don’t want to talk about Trump …”
“Here we are, back to Trump again,” Christie said, shaking his head.
Trump, I mentioned, has been the definitional figure in the Republican Party for the past seven or eight years, and probably will remain so for the next few. Not only that, but Christie’s history with Trump—especially from 2016 to 2021—was pretty much the only thing that made him more relevant than, say, Hutchinson (respectfully!) or any other Republican polling at less than 1 percent.
This was when Christie lit into me for asking him “the same fucking question.” Look, I said, at least 40 or 50 percent of the GOP remains very much in thrall to Trump, if you believe pollnumbers.
Christie questioned my premise: “No matter what statistics you cite, what polls you cite, that’s a snapshot in the moment, and I don’t think those are static numbers.”
“It’s been true for about seven years,” I replied. “That’s pretty static.”
“But he’s been as high as 85 to 90 percent,” Christie said, referring to Trump’s Republican-approval ratings in the past. There will always be variance, he argued, but those approval ratings would be much smaller now. Christie then accused me of being “obsessed” with Trump.
At this point, Christie was raising his voice rather noticeably again, an agitated wail that brought to mind Wilma Flintstone’s vacuum. I was becoming self-conscious about potentially disturbing other diners in this elegant salle à manger.
A waiter came over again and asked if we wanted any food. Christie, who was sipping a cup of hot tea, demurred, and I ordered a Diet Coke and a bowl of mixed berries. “What a fascinating combination,” Christie marveled.
I told Christie that I hoped he would in fact run, if only because he would be better equipped to be pugilistic than the other milksops in the field. Obviously, it would have been better if Christie had taken his best shots at the big-bully front-runner seven years ago instead of largely standing down, quitting the race, and then leading the GOP’s collective bum-rush to Trump. But he has grown a lot and learned a lot since then, Christie assured me.
“I certainly won’t do the same thing in 2024 that I did in 2016,” Christie said. “You can bank on that.”
“Well, I would hope not,” I said. This seemed to reignite his pique.
“What do you mean, I hope?” Christie snapped. He took umbrage that I would question the sincerity of his opposition to Trump: “How about just paying attention to everything I’ve said over the last eight weeks?”
I told him that I had paid attention to what he said about Trump over the past eight years. Christie nodded and seemed to acknowledge that maybe I had a point, that some skepticism might be warranted.
I asked Christie if he had any regrets about anything.
“I have regrets about every part of my life, Mark,” he said.
Whoa.
“And anybody who says they don’t is lying.”
That said, Christie added, he would not change anything about his past dealings and relationship with Trump. He is always reminding people that he and Trump were friends long before 2016; that they went way back, 22 years or so. Christie told me that he and Trump have not spoken in two years. Did he miss Trump?
“Not particularly,” he said.
Do you think he misses you?
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“I do,” Christie said.
“Has he called, or tried to reach out?”
“No, that wouldn’t be his style,” Christie told me. “That would be too ego-violative.” (I made a mental note that I’d never before heard the term ego-violative.)
“But I do think he misses me, yeah. I think he misses people who tell him what the truth is. I think he misses that.”
Christie had another meeting scheduled at nine at the Hay-Adams, this one with Representative John James, a freshman Republican from Michigan. From Washington, he would head to New Hampshire, where he had a full two-day schedule planned—a town hall, a few campaignlike stops, some meetings. He told me he would make a decision in the next few weeks whether to run.
Before I left the hotel, I asked Christie whether his wife, Mary Pat, thought he should run. “My wife affirmatively wants me to do it, which is different than 2015 and 2016,” Christie told me. “She thinks I’m the only person who can effectively take on Donald Trump.”
That’s kind of what I think, I told him—that he could at least play the role of a deft agitator. Good, Christie said, but Mary Pat’s vote counted for more than mine. “I sleep with her every night,” he explained. I told him I understood.
“Have fun in New Hampshire,” I said as Christie shook my hand and pirouetted out of the dining room. He seemed to be no longer mad, if he ever was.
Among the things Jaime Herrera Beutler remembers about January 6, 2021, is that her husband managed to turn off the television just in time.
He was at home with their three young children in southwestern Washington State when the riot began. It had taken him a few moments to make out the shaky footage of the mob as it tore through the Capitol. Then he started to recognize the hallways, the various corridors that he knew led to the House floor, where his wife was preparing to break from her party and speak in favor of certifying the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. He grabbed the remote before the kids could register what was about to happen.
It was a few moments later that Herrera Beutler, huddled among her Republican colleagues, heard the door. “I will never forget the pounding,” she told me recently: Boom, boom, boom.
Before January 6, Herrera Beutler was a purple-district congresswoman who had spent most of her 12-year tenure removed from controversy, passing legislation on bipartisan issues such as maternal health and endangered wildlife while maintaining a social conservatism that kept her in good standing with the base. In the weeks that followed the insurrection, however, when she and nine other House Republicans voted to impeach President Donald Trump, the 44-year-old found herself the pariah of a party whose broader membership, for most of her career, had not precisely known she existed. Today, when the 118th Congress is sworn in, she, like all but two of the Republicans who voted to impeach, will find herself out of office.
In an interview with The Atlantic about her six terms in the House and the Trump-backed primary challenge that ousted her, Herrera Beutler remained convinced of Trump’s culpability for the events of January 6. Yet she appeared still bewildered that a crisis of such magnitude had come to pass, and that not even her own constituents were immune to Trump’s propaganda about the 2020 election and the insurrection itself. “I didn’t know that I had so many people who would be like, ‘What are you talking about? This was a peaceful protest,’” she told me. “I had no idea the depth of misinformation people were receiving, especially in my own home.”
Throughout our conversation, it was clear that the insurrection’s fallout hadn’t changed Herrera Beutler the way it had Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who sat on the January 6 committee and who have publicly committed themselves to keeping Trump out of office. These and other Republicans who retired or lost their seats after voting to impeach Trump have seemed liberated to speak about the GOP’s widespread delusion over election fraud. But Herrera Beutler is different: refusing to say that the forces of Trumpism have triggered a fundamental shift in her party, even as her own career was upended by them. Despite two years of hindsight, she seems to have rationalized her party’s continued promotion of lies concerning January 6 as a function of tactical error—believing that had Republicans and Democrats agreed to proceed with witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial, and had she communicated the stakes differently back home, her base would have rejected the conspiracy theories and accepted Trump’s guilt. “I know a majority of the Republicans who disagree with me on impeachment, had they seen and talked to the people that I had, and had they seen what I saw—I have no doubt about where they would have come down,” she said. “I really don’t.”
That Herrera Beutler has arrived at this conviction might seem naive but is in many ways understandable. For the better part of 12 years, she has been reinforced in the idea that the Republicans in her district are ideologically independent, cocooned from the national party as it leaps from one identity to the next. In her first bid for Congress, at the height of the Tea Party wave, she easily beat challengers from the right to become, at just 31 years old, the first Hispanic to represent Washington State in Congress. She had barely unpacked before the media christened her the future of her party. To the disappointment of the Republican leadership, however, the young and charismatic statehouse veteran wasn’t terribly interested in developing a national profile. Over the next several years, Herrera Beutler instead oriented her office around the hyperlocal work her constituents seemed to prefer—efforts such as expanding the forest-products industry and protecting the Columbia River’s salmon and steelhead runs from sea lions.
On January 6, Herrera Beutler’s career moved onto alien terrain. Immediately after the insurrection, she directed her staff to start making calls, to find out where Trump had been during the rioting and why. Late that afternoon, she texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for answers—“We need to hear from the president. On TV,” she sent, to no response—and, on January 11, two days before the impeachment vote, she privately pressed Kevin McCarthy for his impression of Trump’s culpability. During their conversation, the House minority leader confessed that the president had refused his pleas over the phone to call off the rioters—that as they smashed the windows of McCarthy’s office, Trump accused him of not caring enough about purported election fraud. For Herrera Beutler, it was enough to prove Trump’s guilt. In a press release the next day, and later a town hall back in her district, she invoked the conversation with McCarthy to explain her decision to vote to impeach.
At the time, she hadn’t thought twice about airing the details of the Trump-McCarthy call. In the context of the various other things that she and the public had learned by that point, she told me, “I didn’t think it was unique or profound.” In fact, for McCarthy’s reputation, it was. The California Republican would soon make something of a penance visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, despite having been, according to Herrera Beutler and other (anonymous) Republican members who were privy to details of the call, terrified and livid at the height of the insurrection, acutely aware of Trump’s real-time recognition of the danger and refusal to do anything about it. Before long, Herrera Beutler’s revelation about the Trump-McCarthy call became the lead story on CNN. Jamie Raskin, the House Democrat managing Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, suddenly wanted to know everything about this congresswoman he had hardly heard of.
For Herrera Beutler, the attention was unlike anything she’d experienced. “I wasn’t trying to insert myself into the national conversation,” she told me. “I wasn’t trying to be the, you know …” She trailed off, seemingly trying to say something like the truth teller. She was open to testifying in the impeachment trial and contacted Nancy Pelosi’s counsel about how to proceed, according to reporting by Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian in Unchecked, yet the House speaker’s attorney never relayed the message to Raskin and his staff. With zero surefire commitments from Republican witnesses to Trump’s conduct during the riot, and facing pressure from his own party not to gum up the 46th president’s honeymoon period with proceedings against the 45th, Raskin rushed the trial to a close.
If Herrera Beutler had pushed more publicly to testify, would Raskin have charged ahead and subpoenaed others? Would it have changed the final vote in the Senate? It’s impossible to say. But for Herrera Beutler, the outcome remains bound up in regret. She said it was “overwhelming” when she began to realize “that good people, honest people, amazing people that I knew” believed, for example, that antifa had orchestrated the riot. “Because, at that point, what could I do?” In retrospect, she believes that pushing ahead with a full trial, before public opinion about January 6 could “bake,” as she puts it, might have plugged the flow of conspiracies in her district and elsewhere. The implication, left unsaid, is that it also might have changed the outcome of her primary. “Had we made everything as public as we could at that moment, I think that we could have come to a better agreed-upon actual history of what happened,” she said. “That’s the only thing that I wish I had known—I moved into this thinking we all had the same information, and we didn’t.”
Though she said she appreciates the “sense of duty” of the lawmakers on the January 6 committee—whose final report was published just before we spoke—Herrera Beutler was pessimistic about the resonance of their work. “The challenge for me with the committee was that the 70 million people who voted for Trump are never going to get anything out of that,” she said. “And that’s who I wanted to move.”
This past August, a Trump-backed Republican and former Green Beret named Joe Kent, who had promoted the former president’s lies about the 2020 election, defeated Herrera Beutler in the Third Congressional District’s jungle primary. (Two months later, Kent narrowly lost the general election to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who will be the first Democrat in the seat since Herrera Beutler took office in 2011.) On the one hand, Herrera Beutler seems clear-eyed about the forces behind her loss. “It’s just turned into such a tit-for-tat on personality things, and I think my base has definitely at times wanted to see more of that from me,” she said. “And that’s probably part of why the guy in my race made it as far as he did, because that was his oxygen—scratching that itch and making people feel justified in their ideas.”
On the other hand, Herrera Beutler at various times in our conversation expressed an optimism about the future of Republican politics that seemed unmoored from the fact that her party’s base had rejected her. In criticizing both Republican and Democratic lawmakers she called “members in tweet only,” she said she often wondered what their constituents think “when they don’t get anything done—like when they can’t help a local hospital with a permit, or when Grandma can’t get her spouse’s disability payment from the VA.” “I don’t know if they just speechify when they go home,” she said, “but I know that the American people are going to get tired of that. It’s just a question of when, and under what circumstance.” The broader results of the midterm elections, in which numerous Republicans in the mold of Kent ultimately lost to Democrats, would seem to prove her point. But the results of countless Republican primaries, including the victories of election deniers such as Kari Lake in Arizona, indicate that the “when” is likely still far off.
Perhaps one reason Herrera Beutler insists that a “restoration is coming” for the Republican Party: She’s probably going to run again. She won’t say so definitively; she told me she’s looking forward to living in one place with her family and “just being functional.” “I mean, would I be shocked if I ran for something? At some point in my future? No,” she said. The sheer possibility might explain her unwillingness to speak candidly about her party’s current leaders, even two years after the cumulative letdown of January 6. Reports have suggested that her long and friendly relationship with McCarthy, for instance, ruptured after she inadvertently exposed his two-faced response to the insurrection. Bade and Demirjian have written that the House Republican leader exploded at Herrera Beutler, making her cry. (In a joint statement, McCarthy and Herrera Beutler denied that this happened.) When I asked Herrera Beutler for her thoughts about McCarthy’s current bid for the speakership, she demurred, saying, “I don’t want to be the one who comments on that.”
It wasn’t her place, she reasoned. She no longer has a voice in how the House Republican conference chooses to lead. And in the end, even if she is reluctant to acknowledge it, few things constitute more of an indictment of her party than this. All of the qualities that once fueled Herrera Beutler’s rise are still there. She is still a young Hispanic woman in a party that skews old, white, and male. She still rhapsodizes about individual liberty, still considers herself a social conservative in a moment when the Republican stance on abortion seems as unpopular as it ever has. But in little more than a decade, Herrera Beutler has gone from being the future of the party to a casualty of one vote.
Three thousand miles away from Capitol Hill, she begins the work of moving on. She wants to continue to serve the public, she told me, but as a private citizen for the first time since her 20s, she’s still trying to figure out what that means. “I need a cause, something that gives me something to fight for,” she said. “And I just don’t know yet what that’s going to be.”
