Though Rick Ahearn was just a few feet from John Hinckley Jr. when he opened fire on Ronald Reagan and his entourage outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981, he was most likely among the last people in the city to know that the president had been shot. That’s because as soon as Secret…
Powerful allies of President Biden are aggressively working to stop third-party and independent presidential candidacies, fearing that an outside bid could cost Democrats an election that many believe will again come down to a few percentage points in key battleground states. As attempts to mount outside campaigns multiply, a broad coalition has accelerated a multipronged…
Republican presidential candidates seized on the Hamas attacks on Israel Saturday to criticize President Biden, whom they sought to cast as enabling the offensive by Palestinian militants. Several of the primary contenders argued that there was a connection between the surprise assault and a recent hostage release deal between the Biden administration and Iran, a…
The Scene Did you hear? There was a mass gathering of Republican 2024 hopefuls in Iowa on Sunday — near Cedar Rapids, amid the midsummer seas of ripening cornstalks and the darker hues of rows of soybeans. This was after a Republican Party fund-raising dinner in Des Moines nine days earlier, and just before the…
Candidate after candidate at an Iowa Republican dinner on Friday avoided so much as mentioning the dominant front-runner in the race, former President Donald J. Trump. But when Mr. Trump took the stage after more than two hours of speeches by his lower-polling rivals, it took him less than three minutes to unleash his first…
As the politicians and Republican Party officials tossed out the red meat on Saturday at an event at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, Wayne Johnson, a 70-year-old farmer and financial consultant from Forest City, Iowa, had some quieter thoughts about the next president he would like to see. The violence in American schools and public places,…
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina opened his presidential candidacy with a story of the nation’s bitter, racist past. It is one that he tells often, of a grandfather forced from school in the third grade to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South. A rival for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, speaks of the…
The donor network created by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch is preparing to get involved in the presidential primaries in 2024, with the aim of turning “the page on the past” in a thinly veiled rebuke of former President Donald J. Trump, according to an internal memo. The network, comprising…
A surprisingly nuanced verdict in the midterm elections has delivered at least one important conclusion about the state of the national mood: In battleground states and swing districts across the country, voters voiced their support for moderation. That happened in Nevada’s Senate race, where Catherine Cortez Masto, an unassuming incumbent Democrat occupying one of the…
In the last full day of campaigning, Republican and Democratic candidates made their final appeals to voters before one of the most consequential and unpredictable midterm campaigns drew to a close. Republican candidates stuck to their central themes of inflation, crime and immigration, tapping into mounting voter concerns over issues around daily life. Democrats also…