The Run-Up

On Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump won another four nominating contests and officially became the presumptive Republican nominee. That’s despite the criminal charges, the judgments made against him in defamation and sexual abuse cases, the hundreds of millions of dollars in legal penalties and the continued fallout from the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Considering all of that, we want to ask Republicans...

With Super Tuesday behind us, this week is the end of one chapter of this campaign. On the Republican side, former President Donald Trump’s only remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, is out of the race. And on the Democratic side, President Biden has so far secured more than 70 percent of the delegates he needs to secure the nomination. The general election is here. And so too is the rematch we’ve be...

It’s Super Tuesday. That means that people in 15 states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia) and one territory (American Samoa) are going to the polls. Usually, Super Tuesday is one of the biggest dates on the primary calendar — a day when a lot of people across the country make th...

For a lot of his most loyal supporters, Donald Trump isn’t just the former president or even the potential next president. He is, in their view, the true president — because many of them believe the 2020 election was stolen. So with Mr. Trump marching toward the Republican nomination and a likely rematch with President Biden in November, we went to this year’s Conservative Political Action Confere...

For the past few months, we’ve been asking our listeners to write in with questions, and we’ve gotten some great ones. Things like: How does polling work ? Does Joe Biden’s stance on Gaza present a campaign challenge ? And who might Donald Trump select as his running mate? But as we were sorting through them, an underlying theme started to emerge: People can’t seem to fathom that we’re careening t...

If you had just a few minutes to win someone’s affection, how political would you get? Would you dive right in, or avoid politics altogether? The Run-Up went speed dating in suburban Philadelphia to find out.  Usually when we’re out in the field, we’re at rallies or campaign events – places where people are vocal about their political beliefs. But for many participants at the dating event, talking...

Our listeners have lots of questions about polling. Questions such as: Is it still relevant? How does it work? How do you get a reliable sample when people don’t answer the phone? At this point in a usual primary season, still weeks away from Super Tuesday, most of the attention of polling would be on who might capture the nomination. But this year, with the race all but set, we’re anticipating ni...

Nevada is doing things differently this year. Or at least, it tried to. The first presidential nominating contest in the west takes place on Tuesday — and on Thursday. But that’s not what state officials were hoping would happen when they decided to move from a caucus to a primary in 2021. Democrats got on board — and President Biden is expected to win that contest handily on Tuesday. On the Repub...

President Biden has started to switch gears into campaign mode. On the trail, he’s particularly focused on South Carolina, which holds the first official Democratic primary contest on Saturday. And one of his first campaign events of the year took him to Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, for a speech that addressed the dangers of white supremacy. But a few minutes into the speech, he was interr...

Donald Trump’s victory over Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire primary made two things clear: The MAGA wing of the G.O.P. is ready for his coronation, while anti-Trump Republicans believe the race is far from over. From inside Trump’s victory party on Tuesday night, we hear from supporters of the former president and from the stars of his orbit, who see themselves as being on the verge of “obliterat...

Warning: this episode contains strong language. On Sunday, after a disappointing finish in the Iowa caucuses and with just two days to go before the New Hampshire primary, Ron DeSantis ended his campaign for president. His decision made it official: The race for the Republican nomination is now a head-to-head contest between two wildly different candidates, Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. And now, t...

Going into the Iowa caucuses, there were a handful of key things we were watching for: Would the frigid weather hamper turnout? Would his overwhelming dominance in the polls translate to a decisive victory for Donald Trump? And finally, could the other candidates muster enough of a showing to keep the race alive? Today: Through conversations with Iowa caucus goers — especially those who preferred...

Finally. More than a year after Donald Trump first announced his 2024 presidential run, six months after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida refocused his campaign strategy to be all-in on Iowa, and right in the midst of debilitating winter weather, the Iowa caucuses are upon us. And “The Run-Up” has everything you need to know to understand what might happen today — and what it will mean for the race go...

At the start of the 2024 Republican primary campaign, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was considered by many in his party to be the biggest threat to Donald Trump. He was seen as someone who could win over the voters who were tired of Trump’s antics, and also bring along the MAGA movement. But it didn’t work out that way. And as Mr. DeSantis has struggled, one main opponent, former Gov. Nikki Haley o...

It’s the start of the actual election year — and a new chapter in the campaign. Voting in early states is less than two weeks away. But, amid the crunchtime campaigning, another story line is unfolding. Two states are saying that Donald Trump can’t be on the ballot … at all. Officials in Colorado and Maine are basing this on a clause of the 14th Amendment , which bars candidates from holding offic...

Last summer, politics, country music and cultural grievance collided with the growing popularity of a new song from recording artist Jason Aldean. Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk Carjack an old lady at a red light Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like In the lyrics, Aldean lists behaviors he associates with cities, like lawlessness and disres...

Iowa was supposed to be fertile ground for Donald Trump’s primary challengers. Its population is disproportionately evangelical, and voters were expected to coalesce around a more faith-driven alternative. But that’s not what’s happened. This past summer, Trump was polling at around 42 percent in the state, a lead that has only continued to grow. Increasingly, it looks like Iowa is on track to cor...

Watching the Republican primary debates can feel like a study in self sabotage. In the latest one, which Donald Trump skipped, the candidates spent most of their time attacking one another — not the guy who is 50 points ahead in the polls. But there is a logic to it. Candidates are trying to position themselves as the party’s alternative to the former president. And to do that, they have to push o...

There was a moment in early 2023 when Donald Trump seemed like a politician in decline. And it wasn’t just his political opponents who thought so. National Republicans, who blamed Mr. Trump for the party’s run of bad results in the midterms, largely agreed. But now it’s starting to set in: It appears the former president’s staying power was underestimated … again. Mr. Trump is the overwhelming fav...

The former president’s legal status is one of the biggest wild cards heading into 2024. Even as he dominates the Republican primary and his party, Trump has been indicted on 91 felony charges, across four criminal cases in state and federal courts. We spent a day talking to our colleagues in The Times’s newsroom, trying to get answers to questions it’s surreal to even be asking. Among them: Are Re...

Polls suggest that they are – and that Black voters’ support for Donald Trump, especially among men, is rising. Astead W. Herndon convened a special "Run-Up" Thanksgiving focus group to explore what might be behind those numbers. He spoke with family, friends and, parishioners from his father’s church, community members and people he grew up with. It’s a lively conversation with real implications...

Vice President Harris believes that democracy is once again on the line in November. She is key to the Biden campaign’s strategy for getting that message to its skeptical base — and winning over groups of voters that Democrats can't afford to lose. In a wide-ranging conversation recorded in Chicago in August, Astead Herndon sat down with the vice president to discuss her life and work before Washi...

Yes, President Biden’s team has seen the polls that show him struggling in a 2024 rematch with Donald Trump. But it says it’s focused on other things — like how well Democrats are doing at the ballot box. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher...

Out of more than 3,000 counties in the United States, Clallam County, Wash. is the only one that has voted for the winner of the presidential race every year since 1980. It earned this distinction in 2020, the election that broke everyone else’s streak. We’re a year out from the 2024 presidential election and despite a robust Republican primary field, the race is looking like it could easily be a...

It could be 2020 all over again. That’s what makes 2024 so different. And why it demands a different kind of political reporting. That is The Run-Up’s specialty. We’ll be back Nov. 2. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher .