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*How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again*
Blue-collar white voters make up Donald Trump’s base. But his political resurgence has been fueled largely by Republicans from the other end of the socioeconomic scale.
Working-class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump. College-educated conservatives may ensure that he keeps it.
Often overlooked in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with a college degree remain at the heart of the lingering Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy and cultural issues.
These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Mr. Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.
Even as Mr. Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, it was only a year ago that he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination.
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Then came Mr. Trump’s resurgence, in which he rallied every corner of the party, including the white working class. But few cross-sections of Republicans rebounded as much as college-educated conservatives, a review of state and national polls during the past 14 months shows.
This phenomenon cuts against years of wariness toward Mr. Trump by college-educated Republicans, unnerved by his 2020 election lies and his seemingly endless craving for controversy.
Their surge toward the former president appears to stem largely from a reaction to the current political climate rather than a sudden clamoring to join the red-capped citizenry of MAGA nation, according to interviews with nearly two dozen college-educated Republican voters.
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A supporter holding his hand over his heart — where his shirt has a picture of Donald Trump’s mug shot — during the singing of the national anthem at a Trump event in Clinton, Iowa.
In interviews, many college-educated Republicans expressed anger at the criminal cases against Mr. Trump, calling them unfair. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Many were incredulous over what they described as excessive and unfair legal investigations targeting the former president. Others said they were underwhelmed by Mr. DeSantis and viewed Mr. Trump as more likely to win than former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Several saw Mr. Trump as a more palatable option because they wanted to prioritize domestic problems over foreign relations and were frustrated with high interest rates.
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“These are Fox News viewers who are coming back around to him,” said David Kochel, a Republican operative in Iowa with three decades of experience in campaign politics. “These voters are smart enough to see the writing on the wall that Trump is going to win, and essentially want to get this over with and send him off to battle Biden.”
As the presidential nominating season commences, college-educated Republicans face a profound decision. Whether they stick with Mr. Trump, swing back to Mr. DeSantis or align behind Ms. Haley will help set the party’s course heading into November and for years to come.
‘Now I prefer Trump’
Mr. Trump is the odds-on favorite to become his party’s nominee, which would make him the first Republican to win three consecutive presidential nominations. But there was little sense of inevitability a year ago.
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He had failed to help deliver the red wave of victories he promised supporters in the 2022 midterm elections. In the weeks that followed, he suggested terminating the Constitution and faced sharp criticism for hosting a dinner with Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier, and the rapper Kanye West, who had been widely denounced for making antisemitic comments.
The backlash from Republican voters was immediate.
In a Suffolk University/USA Today poll at the time, 61 percent of the party’s voters said they still supported Mr. Trump’s policies but wanted “a different Republican nominee for president.” A stunning 76 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed.
This month, the same pollster showed Mr. Trump with support from 62 percent of Republican voters, including 60 percent of those with a college degree.
Other surveys have revealed similar trends.
Mr. Trump’s backing from white, college-educated Republicans doubled to 60 percent over the course of last year, according to Fox News polling.
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Supporters of Mr. Trump clapping at a rally in November in Edinburg, Texas, near the southern border, where Gov. Greg Abbott endorsed the former president.
Supporters of Mr. Trump gathered at a rally in November in Edinburg, Texas, near the southern border, where Gov. Greg Abbott endorsed the former president. Mr. Trump consolidated Republican support throughout the year. Credit…Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Mr. Trump’s ability to maintain support from both sides of the party’s educational gap could be crucial to his political future beyond the Republican primary race.
Iowa Caucuses: Live Updates
Updated
Jan. 15, 2024, 11:47 a.m. ET55 minutes ago
55 minutes ago
When will we know who won Iowa? It depends.
Will Trump claim fraud if he doesn’t like the caucus results?
Fear and anxiety are on the ballot in Iowa.
In the 2020 presidential election, he bled support from 9 percent of Republicans who voted for a different candidate, according to an AP VoteCast survey of more than 110,000 voters. Some campaign advisers have said those defections cost him a second term, particularly given that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost just 4 percent of Democrats.
College-educated voters accounted for 56 percent of Mr. Trump’s defections, according to a New York Times analysis of the data.
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Ruth Ann Cherny, 65, a retired nurse from Urbandale, Iowa, said she was turning back to Mr. Trump after considering whether the party had “a younger, dynamic guy.”
She considered Mr. DeSantis, but decided she couldn’t support him because “dang, his campaign is such a mess.” She wanted to support Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and political newcomer, but concluded he was too inexperienced and could not win.
“Trump has been in the White House once, and maybe he has a better lay of the land this time and will know who’s who and what’s what,” Ms. Cherny said.
Yolanda Gutierrez, 94, a retired real estate agent from Lakewood, Calif., whose state votes in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 5, expressed similar views.
“I know Trump’s got a lot of baggage,” she said. “But so much of it is make-believe.”
Ms. Gutierrez, who studied education in college, said she had voted twice for Mr. Trump but had been leaning toward Mr. DeSantis because she liked his record as governor of Florida and thought the party needed a younger leader.
“But now I prefer Trump because Democrats are trying to find any way they can to jail him,” she said.
‘Like a teenager who’s rebelling’
The shift in Republican support for Mr. Trump can be pinpointed almost to the moment last year when, on March 30, 2023, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, making him the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.
At the time, Mr. Trump’s primary bid had support from less than half of voters in most polls, an ominous position where he had been hovering for months.
But just four days after the Manhattan indictment, Mr. Trump eclipsed the 50 percent mark, and he has trended upward ever since, according to a national average of polls maintained by FiveThirtyEight. As of Saturday, Mr. Trump had support from about 60 percent of the party.
Lisa Keathly, 54, who owns two flooring businesses near Dallas, said she still wanted to support Mr. DeSantis, whom she views as more polished and less rude. But she added that she was increasingly likely to back Mr. Trump in her state’s Super Tuesday primary.
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Ron DeSantis smiling and speaking into a microphone at a rally in Grimes, Iowa.
At the start of the primary campaign, Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the Republican Party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times
She pointed to a ruling last month from Colorado’s top court to block the former president from the primary ballot, which the U.S. Supreme Court is now considering, as a moment that may have sealed her support for Mr. Trump.
“It’s a little bit like a teenager who’s rebelling — a part of me is like, Maybe I should go for Trump because everyone is telling me not to,” Ms. Keathly said. “Part of my thing is: Why are they so scared?”
She added, “Because they can’t control him.”
Worries about ‘a wasted vote’
Some college-educated Republicans said they had circled back to Mr. Trump as they grew increasingly anxious about foreign conflicts.
Unlike Ms. Haley, who now appears to be Mr. Trump’s toughest challenger, they were opposed to sending more aid to help Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. And they liked Mr. Trump’s tough talk on China.
“I like Nikki Haley, and I’d probably vote for her if I thought she could beat him,” said Linda Farrar, a 72-year-old Republican from Missouri, which holds its presidential caucuses on March 2. “But right now, national security is the most important thing.”
Ms. Farrar said she wanted to send a message to the world by nominating a presidential candidate who would project strength abroad.
“I’m just afraid of China and what’s happening at the border and who’s coming in,” she said. “It scares me a great deal. China is really taking over — they’re infiltrating from the inside.”
Others cited increasing concern about the economy, and a longing for the kinds of market gains that colored Mr. Trump’s first three years in office.
Many, like Chip Shaw, a 46-year-old information technology specialist in Rome, Ga., said they had been underwhelmed by Mr. DeSantis’s campaign, and viewed support for any candidate other than Mr. Trump as “a wasted vote.”
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Mr. Trump’s back is visible as he walks offstage after an event in Clinton, Iowa.
Some college-educated Republicans said they had circled back to Mr. Trump as they grew increasingly anxious about foreign conflicts.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
“If we’re going off the way polls are right now, that’s the way I feel. My vote would be going into thin air,” Mr. Shaw said. “The country was really running smooth under him. I think that the economy was a crap ton better — we weren’t paying $6 a carton for eggs.”
Still, support for Mr. Trump has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The urgency among Republicans to unseat Mr. Biden has been a key factor in determining which candidate to support, a finding that Trump aides said had revealed itself in their internal research of primary voters.
The Trump campaign has focused much of its ad budget on attacking Mr. Biden, which appears to be an early pivot to the likely matchup in the general election — and addresses one of Republican voters’ top concerns.
“Trump is good,” said Hari Goyal, 73, a physician in Sacramento, who supported Mr. DeSantis last year but has since changed his mind. “Look at Biden and what he has done to this country. Trump can beat him, and he can fix this country.”
*Election 2024 In Final Push, Trump, Haley and DeSantis Battle for Votes in Iowa*
Donald J. Trump is hoping for a record margin of victory. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are battling to finish a stronger-than-expected second. Caucusing begins at 7 p.m. Central time.
It’s Caucus Day in Iowa. Here’s the latest.
Against a backdrop of blisteringly cold weather and polls suggesting a race short on drama, Republicans will gather on Monday night in caucuses across Iowa to inaugurate their party’s process of choosing a presidential nominee for 2024.
The three leading candidates — Donald J. Trump and then, far behind him in the polls, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis — battled high winds and snow over the weekend as they implored supporters to turn out, making the case one final time for their candidacies and against those of their opponents. They were also looking ahead to the next two states with nominating contests as they began to shut down their Iowa operations and move to New Hampshire and South Carolina.
The Iowa caucuses have historically been a suspenseful early test for candidates, who spend nearly a year campaigning in intimate settings, taking questions from voters. Suspense-wise, that may be less true this year.
Mr. Trump, the former president, is dominating the field, according to nearly every poll and reports from Republicans across the state. The lingering question is whether Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, or Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, will come in second.
In one sign of confidence, Mr. Trump held his final in-person campaign rally on Sunday night, in Indianola, and plans to spend the day calling caucus captains before visiting a caucus site in Des Moines.
Ms. Haley plans to attend several events in and around Des Moines on Monday, as well as host a virtual town hall and visit a caucus site. In the evening, she is expected to deliver remarks at a caucus watch party in West Des Moines.
Mr. DeSantis — who could very well be forced out of the contest if he comes in third — was setting off on one final blitz of campaigning across the state, including stops in three of Iowa’s major media markets and nearly a dozen appearances on national and local media outlets.
In other news:
Republicans once had high hopes for a possible record turnout in these caucuses. But the brutal weather and Mr. Trump’s dominance have cooled predictions. When caucusgoers cast the first votes tonight, the temperature will feel like minus 40 degrees in northwestern Iowa, minus 30 degrees near Des Moines and minus 15 degrees in the southeastern part of the state, said Jonathan Porter, the chief meteorologist for AccuWeather.
After Monday, the quadrennial post-caucus exodus begins, potentially before the final outcome in Iowa is known. In the coming days, Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis all plan to make their way to New Hampshire, where there is a Republican primary next week, though Mr. DeSantis will stop along the way in South Carolina, which has its primary after New Hampshire’s. (Polls suggest that Mr. DeSantis should not bank on a strong showing in New Hampshire.) No weather respite there: Forecasters are predicting cold temperatures and up to three inches of snow.
Mr. Trump finished up a light month of campaigning by attacking Ms. Haley, as good an indication as any poll of how he sees the race in the days ahead. He told supporters that Ms. Haley was “not right to be president.” (A key poll released on Saturday night showed her in second place, with 20 percent, behind Mr. Trump, with 48 percent. Mr. DeSantis was at 16 percent.)
President Biden’s campaign, seeking to grab some attention, said that together with two allied committees it was entering 2024 with more than $117 million in cash.
For her part, Ms. Haley used her closing arguments on Sunday to tell voters in Ames that the country was at a turning point — “The world is on fire,” she said — as she presented herself as a candidate of change. “The only way we’re going to win the majority of Americans is if we have a new generational leader that leaves the negativity and the baggage behind and focuses on the solutions of the future,” she said.
*A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.*
Cheryl Sharp, a 47-year-old sales associate who was among the many Iowans turned away from a filled-to-capacity Trump rally last month, sounded pretty confident she knew why Donald Trump was so appealing to many voters. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along.
“You want someone strong, globally, so that it creates mutual respect with other countries, and maybe a little bit of fear,” she told me. “Yes, it’s true, not everyone likes him. It’s good not to be liked. Being strong is better.” Sharp readily conceded that not everything Trump said was great, but she saw that as part of the right personality to be president. “You gotta be a little crazy, maybe, to make sure other countries respect and fear us,” she said. “And he can run the country like a business, and they will leave him alone.”
Three days later, inside a Trump rally in New Hampshire, Scott Bobbitt and his wife, Heather, also brought up Trump’s strength. “He commands respect and fear around the world,” Scott Bobbitt told me. “Many people may be driven by fear of him because he’ll do what he says he’s going to do, and he’s not afraid to talk about it. And I think that that’s very powerful. That does protect our country, and he’ll stand up instead of rolling over.”
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A photograph of a flag with a portrait of Donald Trump that reads “miss me yet?”
I first began attending Trump rallies eight years ago, to try to better understand a candidate who was then being described as a joke — someone with little to no chance of winning the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency — and came away struck by his mix of charisma and powerful command of audiences.
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Rather than the bumbling celebrity I expected, I encountered a politician laying the groundwork for a powerful political realignment around subjects too readily brushed aside by the bipartisan establishment in Washington, such as the loss of manufacturing in the United States; those left behind by globalization and trade, especially trade with China; the legacy of the Iraq war and U.S. involvement in foreign wars in general; and, of course, immigration.
I recently started going to Trump rallies and following his supporters’ online political conversations once again, to try to better understand something else: his base, and specifically the question of authoritarianism and the American voter.
The authoritarian label has been attached to Trump by critics for years, especially after he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, which culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. I have studied and written about authoritarianism for years, and I think it’s important to pay attention to the views and motivations of voters who support authoritarian politicians, even when these politicians are seen by many as threats to the democratic order.
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My curiosity isn’t merely intellectual. Around the world, these politicians are not just getting elected democratically; they are often retaining enough popular support after a term — or two or three — to get re-elected. Polls strongly suggest that Trump has a reasonable chance of winning another term in November. And he has clearly retained his hold on the Republican Party base: His Republican challengers either seem to be angling to be his vice president or are struggling to climb in the polls.
What I wanted to understand was, why? Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?
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A photograph of a woman in a stars-and-stripes T-shirt, holding a red trump hat over her heart.
Barb Rice stands for the pledge of allegiance in Waterloo, Iowa.
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A photograph of a man holding up a sign at a Trump rally.
A Trump supporter at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa.
In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.
*What Makes Nikki Haley Tougher Than the Rest*
Politics is a tough business, so you’d think most politicians would be tough people. In fact, in my experience they’re often not. A lot of people go into politics because they want to be universally liked, and from Abraham Lincoln on down, many of them have detested personal confrontation. Several years ago it occurred to me that in every administration I had covered to that point — from Reagan through Obama — the White House staff seemed to fear the first lady more than they feared the commander in chief.
This has obviously changed in recent times. Donald Trump was tough, mean and self-pitying (a nifty combination). President Biden is tougher than he looks. And the woman who is now Trump’s chief challenger, Nikki Haley, is one of the toughest politicians in America — by which I mean confrontational, willing to hammer her foes.
When you read accounts of her days in South Carolina, her bellicosity fairly ripples off the pages. In a fantastic 2021 profile in Politico Magazine, Tim Alberta quotes a former South Carolina Republican Party chair: “Listen, man. She will cut you to pieces. Nikki Haley has a memory. She has a memory. She will remember who was with her and who was against her. And she won’t give a second chance to anyone who she thinks did her wrong.”
But the most telling quotation is the one Haley gave to Alberta herself: “I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust.”
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She grew up in the only Indian American family in a small working-class South Carolina town. The stories she tells about her girlhood are often about exclusion: being disqualified from a beauty pageant because it was set up to allow for only one Black and one white winner (though some locals dispute this); a fruit-stand vendor calling the cops because her father was a brown-skinned man wearing a turban. She once described her childhood as “survival mode.”
Today, many people think of Haley as part of the older Republican establishment, a political descendant of the Bushes and Mitt Romney who suddenly finds herself trying to thrive in a party dominated by Trumpian populists. This is not quite right. Haley entered politics as a Tea Party maverick. As Hanna Rosin noted in The Atlantic in 2011, the Tea Party was female-led, and most of its supporters were right-wing women who, among other things, wanted to take on the Republican old boys network. Women like Haley and Sarah Palin presented themselves as whistle-blowers, taking down corruption.
Haley ran her first campaign, for state legislature, against a 30-year Republican incumbent. What ensued was classic South Carolina politics. A mailer went out attacking her and referring to her by her birth name, Nimrata Randhawa. A whisper campaign suggested she was Buddhist or Hindu. (In fact, she is a Christian who attends a Methodist church). When she got to the legislature, she didn’t fit in with the old guard. “I’m telling you, nobody liked her. Nobody wanted to work with her. They hated her,” another state representative, who became a close friend, told Alberta.
Alberta captured this period of her career this way: “She came to be loathed by many of her fellow Republicans for not being a team player, for going rogue on certain votes and procedures that made them look slimy or stupid to her benefit.”
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In 2010, she was given little shot at winning the governor’s race until Palin visited the state to enthusiastically endorse her. Once again the rough rules of South Carolina politics prevailed. Two men surfaced at the height of the campaign, including a lobbyist who had worked for one of her rivals, claiming to have had affairs with her, while lacking evidence. A fellow lawmaker called her a “raghead.”
After his own political career imploded, Gov. Mark Sanford gave Haley a $400,000 donation at a crucial moment in the campaign. “And then she cut me off,” Sanford recalled to Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki: 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.”
As governor it was more of the same. She frequently went to war with lawmakers to get her agenda passed. “I have called out legislators from Year 1,” she once declared. “I go to their districts and call them out. I mean, it’s what I’m known for. I put their votes up on Facebook.” One of her great successes as governor was relentlessly lobbying corporations to build their plants in South Carolina. When she left office, the state had 400,000 more jobs than when she entered.
She brought the same pummeling manner to her job as U.N. ambassador. All U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations defend Israel, but Haley made it the centerpiece of her job. She waded into a famously anti-Israel institution with fists raised. She was one of the people who made the Trump administration so supportive of the Jewish state. When close allies like Britain and France voted for a resolution condemning the U.S. decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she did not invite their representatives to a U.S. Mission reception, which is practically war in U.N. terms.
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Seen through one lens, she is a ruthlessly ambitious person who is happy to bruise people to succeed. Seen from another perspective, she is a brave renegade who fights the old guard to get things done. Seen through a third lens, she is a needlessly competitive personality who makes enemies in profusion. All three viewpoints seem to contain a piece of the truth.
A few things need to be said to complicate this picture. First, though she knows how to play hardball, her heart has not been callused over. When nine parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston were gunned down by a white supremacist in 2015, she was vulnerable and grieving in public and private. She went to all of the funerals. Her friends worried she was losing a dangerous amount of weight. Mobilized by sadness and anger, she helped persuade more than two-thirds of both houses of the legislature to remove the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds, which was an astounding act of political craftsmanship and moral fortitude that even her detractors admire.
Second, if she’s often tough as nails, she has generally been tough as tulips about Donald Trump. As The Times’ Sharon LaFraniere has reported, she was not one of the Trump officials who would stand up to try to prevent him from carrying out his more crackpot ideas. “Every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later,” Trump told Vanity Fair in 2021, which is pretty accurate.
I wonder if Haley would be seen as tougher if she were a man. I also wonder if her toughness was forged by being a woman in a conservative, male-dominated state. Maya Angelou offered some wisdom on female toughness in her 1993 book, “Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now.” She wrote, “The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough. She must have convinced herself, or be in the unending process of convincing herself, that she, her values and her choices are important. In a time and world where males hold sway and control, the pressure upon women to yield their rights of way is tremendous. And it is under those very circumstances that the woman’s toughness must be in evidence.”
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By this measure, Haley has succeeded amazingly well. But then Angelou added a wrinkle: A woman “will need to prize her tenderness and be able to display it at appropriate times in order to prevent toughness from gaining total authority and to avoid becoming a mirror image of those men who value power above life, and control over love.”
There’s often been a wariness around Haley, people worrying she’s mostly about herself. Donald Trump, who really is all about himself, has somehow made himself into the much-beloved tribune of the working class in a way his opponents just haven’t.
The Republican Party has come a long way in the last few decades. The party is no longer in the mood for compassionate conservatism or even Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. Republicans feel besieged and want a bruiser type who will defend them. In their different ways, Trump and Haley are both products of and architects of the current G.O.P. vibe. Neither Trump nor Haley sits around reading Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Neither Trump nor Haley has what you would call fully developed philosophies. Neither is conventionally partisan; both made their bones attacking the G.O.P. establishment, not working their way up within it.
Mike Pence was too boring to match the party’s current mood. Tim Scott was too nice. Trump and the woman who is now his leading challenger are different versions of a bare-knuckled ethos, and if you look at their records, it’s pretty clear that Haley is actually more effectively tough than Trump. She’s confrontational in pursuit of policy, whereas he is confrontational in pursuit of ratings. She’s a doer; his attention span isn’t long enough to make him an effective executive. If Republicans want someone who will execute their agenda, they should go with her.
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Unfortunately, Haley’s support in the G.O.P. seems to have a low ceiling. This campaign is about toughness and finding someone who can defend a party that feels under siege, but it’s also about identity and class. Haley is surging, but she is surging mostly among college-educated voters. In general, Haley does better among more educated voters than less, slightly better among men than women, and she does poorly among evangelicals, which these days is as much a nationalist identity category as a religious one.
Trump also has an advantage that Haley can’t match. He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unpack. But it’s a bond no amount of Nikki Haley toughness can break.
*Guatemala’s New President Is Sworn In, Despite Efforts to Stop Him*
For hours, it was unclear whether Bernardo Arévalo, an anticorruption crusader, would take office at all, as lawmakers delayed the transfer of power.
Despite staunch resistance from his opponents in the government, the anticorruption crusader Bernardo Arévalo was inaugurated early Monday morning as Guatemala’s president, a turning point in a country where tensions have been simmering over widespread graft and impunity.
His inauguration had been scheduled for Sunday, but members of Congress delayed it, and concerns persisted about whether it would happen at all. But after an international outcry and pressure from protesters, Mr. Arévalo was sworn in shortly after midnight, becoming Guatemala’s most progressive head of state since democracy was re-established in the 1980s.
His rise to power — six months after his victory at the polls delivered a stunning rebuke to Guatemala’s conservative political establishment — amounts to a sea change in Central America’s most populous country. His landslide election reflected broad support for his proposals to curb graft and revive a teetering democracy.
But as Mr. Arévalo prepares to govern, he must assert control while facing off against an alliance of conservative prosecutors, members of Congress and other political figures who have gutted Guatemala’s governing institutions in recent years.
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“Arévalo has the most thankless job in Guatemala today because he arrives with exceptionally high expectations,” said Edgar Ortíz Romero, an expert on Guatemalan constitutional law. “He’s been given a budget for a Toyota when people want a Ferrari.”
Mr. Arévalo’s opponents in Congress moved to rein him in late last year, approving a budget that would severely limit his ability to spend on health care and education, two of his top priorities.
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A person with a white and blue paint on his face takes a photo of a person holding a flag and others look on.
Protesters outside Guatemala’s Congress on Sunday.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
But finding resources to spend is just one of the difficulties confronting Mr. Arévalo. More urgently, as his opponents in Congress showed again on Sunday, he faces multiple challenges from Guatemala’s entrenched establishment, aimed at quickly crippling his ability to govern.
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The power struggle playing out in Guatemala, a nation of 18 million, is being closely followed throughout Central America, a region on edge over the expanding sway of drug cartels, the exodus of migrants and the use of authoritarian tactics in neighboring countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua.
“This is a unique event in the country’s history,” said Javier García, a 31-year-old engineer, who was among the thousands who turned out to celebrate the inauguration in the capital, Guatemala City. “Now I hope those who lost the election understand this once and for all.”
The transition of power was anything but orderly. After he burst onto Guatemala’s political scene last year, Mr. Arévalo faced an assassination plot, his party’s suspension and a barrage of legal attacks aimed at preventing him from taking office. His opponent in the presidential race, a former first lady, refused to recognize his victory.
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In the capital, speculation swirled in recent days that prosecutors would seek the arrest of Mr. Arévalo’s running mate, Karin Herrera, potentially derailing the inauguration because both the president-elect and vice president-elect need to be present for the transfer of power to be legitimate.
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A man in a suit is surrounded by throngs of people holding flags as part of a street march.
Mr. Arévalo, a sociologist and former diplomat, won broad support for his proposals to curb corruption and revive Guatemala’s teetering democracy.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Guatemala’s highest court issued an order last week shielding Ms. Herrera from arrest, giving her and Mr. Arévalo a reprieve. But the same court sowed confusion on Sunday when it allowed his conservative opponents to remain in the running to retain control of Congress.
Members of Congress opposed to Mr. Arévalo then spent hours trying to consolidate their hold on the chamber, effectively delaying the transfer of power as much of the country remained on tenterhooks. But in a twist on Sunday night, Mr. Arévalo’s party managed to win leadership of Congress, clearing the way for the swearing-in.
Prosecutors and judges opposed to Mr. Arévalo had already gone on a judicial onslaught soon after the national election. Seeking to cast doubt on Mr. Arévalo’s victory at the polls, where he won by more than 20 percentage points, prosecutors obtained arrest warrants for four magistrates who served on Guatemala’s top electoral authority, alleging corruption in the acquisition of election software. The four magistrates were all outside the country when the warrants were issued.
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On Thursday, the attorney general’s office arrested Napoleón Barrientos, a former interior minister, on the grounds that he had refused to use force to maintain order in October against protesters demanding the attorney general’s resignation.
Such moves have grown common in Guatemala since 2019, when conservative political figures shut down a pioneering United Nations-backed anticorruption mission. Dozens of prosecutors and judges who had been trying to take on graft fled into exile.
Pushing back, the United States, the European Union and multiple leaders in Latin America threw their support behind Mr. Arévalo, a sociologist and former diplomat. That support was visible on Sunday as the delays seemed to put the transfer of power in doubt.
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People linger and chat inside the congressional chamber.
Members of Congress delayed the inauguration on Sunday.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
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“There is no question that Bernardo Arévalo is the president of Guatemala,” said Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, who led a U.S. delegation to the inauguration. She added, “The world is watching.”
The Biden administration maneuvered for months in support of Mr. Arévalo after he shocked many in Guatemala, including members of his party, by squeaking into a runoff election that he went on to resoundingly win.
Washington’s support for reform stands in contrast to the role it played in Guatemala decades ago. The United States backed the Guatemalan military during a long, brutal civil war; one military dictator during the 1980s was later convicted of genocide for trying to exterminate the Ixil, a Mayan Indian people. In 1954, the C.I.A. engineered a coup that toppled a popular, democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz.
After that coup, Mr. Arévalo’s father, Juan José Arévalo, a former president who is still admired in Guatemala for allowing freedom of speech and creating the social security system, spent years in exile around Latin America.
The younger Mr. Arévalo, a soft-spoken sociologist and diplomat, was born in Uruguay during that time and was raised in Venezuela, Mexico and Chile before the family could return to Guatemala.
As efforts intensified last month to prevent Mr. Arévalo from taking office, the United States imposed sanctions on Miguel Martínez, one of the closest allies of the departing president, Alejandro Giammattei, over widespread bribery schemes.
And in a pivotal move, the American authorities in December imposed visa restrictions on nearly 300 Guatemalans, including more than 100 members of Congress, accusing them of undermining democracy and the rule of law as they tried to weaken Mr. Arévalo and keep him from being inaugurated.
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Men and women sit in a waiting room centered by a large, flat-screen television.
Journalists waiting for the inauguration.Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
“The pressure from the United States has prevented a coup d’état; without that, we wouldn’t be here,” said Manfredo Marroquín, the head of Citizen Action, an anticorruption policy group. “The Americans are like insurance: there in times of crisis.”
Still, the U.S. support of Mr. Arévalo has revealed fissures in Guatemala. In his last weeks in office, Mr. Giammattei, who was barred by law from seeking re-election, grew increasingly vocal in his criticism of the American sanctions and the international support for Mr. Arévalo.
Dealing another blow to Mr. Arévalo, Mr. Giammattei withdrew Guatemala from an antidrug task force created in 2020 with the United States. That move could weaken Guatemala’s ability to combat drug trafficking groups, which have been expanding their sway around the country.
At the same time, Mr. Arévalo’s efforts to forge alliances have revealed how challenging it will be for him to govern. This month, he announced the first Guatemalan cabinet in which women would account for half of all ministerial posts, but the celebration of that milestone was short-lived.
A member of a major business association was named to the new cabinet, prompting calls that Mr. Arévalo, who has hewed to centrist policies, was drifting to the right. Another cabinet nominee withdrew after old comments surfaced in which she criticized a prominent Indigenous activist.
Indignation also arose because only one minister in his cabinet was Indigenous, despite the crucial role that Indigenous groups played in protesting against the efforts to keep Mr. Arévalo from taking office. Nearly half of Guatemala’s population is Indigenous.
“There is an expectation that this new government will be different,” said Sandra Xinico, an anthropologist and Indigenous activist. “But we’ve seen once again how Indigenous peoples are excluded from the political process.”
*Taiwan Loses Ally to China After Electing President Loathed by Beijing*
The tiny Pacific island of Nauru severed relations with Taiwan, a move that boosts China’s regional sway and was seemingly timed to Taiwan’s contentious recent election.
Just two days after Taiwan elected as its next leader Lai Ching-te, whom Beijing sees as a staunch separatist, it lost a diplomatic ally in its rivalry with China. Nauru, a tiny freckle of land in the Pacific Ocean, announced that it would be severing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, effective immediately.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it welcomed the decision by Nauru and is ready to establish relations with it. Taiwan’s foreign ministry indicated that it had no doubt that Beijing had orchestrated the Pacific island’s shift, stating that “China has been actively courting Nauru’s political leaders for a long time, and using economic inducements to bring about a change of direction in the country’s diplomacy.”
A Taiwanese deputy foreign minister, Tien Chung-kwang, told a briefing in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, that China had orchestrated Nauru’s severing of relations to happen in the immediate wake of Taiwan’s election on the weekend.
“The intent is to strike a blow against the democracy and freedom of which the Taiwanese people are so proud,” Mr. Tien said. He said Taiwan had pre-emptively severed relations with Nauru after learning of its impending shift in loyalties.
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Such moves from Beijing have been widely expected in Taiwan in the wake of the victory for Mr. Lai, whose Democratic Progressive Party has campaigned on policies to distance the self-governing island democracy from China. Beijing claims Taiwan is its territory, and Chinese officials harbor a particular dislike for Mr. Lai, whom they call a pro-independence threat. Mr. Lai has said he wants to protect Taiwan’s current status as a de facto independent democracy.
Nauru is the latest small nations to abruptly break relations with Taiwan, joining such countries as Honduras and Nicaragua in switching diplomatic allegiance to China. And it is one of a growing number of Pacific island nations that China has aggressively courted in its bid to dominate the region.
In a statement accompanied by a national address that was broadcast on radio and television, President David Adeang of Nauru announced that the country would no longer recognize Taiwan as a nation in its own right, “but rather as an inalienable part of China’s territory, and will sever ‘diplomatic relations’ with Taiwan as of this day.”
He added: “This change is in no way intended to affect our existing warm relationships with other countries.”
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The move leaves Taiwan, a de facto independent democracy, with just 12 diplomatic relationships, mostly with smaller nations such as Eswatini, Guatemala, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Paraguay. At the start of 2017, it had ties with 21 states.
Voters in Taiwan on Saturday once again handed the presidency to the Democratic Progressive Party. Mr. Lai, its candidate and the country’s current vice president, pledged his commitment to defending Taiwan’s identity — including from Beijing’s ever-louder saber rattling. The Chinese Communist Party had repeatedly stressed that a vote for the Democratic Progressive Party was a vote for war.
“Between democracy and authoritarianism, we choose to stand on the side of democracy,” Mr. Lai said at the time. “This is what this election campaign means to the world.”
Rumors of Nauru shifting diplomatic ties had been swirling for some time, said Anna Powles, a senior lecturer in security studies at Massey University in New Zealand.
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“The timing is not a coincidence,” she said. “The announcement was orchestrated in such a way as to undermine Taiwan and to demonstrate that China has been successful in dismantling Taiwan’s network of allies in the Pacific.”
As a nation with around 13,000 citizens and a gross domestic product of just $133.2 million a year, Nauru is nonetheless valuable to Beijing for its location, its support of deep sea mining and its vote at the United Nations.
“China is increasingly seeking to shape the international narrative, with respect to its activities in Xinjiang, in Hong Kong and in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits,” Dr. Powles said. “So this is where Nauru would be an effective ally.”
China’s move to lure away one of Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic partners exposed a weakness in the island’s political system, said Kuo Yu-jen, a political science professor at National Sun Yat-sen University in southern Taiwan. Mr. Lai will not assume the presidency until May, giving China plenty of time to pressure the incoming administration.
“China can exploit this transition period between Taiwanese administrations to deliver vigorous blows against Taiwan — diplomatically, militarily and economically,” Professor Kuo said.
JOSE UREÑA. 24 HORAS
No puede pasar desapercibida la concentración de diez mil personas en Álvaro Obregón por Javier López Casarín, aspirante a alcalde.
Reunió a tirios y troyanos morenistas, desde Claudia Sheinbaum hasta Omar García Harfuch, quien fue abandonado por el dedazo presidencial pese a liderar encuestas para la capital.
_*”VIDA,VERDAD Y LIBERTAD”*_
Este es el discurso completo de Xóchitl Gálvez en el cierre de su precampaña en la Arena CDMX.
Los que estuvimos ahí podemos confirmar que fue algo MUY emocionante.
Aquí nomás, haciendo historia.
Por favor, date el tiempo de verlo con atención. Es el eje de su propuesta y nuestro estandarte de lucha, porque es una lucha:
Dictadura o democracia.
Elijamos una propuesta que busca proteger la vida, la verdad y la libertad.
¿Luchar o claudicar? Verdad que no hay opción…
*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*
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Mexico Today USA 