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  • Trump Is About to Steamroll Nikki Haley

    Trump Is About to Steamroll Nikki Haley

    If one word could sum up Nikki Haley’s ambivalent challenge to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, that word might be: if.

    If as used by New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent supporter in the state, when he concluded his energetic introduction of her at a large rally in Manchester on Friday night. “If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, don’t sit on your couch and not participate in democracy,” Sununu insisted. “You gotta go vote, right?”

    In that formulation, if served as more shield than sword. By framing his argument that way, Sununu clearly intended to appeal to the voters who do consider Trump a threat to democracy, but without endorsing that sentiment himself.

    That slight hesitation about fully confronting the GOP’s fearsome front-runner has been the consistent attitude of Haley’s campaign. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has shown impressive political skills and steely discipline to outmaneuver a large field of men and emerge as the most viable remaining alternative to Trump. She has displayed fortitude in soldiering on against Trump as a procession of Republican elected officials has endorsed him for the nomination over the past few weeks. And beginning with her speech last Monday night after the Iowa caucus, Haley has turned up the volume on her own criticism of Trump, yoking him to Joe Biden as too old and divisive. “With me, you’ll get no drama, no vendettas, no vengeance,” she told the crowd on Friday night.

    But in this possibly decisive week of the GOP race, Haley has made clear that she will go so far and no further in criticizing or challenging Trump, just as Sununu did with his telltale if. Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary realistically represents the last chance for Haley to stop, or even slow, the former president’s march to his third consecutive GOP nomination. If Trump wins, especially by a big margin, he will be on a glide path to becoming the nominee. Nothing Haley has done this week reflects the gravity of that moment. “She’s got to swing for the fences, and so far she’s just throwing out bunts,” Mark McKinnon, who served as the chief media adviser to George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, told me.

    Read: What Trump’s victory in Iowa reveals

    Many New Hampshire political leaders resistant to Trump fear that Haley has not done nearly enough to generate a surge of turnout among independent voters—known locally as “undeclared voters.” Mike Dennehy, a longtime GOP strategist in New Hampshire, says that Haley’s messaging to these undeclared voters has lacked enough urgency to generate the brushfire of excitement she needs among them. “In my opinion, she’s not doing what she needs to do to connect with independent voters,” Dennehy told me. Haley, he believes, should be framing the choice to New Hampshire voters much more starkly, telling them: “It’s the end of the road here; I’m your last chance to stop a Trump-Biden rematch.” Haley fleetingly raised that argument in her remarks following the Iowa caucus, but it has receded as she’s reverted toward her standard stump speech in New Hampshire.

    McKinnon and Dennehy know something about New Hampshire presidential campaigns that catch fire among independents. Dennehy was the New Hampshire campaign manager for then–Senator John McCain when he stunned George W. Bush, McKinnon’s candidate, in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Bush arrived after a big win in the kickoff Iowa caucus and held a commanding lead in national polls. On the day of that New Hampshire primary, I had lunch with McKinnon; Matthew Dowd, the campaign’s voter-targeting guru; and Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist. They were relaxed, confident, and starting to kick around ideas for how they would contest the general election, while I scribbled in a notebook. Then, halfway through the lunch, Rove took a call, abruptly left the table, and never came back. The reason for his sudden summons back to campaign headquarters became apparent a few hours later: McCain that night beat Bush among independent voters by three to one, exit polls found, and won the state overall by nearly 20 percentage points.

    In retrospect, McKinnon said, the Bush campaign should have seen what was coming. “McCain was definitely on fire; you could feel it on the ground,” he told me. For months McCain had held lengthy town halls across the state, answering questions for hours and then driving to the next event on the “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus, taking questions from reporters for hours more. He was provocative, funny, unfiltered, and unafraid of challenging Republican orthodoxy. “He was entirely authentic, entirely accessible; he was campaigning like he was running for governor of New Hampshire, steely, granite-like,” McKinnon recalled.

    Like McCain, Haley has burrowed into New Hampshire with months of grassroots events. But the similarities stop there. Haley’s town halls are much more structured and controlled; sometimes she doesn’t even take questions from the audience. Her interactions with reporters are limited and often stilted. And she made a choice this week to reject debates by ABC and CNN unless Trump also participated, which forced the sponsors to cancel the sessions. Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to her decision not to appear again with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but more of the people I spoke with believe that by withdrawing, she forfeited the biggest platforms she would have had this week to drive a message to New Hampshire voters. “It’s about pulling as many independents out to vote as you can, and you can’t get to those independents if you don’t go on places like CNN and WMUR,” Dennehy said, referring to the powerful local New Hampshire television station that would have co-hosted one of the debates with ABC.

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    Haley is pushing a tougher message against Trump than she was before Iowa. When a reporter this weekend asked her what her closing message was to New Hampshire voters, Haley replied, “Americans deserve better than what the options are. You’ve got Biden and Trump both distracted with investigations, both distracted with other things that aren’t about how to make Americans’ lives safer and better.” She says flatly that Trump is lying about her record and that America should not have to choose between two roughly 80-year-old candidates. After Trump at a Friday-night rally confused Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during an extended monologue about the January 6 riot, Haley on Saturday responded by questioning his mental acuity: “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.” And she’s been willing to differentiate from Trump on issues where she can reaffirm positions that were considered conservative in the Ronald Reagan–era GOP. That includes criticizing Trump for running up the federal deficit, not taking a tough enough stand against China, and playing “footsy,” as she termed it, with dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

    But Haley has muffled her case against Trump by more often refusing to confront him or by even defending him. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash last week about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, Haley implausibly replied, “I haven’t paid attention to his cases.” Last Friday, reporters asked Haley whether she saw racism in Trump’s multiplying jabs at her immigrant ancestry, which included reposting an inaccurate “birther”-like claim that she was ineligible to run because her parents had not been U.S. citizens when she was born. Her response could not have been more tepid: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks.”

    Haley has also continued to insist that, if elected, she would pardon Trump should he be convicted in any of the cases against him. Hours before the Iowa caucuses last Monday, she told a Fox News anchor that she would vote for Trump over Biden “any day of the week.” She’s closing her New Hampshire campaign with an unusual three-minute ad centered on a testimonial to her compassion and commitment from the mother of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died in North Korean captivity; but nowhere does the ad criticize Trump for his coziness with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In Haley’s stump speech to New Hampshire voters, she still declares that chaos “follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly,” as he if is potentially just an innocent bystander to all the firestorms that he ignites with his words and actions. (Haley does Olympic-level contortions to avoid expressing any value judgments about Trump.) On Saturday, she even tempered her criticism of Trump’s confusion the night before when she reassuringly told a Fox interviewer, “I’m not saying that this is a Joe Biden situation.” To truly threaten a front-runner as commanding as Trump, “you’ve just got to throw caution to the wind,” McKinnon said.  “And it’s the opposite with Haley: The wind throws caution to her.”

    The evidence from Iowa suggests that Haley’s cautious approach has left her with a coalition too narrow to make a strong stand. With Trump bashing her in ads and his stump speech as “liberal” and “weak,” particularly on issues relating to immigration, Haley predictably ran poorly in Iowa among the most conservative voters, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations.

    But although she performed better among more moderate elements of the GOP coalition—particularly those with four-year college degrees—she failed to inspire enough of them to come out and vote on a cold night. In Iowa, Haley won her highest share of the vote in the most populous urban and suburban counties. But the total number of votes she won in the big counties was only a fraction of the total that had come out for Marco Rubio, a candidate who appealed to a similar coalition, in the 2016 GOP caucus. Max Rust, a data analyst at The Wall Street Journal, told me in an email that his unpublished analysis found that Iowa turnout fell more compared with 2016 in better educated and more affluent areas than in rural and blue-collar places. “I was really surprised how much Haley underperformed in the suburbs,” David Kochel, a longtime GOP strategist, told me.

    With Trump holding a steady double-digit lead over her in the New Hampshire tracking polls, Haley faces the prospect of a similar squeeze in Tuesday’s primary. Trump’s ferocious attacks on her from the right leave her with little opportunity to crack his support among staunch conservatives. And her much more carefully nuanced criticism of him leaves her facing long odds of catalyzing the massive turnout among independent voters she’d need to generate any momentum moving forward. The Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 tracking poll released Saturday showed Haley only running even with Trump among undeclared voters, signaling that she’s failing to draw into the primary the large center-left contingent most hostile to the former president. (At the same time, Trump continued to lead her in the survey by two-to-one among Republicans.)

    “There’s always been this ambivalence that emanates from her about Trump,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told me. Scala, the author of Stormy Weather, a book about the New Hampshire primary, said that he understands that Haley must maneuver carefully, because “ultimately, if you want to win the nomination of this party, you are going to have to win over voters who like Trump.” But, Scala added, “I have to think [her] ambivalence rubs off on voters” and may discourage many of those most critical of Trump from bothering to turn out. (Sununu hasn’t helped that problem by publicly insisting that Haley may be hoping only for a strong second-place finish, and repeatedly declaring that he would vote for Trump if he wins the nomination.)

    In my interactions with voters at a few Haley events here, she seems to inspire more respect than enthusiasm. Some are drawn to her contained and cerebral style, and to her message of generational change. “I was thinking if we give her a chance, we will get an opportunity to go in a new direction,” George Jobel, a marketing manager from Concord, told me after Haley’s Manchester rally. But for many others, Haley is simply the last option to register a vote of disapproval about Trump. Dan O’Donnell, a realtor and undeclared voter from Hollis, is planning to cast his ballot for the former South Carolina governor. But he told me that when friends ask him if he’s voting for Haley, “I tell them, ‘No, I’m going to vote against Trump.’” In the latest Suffolk tracking poll, most independent voters backing Haley likewise said that they were motivated primarily to vote against Trump, rather than for her.

    In fairness to Haley, it’s not like anyone else this year—or, for that matter, in 2016—cracked the code of beating Trump in a Republican primary. DeSantis tried the opposite of her strategy, by running to Trump’s right and hoping that moderates would eventually consolidate around him if he was the only alternative remaining; that approach has left DeSantis in an even weaker position than Haley, barely surviving in the race. And toppling a front-runner is never easy: Even after McCain’s New Hampshire upset in 2000, he won only a few more states, and Bush recovered to resoundingly win the nomination.

    But McCain at least went down swinging, indelibly imprinting a maverick image that allowed him to come back and win the GOP nomination eight years later. In his own way, even DeSantis seems liberated by the prospect of defeat, publicly declaring that Trump cares more about personal loyalty than the good of the country or even the party, and accurately complaining that Fox and other conservative media outlets function as a “Praetorian guard” suppressing criticism of the former president.

    Haley, by contrast, still seems here to be weighing every word, as if she expects she will eventually need to defend it from the witness box in some Stalin-esque future MAGA-loyalty trial. If Haley thought she had a better chance to win, maybe she and her allies would dispense with the word if when describing Trump’s potential threat to American democracy. But her reluctance to fully confront Trump probably betrays what she really thinks about the odds that she can wrest control of the party from him this year. In this break-the-glass moment for Trump’s Republican opponents, Haley has made clear she will do no more than tap lightly on the window.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

    What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

    Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucus was as dominant as expected, underscoring the exceedingly narrow path available to any of the Republican forces hoping to prevent his third consecutive nomination. And yet, for all Trump’s strength within the party, the results also hinted at some of the risks the GOP will face if it nominates him again.

    Based on Trump’s overwhelming lead in the poll conducted of voters on their way into the voting, the cable networks called the contest for Trump before the actual caucus was even completed. It was a fittingly anticlimactic conclusion to a caucus contest whose result all year has never seemed in doubt. In part, that may have been because none of Trump’s rivals offered Iowa voters a fully articulated case against him until Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unleashed more pointed arguments against the front-runner in the final days.

    Trump steamrolled over the opposition of the state’s Republican and evangelical Christian leadership to amass by far the largest margin of victory ever in a contested Iowa GOP caucus. He drew strong support across virtually every demographic group—though, in a preview of a continuing general election challenge if he wins the nomination, his vote notably lagged among caucus-goers with at least a four-year college degree.

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    The results as of late Monday evening showed DeSantis solidifying a small lead over former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley for a distant second place behind Trump. Even though DeSantis held off Haley, his weak finish after investing so much time and money in the state—and attracting endorsements from local political leaders including Governor Kim Reynolds—likely extinguishes his chances of winning the nomination. That’s true whether he remains in the race, as he pledged on Monday, or drops out in the next few weeks.

    Though Haley could not overtake DeSantis here, she has a second chance to establish momentum next week in New Hampshire, where she is running close to Trump in some surveys. But the magnitude of Trump’s Iowa victory shows how far Haley remains from creating a genuine threat to the front-runner. Her support largely remained confined to an archipelago of better-educated, more moderate voters in the state’s largest population centers.

    After the Iowa results, “she’ll be the alternative to Donald Trump,” said Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP Iowa activist who supported Haley. Her credible showing “is not because of organization or message, because she didn’t have either. It’s because she’s perceived as the alternative to Trump and the other candidates tried to be Trump.”

    Haley, though, clearly signaled her intent to escalate her challenge to Trump as the race moves on to New Hampshire. In an energetic post-caucus speech, she debuted a new line of argument against Trump, linking him to President Joe Biden as an aging symbol of a caustic and divisive past that American voters must transcend. “Our campaign is the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare,” she insisted, in a line of argument likely to dominate her message in the week until New Hampshire votes on January 23.

    For Haley, the first challenge may be reversing the gathering sense in the party that Trump is on the verge of wrapping up the contest even as it just begins. The behavior of GOP elected officials in the final days before the caucus may have revealed as much about the state of the race as the result of the first voting itself. Trump in recent days has received a parade of endorsements, including from Utah Senator Mike Lee, who criticized him sharply in 2016, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom Trump mercilessly belittled and mocked when he ran in the 2016 presidential race.

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    As telling: Reynolds, the most prominent supporter of DeSantis, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent backer, each declared in separate television interviews just hours before the vote that they would support Trump if he’s the nominee. Haley did the same in an interview on Fox: “I would take Donald Trump over Joe Biden any day of the week,” she told the Fox News Channel host Neil Cavuto on Monday, hours before she unveiled her much tougher message toward the former president Monday night.

    Trump himself revealed his confidence in a restrained victory speech Monday night that included rare praise of DeSantis, Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who finished fourth and then dropped out of the race. Trump’s uncharacteristically sedate and conciliatory remarks suggested that he sees the opportunity to force out the others, and consolidate the party, before very long.

    Trump’s commanding lead in the vote testified to the depth of his victory. Results from the “entrance poll” of caucus-goers on their way to cast their votes underscored the breadth of his win.

    Across every demographic divide in the party, Trump improved over his performance in 2016, when he narrowly lost the state to Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This time, Trump won both men and women comfortably, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. He won nearly half of voters in both urban and suburban areas, as well as a majority in rural areas, the poll found.

    DeSantis won endorsements from much of the state’s evangelical-Christian leadership, but Trump crushed him among those voters by almost two to one, according to the entrance poll. In 2016, Iowa evangelicals had preferred Cruz to Trump by double digits. Trump on Monday also carried nearly half of voters who were not evangelicals, beating Haley among them by about 20 percentage points. In 2016, Trump managed only a three-percentage-point edge over Rubio among Iowa caucus-goers who were not evangelicals. (In both the 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primaries, the candidate who won Iowa voters who are not evangelicals ultimately won the nomination.)

    Before Trump, the most important dividing line in GOP presidential primaries had been between voters who were and were not evangelical Christians. But on Monday night, as in 2016, Trump reoriented that axis: Education was a far better predictor of support for him than whether a voter identified as an evangelical.

    Trump carried two-thirds of the caucus-goers who do not have a four-year college degree, the entrance poll found on Monday night. That was more than twice as much as Trump won among those voters in 2016, when Cruz narrowly beat him among them.

    Other findings in the entrance poll also testified to Trump’s success at reshaping the party in his image. The share of caucus-goers who identified as “very conservative” was much higher than in 2016. About two-thirds of those attending the caucuses said they do not believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Rural areas that Trump split with Cruz in 2016 broke decisively for him this time.

    Yet amid all these signs of strength, the entrance poll offered some clear warning signs for Trump in a potential general election—as did some of the county-level results.

    Despite some predictions to the contrary, Trump still faced substantial resistance from college-educated voters, just as he did in 2016. In the entrance poll Monday night, he drew only a little more than one-third of them. That was enough to push Trump safely past Haley, who split the remainder of those voters primarily with DeSantis (each of them won just under three in 10 of them). But compared with the 2016 Iowa result, Trump improved much less among college-educated voters than he did among those without degrees.

    Trump’s relative weakness among college-educated voters in the 2016 GOP primary presaged the alienation from him in white-collar suburbs that grew during his presidency. Though Biden’s approval among those voters has declined since 2021, Trump’s modest showing even among the college-educated voters willing to turn out for a GOP caucus likely shows that resistance to him also remains substantial. When the results are tallied, Trump might win all 99 counties in Iowa, an incredible achievement if he manages it. But Trump drew well under his statewide percentage in Polk County, the state’s most populous; in fast-growing Dallas County; and in Story and Johnson, the counties centered on Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. (Johnson is the one county where Trump trails as of now.) Those are all the sorts of places that have moved away from the GOP in the Trump years.

    Also noteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in 10 said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination. On that front, it may be worth filing away that more than four in 10 college graduates who participated in the caucus said they would not view Trump as fit for the presidency if he’s convicted of a crime, the entrance poll found.

    Those are problems Trump will need to confront on another day, if he wins the nomination. For now, he has delivered an imposing show of strength within a party that he has reshaped in his belligerent, conspiratorial image. The winter gloom in Iowa may not be any bleaker than the spirits tonight of the dwindling band of those in the GOP hoping to loosen Trump’s iron grip on the party.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Obama’s Campaign Manager Has Some Advice for Biden on America’s Youth: “Don’t Assume They’re Gonna Vote”

    Obama’s Campaign Manager Has Some Advice for Biden on America’s Youth: “Don’t Assume They’re Gonna Vote”

    It’s no secret that Joe Biden is wrestling with young voters. The 81-year-old president, who was first elected to the US Senate in 1972, has long struggled to excite Zoomers who feel the octogenarian is out of touch with their generation. Biden may have canceled a historic amount of student debt and taken bold action on climate change, but much of that is lost on young Americans, who think his policies haven’t gone far enough.

    All this was true before October 7, when Biden pledged unconditional support for Israel after it was brutally attacked by Hamas. However, a clear generational divide has opened up around the administration’s response to Israel’s devastating counteroffensive in Gaza. Poll after poll shows the president losing ground with young progressives ages 18 to 34 who are critical of him and his handling of the war in the region. Beyond all of that, young Americans loathe the idea of voting in a potential rematch between Biden and Donald Trump, as if political dynamics have not changed since 2020. Some have even expressed concerns their peers won’t turn out to vote in 2024 as a result.

    Still, there are glimmers of hope for Biden. Youth voters, who were quite skeptical of Biden in 2020, ultimately rallied behind him in high numbers. They also supported down-ballot Democrats and were credited with helping prevent a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. But will they show up in 2024?

    Jim Messina has advice for the president on this front. Having served as the deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House and as former president Barack Obama’s reelection campaign manager in 2012, he knows a thing or two about how to win over jaded young people. In his current role as CEO of the Messina Group, he’s advised more than a dozen presidents and prime ministers around the world.

    Messina, 54, believes a lot has changed since 2012, like the advent of TikTok (which he says he’s “obsessed with”). However, in the following interview with Vanity Fair, he pointed to key campaign tactics Biden and his team can nevertheless lean on to convince skeptical young people that voting for Biden is vital in 2024. Our conversation below has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

    Vanity Fair: The world is in conflict. Given that the president is continuing to lose faith from young progressives over his support for Israel in the Israel-Hamas war, what can he do to gain it back while maintaining that allegiance to Israel? And has he been vocal enough about where he stands on the humanitarian side of the war in Gaza?

    Jim Messina: What I learned in the White House is—we went through some really tough moments like this as well—and part of the president’s job is to continue to talk through why he’s doing what he is doing. I thought his early [messaging] was very good on this. But let’s be honest, this is an incredibly important issue, and there’s probably no one issue other than maybe Roe that will sway this election either way. The people loudest on these issues aren’t a good representative of voters, and if you don’t love the way Biden’s handling the issue, you probably really hate Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. And so part of it is just the president saying, “Look,” to young voters, “This is why I’m doing what I’m doing.” And then number two is highlighting why Trump is so bad on these same issues, and having a really clear contrast. I’m a very big believer that campaigns have to have contrast.

    Why do you think that’s currently getting lost? Some of the polls have shown that the same people who are critical of the president’s support for Israel are saying that they would maybe even vote for former president Trump for how he would handle it.

    Rachel Janfaza

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  • Political Accountability Isn’t Dead Yet

    Political Accountability Isn’t Dead Yet

    On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.

    The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year.

    It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens of New Jersey did care that their senior senator was allegedly on the take. In the days after the indictment was unsealed, multiple polls found that Menendez’s approval rating had plummeted to just 8 percent. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, and its other Democratic senator, Cory Booker, both called on Menendez to quit. All but three of the nine Democrats in New Jersey’s House delegation have urged the senator to resign, and one of them is his own son.

    Menendez has pleaded not guilty to the charges and rejected calls to resign. A son of Cuban immigrants, he has denounced the case against him as a racially motivated persecution. But his days in the Senate are almost certainly numbered, whether he leaves of his own accord or voters usher him out. Kim has announced that he will challenge Menendez next year, and so has Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady. Menendez’s trial is scheduled for May, just one month before the primary. Early polls show Menendez barely registering support among Democrats.

    Casey Michel: We’ve never seen anything like the Menendez indictment

    “I hit a breaking point,” Kim told me, explaining his decision to run. “I think a lot of people hit a breaking point, where they’re just like, ‘We’re done with this now.’”

    Accountability has come more swiftly for Santos. National party leaders had largely protected him—Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his successor, Mike Johnson, both needed Santos’s vote in the GOP’s tight House majority. But a damning report from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee proved to be his undoing: Earlier this month, Santos became just the sixth lawmaker in American history to be expelled from the House.

    The government’s case against Menendez could still fall apart; he’s beaten charges of corruption before. But the public can hold its elected officials to a higher standard than a jury would. If the appearance (and, in this case, reappearance) of impropriety can cause voters to lose faith in the system, the events of the past few months might go some way toward restoring it. That both Menendez and Santos have suffered consequences for their alleged misdeeds offers some reassurance to ethics watchdogs who have seen Trump survive scandal after scandal, and indictment after indictment. “You can’t get away with anything. There are still some guardrails,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me.

    Yet Trump’s enduring impact on political accountability remains an open question. Has he lowered the standards for everyone, or do the laws of political gravity still apply to ethically compromised lawmakers not named Trump? “Donald Trump is a unique animal,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the Washington-based nonprofit Public Citizen, told me. “He has built a cultlike following and surrounded himself with people who believe that no matter what he does, he is in the right.” Few politicians could ever hope to build such a buffer.

    Trump hasn’t evaded accountability entirely: The ethical norms he shattered while in office likely contributed to his defeat in 2020. And although he’s leading in the polls, one or more convictions next year could weaken his bid and demonstrate that the systems meant to hold American leaders in check function even against politicians who have used their popularity to insulate themselves from culpability. “He is being charged,” Gilbert said. “There are accountability mechanisms that are moving in spite of that apparatus. And to me, that’s a sign that eventually the rule of law will prevail.”

    At the same time, the Menendez and Santos examples provide only so much comfort for ethics watchdogs. The allegations against both politicians were particularly egregious. The phrase lining his pockets is usually metaphorical, but in addition to gold bars, the FBI found envelopes of cash in the pockets of suit jackets emblazoned with Menendez’s name in his closet.

    The earlier allegations Menendez faced were almost as lurid; prosecutors said he had accepted nearly $1 million in gifts from a Florida ophthalmologist, including private flights and lavish Caribbean vacations, in exchange for helping the doctor secure contracts and visas for his girlfriends. A 2018 trial ended in a hung jury, and the Department of Justice subsequently dropped the case.

    Santos was caught lying about virtually his entire life—his religion, where he had gone to school, where he worked—and then was accused of using his campaign coffers as a personal piggy bank, spending the money on Botox and the website OnlyFans.

    Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans

    Some of the charges against Trump, such as falsifying business records and mishandling classified documents, involve more complicated questions of law. “A lot of the Trump scandals that he’s been indicted for may sort of be beyond the grasp of the average voter,” says Tom Jensen, the director of the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, which conducted one of the surveys finding that Menendez’s approval rating had sunk after the indictment. “Gold bars are not beyond the grasp of the average voter. Voters get gold bars, and when it’s something that’s so easy for voters to understand, you’re a lot more likely to see this sort of precipitous decline.”

    Jensen told me that in his 16 years as a pollster, he had seen only two other examples where public support dropped so dramatically after the eruption of scandal. One was Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted of attempting to sell the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated when he became president in 2009. The other was John Edwards, who, after running for president as a Democrat in 2008, admitted to having an affair while his wife, Elizabeth, was battling a recurrence of breast cancer. (He would later admit to fathering a child with his mistress, and face charges that he illegally used campaign funds to hide the affair; Edwards was found not guilty on the one count on which the jury reached a verdict.)

    The Trump era has revealed an asymmetry in how the parties respond to scandal. Republicans have overlooked or justified all sorts of behavior that would have doomed most other politicians, including multiple allegations of sexual assault (such as those that Trump essentially admitted to in the infamous Access Hollywood video made public in 2016). Although Santos was expelled by a Republican-controlled House, Democrats provided the bulk of the votes to oust him, while a majority of GOP lawmakers voted against expulsion. Democrats were quick to pressure Senator Al Franken to resign in 2018 after several women accused him of touching them inappropriately. (Some Democrats later regretted that they had pushed Franken out so fast.) The party also forced a defiant New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to step down in 2021 amid multiple allegations of misconduct and harassment.

    Trump’s gut-it-out strategy seems to have inspired politicians in both parties to resist demands to resign and to bet that the public’s short attention span will allow them to weather just about any controversy. Gone are the days when a scandalized politician would quit at the first sign of embarrassment, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer did in 2008, less than 48 hours after the revelation that he had patronized high-end prostitutes. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was able to serve out his full term despite losing the support of virtually the entire Democratic Party in 2019 after photos surfaced of him dressed in racist costumes in a medical-school yearbook. Cuomo defied calls to resign for months, and Santos forced the House to expel him rather than quit. Menendez has similarly rebuffed the many longtime colleagues who have urged him to leave.

    Shame may have left politics in the Trump era, but consequences haven’t—at least in the cases of Menendez and Santos. “Maybe these can be first steps,” Bookbinder told me, sounding a note of cautious optimism. “If you say nothing matters, then really nothing will matter. I hope we can go back to the place where people do feel like they owe it to their constituents to behave in an ethical and legal way.”

    Russell Berman

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  • Why Biden Should Shift the Debate to This Topic

    Why Biden Should Shift the Debate to This Topic

    President Joe Biden and Democrats cannot win the debate over the economy without fundamentally reframing the terms of the choice they are offering voters, an extensive new research study by one of the party’s prominent electoral-strategy groups has concluded.

    The study, scheduled to be released today, seeks to mitigate one of the party’s most glaring vulnerabilities heading into the 2024 election: the consistent finding in surveys that when it comes to managing the national economy or addressing inflation, significantly more voters express confidence in Republicans than in Democrats.

    To close that gap, the study argues, Biden and Democrats must shift the debate from which party is best equipped to grow the overall economy to which side can help families achieve what the report calls a “better life.” The study argues that Democrats can win that argument with a three-pronged message centered on: delivering tangible kitchen-table economic benefits (such as increased federal subsidies for buying health insurance), confronting powerful special interests (such as major corporations), and pledging to protect key personal liberties and freedoms, led by the right to legal abortion.

    The study was conducted by Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing voters of color, in conjunction with Anat Shenker-Osorio, a message consultant for progressive candidates and causes. Last year, Way to Win was among the top advocates pushing the party to stress a message of protecting personal freedoms and democracy—an approach that helped Democrats overperform expectations despite widespread discontent about the economy.

    Reversing the advantage Donald Trump and the GOP have on the economy will require Democrats to highlight “the tangible improvements their policies have made in people’s lives, in lieu of speaking of abstract economic gains, as well as touting their future agenda of expanding on these gains, taking on corporate greed and the MAGA Republicans who aim to rule only for the wealthy few,” concludes a memo summarizing the research that was provided exclusively to The Atlantic.

    Read: The two Republican theories for beating Trump

    Based on months of polls, focus groups, and other public-opinion research, the study comes amid simmering Democratic anxieties over national and swing-state surveys showing Trump leading Biden. Especially frustrating for the White House and other Democrats has been the persistence and pervasiveness of negative public attitudes about the economy, despite robust economic growth, low unemployment, and a huge reduction in the inflation rate over the past year. Democrats were particularly unnerved by a recent survey from Democracy Corps, a group founded by the longtime party strategists James Carville and Stanley B. Greenberg, that found that voters in the key swing states gave Trump a retrospective job-approval rating for his performance as president nearly 10 percentage points higher than what they give Biden for his current performance.

    Biden has spent months trying to highlight positive trends in the economy by describing them under the rubric of “Bidenomics.” But the Way to Win study, like the Democracy Corps research, argues that it is counterproductive for the administration to try to convince voters that inflation is abating or that the economy is improving while so many are struggling to make ends meet. Telling voters that “inflation is going down [produced a] backlash” in the research, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Way to Win’s senior vice president, told me: “Their experience is that it’s up. If you make an overarching statement that things are getting better, it rubs people the wrong way.”

    Probably the key insight in the report is the contention that it’s a mistake for Democrats to focus the 2024 debate on any of the broad national trends in the economy, including those that have been positive under Biden, such as job growth.

    For many years, the report argues, voters have been inclined to believe that Republicans are better than Democrats at managing the overall economy—an advantage that may be especially pronounced for Trump, a former business mogul, if he’s the GOP nominee. But, the study found, swing voters, as well as the irregular voters the party needs to turn out in 2024, give Democrats an edge on which party can best deliver for “you and your family’s economic well-being.”

    “If the argument is who [handles] the economy best, even though it’s not true in any sense, that’s their brand advantage,” Shenker-Osorio told me. “If the question is who is going to create the best future for your family, that is a Democratic-brand advantage. That is a story we can tell. It’s a credible story, and it’s a story that people care more about.”

    Read: A war on blue America

    To shift the debate into this more favorable terrain, the report argues, Biden and other Democrats must simultaneously reorient their economic arguments in opposite directions. The group argues that Democrats must narrow their focus by talking less about macroeconomic trends and more about specific policies they have enacted to help families make ends meet. That includes policies that Biden has passed to lower prescription-drug and utility costs, and policies he could promote in a second term, such as restoring the expanded child tax credit that Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia stripped from the Inflation Reduction Act last year.

    “Among both swing voters and surge voters, folks are moved more by talking about tangible gains than by talking about growing the economy,” Shenker-Osario said.

    Simultaneously, the report argues that Democrats must link their economic agenda to a broader promise to defend voters against an array of forces threatening their ability to succeed. In its research, the group found that the strongest case for Democrats blended pledges to deliver concrete economic benefits with promises to defend fundamental rights and stand up to big, wealthy corporations.

    Across all of these fronts, Fernandez Ancona argues, the key for Democrats is not just to warn about what a second Trump term could mean but to give voters a positive vision that emphasizes their success at stopping him and the prospect that reelecting Biden could deliver measurable benefits. “We really believe we can’t just rely on telling people the bad things,” Fernandez Ancona said.

    Key results in the 2022 election offer Democrats some reason for optimism that the approach urged by Way to Win can succeed. In the five swing states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race, Democrats won seven of the nine Senate and gubernatorial races in 2022, primarily around variations on the themes that Way to Win wants the party to stress next year.

    The range of problems confronting Biden, such as doubts about his age and capacity, can’t all be resolved by recalibrating his message. Fernandez Ancona doesn’t pretend otherwise. But she argues that a more precisely targeted message will provide Biden the best chance of maximizing his support whatever the background environment looks like next year. “We can’t control what conditions are,” she told me. “Messaging can’t solve all problems. But it does do something to paint the path forward and make sure that voters go into the booth knowing what the stakes are.”

    With Trump looming as the likely GOP nominee, Democratic strategists at this point may have greater consensus about the stakes in 2024 than the path forward for the party. The sheer proliferation of studies proposing a new approach for Biden may be the most telling measure of how much more difficult this election looks than Democrats once anticipated.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Gen Z and Millennials Are Undecided in the 2024 Election

    Gen Z and Millennials Are Undecided in the 2024 Election

    A third of young voters aged 18 to 34 say they are undecided about who they will vote for in the 2024 presidential election, a recent poll showed, signaling an opportunity for candidates to attract this key voting bloc in the upcoming presidential polls.

    The survey by the non-partisan Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University found that about a third of Americans aged 18 to 34 are undecided about who they’ll vote for in the 2024 presidential election. Thirty-seven percent want to vote for a Democrat, while 25 percent will side with a Republican. Seven percent would vote for a third-party or independent candidate.

    The 2024 election is set to begin in earnest in a little over six weeks, where the Iowa caucuses are slated to kick-off on January 15 where Republican presidential candidates will compete for a chance to replace Democratic President Joe Biden at the White House.

    The youth vote promises to be a critical bloc in determining the next election, according to the CIRCLE study, which found that in the next election cycle, there will be 40 million potential new Gen Z voters, a fifth of the overall electorate.

    “Together with the youngest millennials, young people ages 18 to 34 are poised to be a potential force in the next presidential election,” they said.

    The Pre-2024 Election Youth Survey was developed by CIRCLE and conducted by polling firm Ipsos between October 25 and November 2, 2023, with a sample size of 2,017 self-reported U.S. citizens aged 18 to 34, CIRCLE said.

    Newsweek contacted the CIRCLE for comment via email on Monday afternoon.

    A sign stating “VOTE” is affixed to the wall beside children’s art work of hand drawings at the Shawmont School polling location on November 8, 2022 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The youth vote could be critical in deciding who the next president is at the next election. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

    Meanwhile, the poll also found that among young voters that are highly motivated to vote, 51 percent prefer a Democrat in 2024, 30 percent a Republican and 16 percent are still undecided.

    “The high share of undecided voters (31 percent) among all youth in our survey is notable, though not totally unexpected far out from the election,” CIRCLE said in its report. “When looking at youth attitudes regardless of likelihood to vote, there appear to be undecided youth across the political spectrum: 35 percent of youth who are undecided about 2024 candidates voted for President Biden in 2020, while 15 percent voted for former President Trump.”

    Youth voters told CIRCLE that in 2024, the economy will be top of mind in deciding how they vote. Young people said that inflation and the cost of living was their number-one concern, with 52 percent of those surveyed including it as one of their top-three issue in terms of priorities, followed by jobs that pay a living wage at 28 percent, gun violence prevention at 26 percent and climate change also garnering the support of 26 percent.