Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck

But Bloomberg’s early moves also signaled he would be approaching the campaign in an unconventional manner: In an acknowledgment of his own late start in the race, Bloomberg and his advisers have decided he would pursue a risky strategy of skipping all four traditional early-state contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, and focus instead on big states that hold primaries soon afterward.

Bloomberg, who flirted with running for president in 2008 and 2016 and early this year but had never taken a formal step to do so, filed paperwork and qualified for the Alabama primary Friday afternoon. The Deep South state has the earliest primary filing deadline in the country, effectively forcing Bloomberg to put his name into contention this week.

While Bloomberg has not made a final decision to run, his allies say he intends to enter the campaign. His consideration of a 2020 bid reflects the fluidity of the race and the angst among many leading Democrats about whether Biden is strong enough to win the nomination as a centrist standard-bearer.

Bloomberg’s moves have already rippled through an unsettled Democratic field. While polls show that most Democratic voters are content with their current array of candidates, there are significant pockets of unease, most of all among politically moderate donors and leaders of the party establishment who are concerned about Biden’s prospects in the primary and fear that Warren and Sanders are too liberal for the general election.

On Friday, Bloomberg’s camp began to lay out in public a theory of how he might win the nomination: Advisers said he intended to stake his candidacy on big, delegate-rich primary states like California and Texas, where Bloomberg’s personal fortune could be put to extensive use.

Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, criticized Bloomberg for spurning the circuit of early states that he said “makes candidates and their campaigns better prepared for a general election fight.”

Bloomberg’s advisers are preparing to meet several other upcoming filing deadlines, including in Arkansas. It was not clear Friday night if Bloomberg still planned to file paperwork by next Friday to qualify for the New Hampshire primary, as he originally intended.

Bloomberg, 77, was elected mayor of New York City three times on the Republican ticket.

This article originally appeared in

Testing the Waters, Bloomberg Ripples an Uneasy Democratic Pool

Michael Bloomberg disrupted the Democratic presidential field Friday as he took his first steps into the 2020 race, unnerving supporters of Vice President Joe Biden and prompting Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to accuse Bloomberg of seeking to buy the presidency.

Bloomberg qualified for the Alabama primary Friday afternoon, according to the Alabama Democratic Party. The Deep South state has the earliest deadline in the country, Nov. 8, for candidates to qualify for the primary ballot, effectively forcing Bloomberg to put his name into contention this week if he did not want to get shut out of the ballot.

While Bloomberg has not made a final decision to run, his allies say he intends to enter the race, and his early moves have rippled through the Democratic field. It has raised alarm among supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is the leading centrist in the race, and prompted accusations from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders that Bloomberg is going to try to buy the presidency with his personal wealth.

Bloomberg has decided that if he seeks the Democratic nomination, he would stake his candidacy on big, delegate-rich states like California and Texas, which vote somewhat later in the calendar, rather than trying to catch up with his rivals in the circuit of traditional early states.

Should Bloomberg proceed with such a campaign, he would be attempting to take a high-risk route to the Democratic nomination unprecedented in modern presidential politics — one that shuns the town hall meetings and door-to-door campaigning that characterizes states like Iowa and New Hampshire and relies instead on a sustained and costly campaign of paid advertising and canvassing on a grand scale.

Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Bloomberg, cited the other candidates’ head start in a statement confirming Bloomberg intended to mount his campaign from the outset in an unconventional array of states.

The plan to skip campaigning in early voting states drew a negative reaction Friday night from the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, Ray Buckley.

“We are disappointed and frankly very surprised that any candidate would launch a campaign for the White House where their path doesn’t run through New Hampshire or any of the other early states,” Buckley said.

Bloomberg, 77, was elected mayor of New York City as a Republican and became a Democrat only last year.

Bloomberg has seriously explored running for president at least three times but in every case he opted against mounting a campaign.

Bloomberg Files Paperwork for 2020 Presidential Primary

Michael Bloomberg moved forward Friday with plans to enter the 2020 presidential race, filing papers to become a candidate in the Alabama Democratic primary and further disrupting the race by embracing a risky campaign strategy that would involve bypassing early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

But Bloomberg’s early moves also signaled he would be approaching the campaign in an unconventional manner: In a dramatic acknowledgment of his own late start in the race, Bloomberg and his advisers have decided that he would pursue a risky strategy of skipping all four traditional early-state contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, and focus instead on big states that hold primaries soon afterward.

Bloomberg, who flirted with running for president in 2008 and 2016 and early this year but had never taken a formal step to do so, filed paperwork and qualified for the Alabama primary Friday afternoon. The Deep South state has the earliest primary filing deadline in the country, effectively forcing Bloomberg to put his name into contention this week if he did not want to get shut out of the ballot.

While Bloomberg has not made a final decision to run, his allies say he intends to enter the campaign. His consideration of a 2020 bid reflects the fluidity of the race and the angst among many leading Democrats about whether Biden is strong enough to win the nomination as a centrist standard-bearer. Bloomberg is also acting on his own long-standing ambition to be president: At 77, he is unlikely to have another chance to run if he does not attempt a campaign now.

But Bloomberg will have to overcome considerable doubts across the Democratic Party about his own ability to win the nomination and prove that he is more than a niche candidate for moderate elites.

On Friday, Bloomberg’s camp began to lay out in public a theory of how he might win the nomination: Advisers said he intended to stake his candidacy on big, delegate-rich primary states like California and Texas, where Bloomberg’s immense personal fortune could be put to extensive use.

Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Bloomberg, said in a statement that Bloomberg would not contest the early states where other candidates have been competing for months, and would mount his candidacy in a different array of states from the outset.

“If we run, we are confident we can win in states voting on Super Tuesday and beyond, where we will start on an even footing,” Wolfson said. “But the late timing of our entry means that many candidates already have a big head start in the four early states, where they’ve spent months and months campaigning and spending money. We have enormous respect for the Democratic primary process and many friends in those states, but our plan is to run a broad-based, national campaign.”

Should Bloomberg proceed with such a campaign, he would be attempting to take a high-risk route to the Democratic nomination that has never succeeded in modern politics — one that shuns the town hall meetings and door-to-door campaigning that characterize states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and relies instead on a sustained and costly campaign of paid advertising and canvassing on a grand scale.

That approach would amount to a high-risk bet that no other candidate emerges from that early-state circuit with the kind of momentum that could overwhelm whatever operation Bloomberg has built in the Super Tuesday states that vote in early March. It is sure to alienate Democratic Party leaders and stalwarts in the early states, several of which are key battlegrounds in the general election, and intensify complaints from Bloomberg’s opponents about his reliance on personal wealth.

The plan to skip campaigning in early voting states drew a sharply negative reaction Friday night from the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, Ray Buckley.

Troy Price, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, criticized Bloomberg for spurning the circuit of early states that he said “makes candidates and their campaigns better prepared for a general election fight.” Iowa voters, he said, “kick the tires and ask the hard questions.”

Many of the details of Bloomberg’s plans appeared to be coming together at the last minute. Even some of his longtime allies said they had been blindsided by Bloomberg’s sudden move to enter the race, and his advisers were reaching out to assemble staff for a presidential campaign even as Bloomberg was entering his final deliberations.

Michael Nutter, the former mayor of Philadelphia who has long been close to Bloomberg, said word of Bloomberg’s intentions had taken him by surprise Thursday night. He said he had spoken to Bloomberg’s camp and come away convinced that Bloomberg was “serious about running.”

Nutter, who has been supporting Biden, said he had not yet thought through the implications of Bloomberg’s entry for his own involvement in the race.

“I think all the other candidates will take him seriously,” Nutter said.

Biden, who appeared to have the most to lose from the sudden entry of a prominent centrist with unlimited financial resources, spoke guardedly to reporters in New Hampshire about that possibility Friday. He called Bloomberg an “honorable guy” and deflected a reporter’s question about whether Bloomberg, who was elected mayor of New York City as a Republican and became a Democrat only last year, could be considered an authentic member of the party.

“Michael’s a solid guy, and let’s see where it goes. I have no, no problem with him getting in the race,” Biden said in New Hampshire, adding, “Last polls I looked at, I’m pretty far ahead.”

Advisers to Biden have argued in private that Bloomberg should not be overestimated as a threat to the former vice president because he may struggle to appeal to the African American voters and working-class whites who make up most of Biden’s political base.

Bloomberg, who is one of the country’s richest men, has his own vulnerabilities, such as his support for stop-and-frisk policing and charter schools, and his opposition to liberal economic policies that involve taxing large private fortunes and breaking up banks and other big corporations.

President Donald Trump, for his part, did not sound concerned about Bloomberg on Friday morning. Trump noted that Bloomberg would spend a lot of money on a campaign and predicted he would damage Biden in the process. Speaking in the terms of derision he usually applies to political rivals, Trump said without elaborating that Bloomberg had “personal problems” and applied a derisive nickname.

“There’s nobody I’d rather run against than little Michael,” Trump said.

Warren and Sanders have already begun to take on Bloomberg more assertively, both emailing their supporters to warn that a prominent billionaire was seeking to — as they put it — buy the presidency. “The billionaire class is scared and they should be scared,” Sanders tweeted Thursday evening, without mentioning Bloomberg by name.

Campaigning in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday, Warren avoided attacking Bloomberg directly but told reporters that a candidacy funded from personal wealth would not produce “a government that works for the people.”

“I don’t think that big money ought to be able to buy our elections, and that’s true whether we’re talking about billionaires or corporate executives that fund PACs or big lobbyists,” Warren said.

Bloomberg initially decided last winter that he would not challenge Trump in 2020, in large part because he concluded he could not win the Democratic nomination with Biden in the race, as a formidable standard-bearer for the party’s moderate wing. But Biden’s struggles in recent months have given Bloomberg new optimism that there is space for him in the campaign.

There is considerable skepticism among the leading Democratic candidates about Bloomberg’s path forward in a 2020 primary. A centrist business mogul in his eighth decade, he would be seeking to lead a party focused on questions of economic inequality, cultural diversity and generational change. (The 2020 field already has several candidates in their 70s: Sanders is 78, Biden is 76, Trump is 73, and Warren is 70.)

But unlike the rest, Bloomberg has never run a political campaign outside New York City, and he has neither a sweeping progressive platform, like Warren and Sanders, nor a famous friendship with the first black president, like Biden, to excite the Democratic base.

A political nomad with respect to party affiliation, Bloomberg was elected mayor three times on the Republican ticket before he registered as a Democrat during the midterm elections and spent more than $100 million to help the party take control of the House of Representatives.

Former Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a moderate who has endorsed Biden, said he believed Bloomberg had the potential to cut into Biden’s electoral coalition.

“I very much would like to see Joe Biden be president, but if Mike Bloomberg was the nominee of the Democratic Party, would I be disappointed?” Kerrey said. “Not in the slightest.”

Other supporters of Biden were more dismissive.

“There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of him getting the nomination,” said John Morgan, a Florida trial lawyer who is raising money for Biden. “He’s a Republican billionaire.”

Testing Waters, Bloomberg Ripples Uneasy Pool

More than ever, it was clear that last weekend’s massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, had put Trump on the defensive and added fierce new urgency to Democratic efforts to engineer his ouster. Trump has not accounted for the echoes of his own rhetoric about immigrants and minorities in the manifesto composed by the anti-immigrant gunman in Texas, and he has appeared far more focused on feuding with his critics than on striking a tone of healing.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, in one of the most fiery speeches of his campaign so far, argued Wednesday that Trump had both explicitly and implicitly “fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation” with his language.

“Trump readily, eagerly attacks Islamic terrorism but can barely bring himself to use the words ‘white supremacy,’” Biden said in Burlington, Iowa. “And even when he says it, he doesn’t appear to believe it. He seems more concerned about losing their votes than beating back this hateful ideology.”

Speaking in Charleston at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where a white supremacist gunman killed nine black worshippers in 2015, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey also blamed Trump for encouraging hatred. The weekend’s violence, he said, was “sowed by those who spoke the same words the El Paso murderer did, warning of an ‘invasion,’” a word Trump has used to describe migrants approaching the Southern border.

And in El Paso, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who hails from the city, criticized the president shortly before his visit. “We live in a country where we have a president who demonizes communities like this one, who vilifies immigrants, who says that those from Mexico are rapists and criminals, and warns of invasions and infestations,” he said. O’Rourke also told MSNBC that he believed Trump was a white supremacist.

Trump has emphatically denied that he is racist, and on Wednesday, he dismissed reporters’ questions about the role of his rhetoric in dividing the country, saying his language “brings people together.”

The extraordinary focus this week on white nationalism, gun violence and domestic terror appeared to reframe a chaotic presidential campaign as a searing moral debate about the racial history and cultural destiny of the United States. Trump, who rose to power railing against the country’s changing ethnic and cultural texture, contends that Democrats should be punished for opposing his immigration policies and rejecting the values of the rural white people who make up his base.

Democrats, meanwhile, are now arguing in the most explicit terms yet that white supremacists are receiving aid and comfort from the president. Where Democrats differ, it is largely over whether Trump is the country’s chief affliction, or a symptom of deeper woes.

But if the starkest contrast this week has been between Trump and those vying to unseat him, the speeches Wednesday by several Democratic candidates also exposed important gradations in their worldviews. Booker spoke at considerable length on racism as an American heritage, while Biden discussed dark episodes from the past but leaned more heavily on nostalgia and triumphalism.

In Iowa, Biden acknowledged that American history was no “fairy-tale.” “I wish I could say that this all began with Donald Trump and will end with him,” he said. “But it didn’t and I won’t.”

But Biden also assailed Trump as representing a wild departure from the American political tradition, blaming him for stoking hatred and abandoning the unifying role past presidents have sought to play. He contrasted Trump’s ambivalent response to racism and tragedy with the conduct of his predecessors, including Bill Clinton’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and George W. Bush’s visit to a mosque after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a biting one-liner that has become a regular jab on the campaign trail, Biden said that Trump had “more in common with George Wallace than he does with George Washington.”

Speaking from the pulpit at the church known as Mother Emanuel, one floor above the room where the 2015 massacre took place, Booker eschewed that kind of nostalgia for the Founding Fathers in his own speech against violent racism.

Booker said instead that white supremacy had been “ingrained in our politics since our founding,” within the text of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The present moment, he said, demanded both federal action to regulate guns and investigate white nationalists and a cleareyed confrontation of the past.

“Racist violence has always been part of the American story, never more so than in times of transition and times of rapid social change,” Booker said, linking the trauma of the last week to slavery and segregation, and “demagogues throughout generations who stoked racist and anti-immigrant hatred, often for votes, and then enshrined their bigotry into laws.”

Booker neither mentioned Trump by name, nor did he cast the president as an aberrational figure in American history, as Biden did. Instead, he urged a broad moral reckoning over racism and departed from his prepared remarks to call, in an echo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for the rise of a “generation that truly will be free at last.”

“There is no neutrality in this fight,” he said. “You are either an agent of justice or you are contributing to the problem.”

The speech by Booker, one of two leading black candidates for the Democratic nomination, had the potential to be one of the most important moments of his campaign, testing his power as a voice of moral clarity and racial justice after a week of national pain.

He has lagged in the polls, insisting on a message of healing that has at times clashed with his party’s prevailing mood of hot indignation. But after months of toiling away in relative obscurity he had a standout performance in the second round of Democratic debates last week, besting Biden in a series of exchanges on race and criminal justice and displaying for a national audience the kind of sunny pugilism that has made him a force in New Jersey and in the Senate.

Few venues for Booker’s message could have been as laden with symbolism as the one he chose. A funeral for the victims of the massacre, by a gunman who has since been sentenced to die, became the site of one of the most memorable moments of former President Barack Obama’s time in office. During the ceremony, he broke into a rendition of “Amazing Grace” and called both for the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol building and a remedy to “the mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation.”

Booker earned applause and murmurs of appreciation throughout his speech, including with a prominent quotation from “our beloved Toni Morrison,” the Nobel laureate who died this week. Borrowing her words, Booker said: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

Deirdre McClain, who watched Booker speak from the pews, said she found his remarks moving and persuasive, including his recitation of the names of the nine people murdered in the church.

“I was surprised at how he made the past come to the present, how he knew the names of those who had passed in this very church and that he connected it to freedom,” said McClain, 53. “That resonated with me.”

McClain said Booker was among several candidates she was considering in the presidential race, along with Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Biden.

Biden leads in national polls and maintains a strong advantage with African-Americans, most importantly in South Carolina, the first Southern state to cast its votes for the nomination. Biden has spent much of the summer relitigating his decadeslong record, but he is often at his strongest when casting the race as a choice between himself and Trump.

Biden and Booker have had plenty of company in their condemnations of Trump this week. The candidates have been all but unanimous in their descriptions of the president as a racist or as bearing some personal responsibility for the violence in El Paso.

Trump has long attacked Latin American migrants as dangerous criminals and his campaign has run thousands of digital advertisements describing illegal immigration as an invasion. He has spent much of the summer insulting prominent black and Hispanic Democrats, deriding the predominantly black city of Baltimore and addressing a rally where his supporters engaged in a chant of “send her back” directed at a Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is a naturalized citizen who came to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia.

Though Trump denounced white supremacy in his speech from the White House on Monday morning, he has continued to batter his political rivals in divisive terms, railing on Twitter against O’Rourke, who has described Trump this week as an obvious racist. Trump mocked O’Rourke for taking “Beto” as a nickname — his birth name is Robert — tweeting that it was a “phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage.”

Speaking Wednesday at an El Paso park, O’Rourke praised his hometown as a safe, beautiful and welcoming place made stronger by its binationalism and the immigrants and asylum-seekers who live there.

“Though we bore the brunt of this hatred and this racism and this intolerance and this violence, I believe this community also holds the answer,” he said. “The way that we welcome one another and see our differences — not as disqualifying or dangerous, but as a very source of our strength, as a foundation of our success — that needs to be the example to the United States of America today.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/politics/cory-booker-speech-mother-emanuel.html" id="f44d1207-572d-3e4c-ab68-988d9792b8f1">The New York Times</a>.

Democratic Candidates Say President Is Fostering Hatred, Not Fighting It

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Democratic presidential candidates lashed President Donald Trump on Wednesday with their sternest denunciations yet of his exploitation of racism for political purposes and resistance to gun control, in a day of biting criticism that also highlighted differences between Democrats over how best to understand the recent rise of hate crimes in America.

More than ever, it was clear that last weekend’s massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, had put Trump on the defensive and added fierce new urgency to Democratic efforts to engineer his ouster. Trump has not accounted for the echoes of his own rhetoric about immigrants and minorities in the manifesto composed by the anti-immigrant gunman in Texas, and on Wednesday morning he appeared far more focused on feuding with his critics in the Democratic Party and the media than on striking a tone of healing.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, in one of the most fiery speeches of his campaign so far, argued that Trump had “fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation” with both explicit and implicit language as president.

“Trump readily, eagerly attacks Islamic terrorism but can barely bring himself to use the words ‘white supremacy,’” Biden said Wednesday afternoon in Burlington, Iowa. “And even when he says it, he doesn’t appear to believe it. He seems more concerned about losing their votes than beating back this hateful ideology.”

Speaking in Charleston, South Carolina, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where a white supremacist gunman killed nine black worshippers in 2015, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey also blamed Trump for encouraging hatred. The weekend’s violence, he said, was “sowed by those who spoke the same words the El Paso murderer did, warning of an ‘invasion,’” a word Trump has used to describe migrants approaching the Southern border.

For both Trump and his Democratic challengers, the extraordinary focus this week on white nationalism, gun violence and domestic terror appeared to reframe a chaotic presidential campaign — at least temporarily — as a searing moral debate about the racial history and cultural destiny of the United States.

Trump, who rose to power railing against the country’s changing ethnic and cultural texture, contends that Democrats should be punished for opposing his immigration policies and rejecting the values of the rural white people who make up his political base. Democrats, meanwhile, are now arguing in the most explicit terms yet that white supremacists are receiving aid and comfort from the president of the United States.

“His low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week I don’t believe fooled anyone, at home or abroad,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s remarks Monday about the El Paso shooting.

There is virtually no disagreement among the Democratic candidates about Trump’s character, or his culpability in what they see as a still-unfurling disaster of race relations and social cohesion. Where they differ, it is largely over whether Trump is the country’s chief affliction, or a symptom of deeper woes.

But if the starkest contrast this week has been between Trump and those vying to unseat him, the speeches on Wednesday by several Democratic candidates also exposed important gradations in their worldviews. Booker spoke at considerable length on racism as an American heritage, while Biden acknowledged dark episodes from the past but leaned more heavily on nostalgia and triumphalism. Booker neither mentioned Trump by name, nor did he cast the president as an aberrational figure in American history, as Biden did.

In Iowa, Biden acknowledged that American history is “not a fairy tale.” “I wish I could say that this all began with Donald Trump and will end with him,” he said. “But it didn’t and I won’t.” But he also assailed Trump as representing a wild departure from the American political tradition, blaming him for stoking hatred and abandoning the unifying role past presidents have sought to play.

Insistently branding Trump as a figure who offends the nation’s political values, Biden contrasted the president’s ambivalent response to racism and tragedy with the conduct of his predecessors — Bill Clinton’s soothing response to the 1995 bombing at a federal building in Oklahoma City, for instance, and George W. Bush’s visit to a mosque after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a biting one-liner that has become a regular jab on the campaign trail, Biden said to applause that Trump had “more in common with George Wallace than he does with George Washington.”

He said instead that white supremacy had been “ingrained in our politics since our founding,” within the text of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The present moment, he said, demanded both federal action to regulate guns and investigate white nationalists, as well as a clear-eyed confrontation with the American past.

“Racist violence has always been part of the American story, never more so than in times of transition and times of rapid social change,” Booker said, linking the trauma of the last week to the roots of slavery and segregation, and “demagogues throughout generations who stoked racist and anti-immigrant hatred, often for votes, and then enshrined their bigotry into laws.”

Booker urged a broad moral reckoning over racism and departed from his prepared remarks to call, in an echo of Martin Luther King Jr., for the rise of a “generation that truly will be free at last.”

The speech by Booker, one of two leading black candidates for the Democratic nomination, had the potential to be one of the most important moments of his campaign, testing his power as a voice of moral clarity and racial justice in a crowded race that has largely focused so far on debates about economic inequality. He has been lagging in the polls, insisting on a message of national healing that has at times clashed with his party’s prevailing mood of hot indignation.

Few venues for Booker’s message could have been as laden with symbolism as the one he chose. A funeral for the victims of the massacre, by a gunman who has since been sentenced to die for his crimes, became the site of one of the most memorable moments of former President Barack Obama’s time in office. During the ceremony, he broke into a rendition of “Amazing Grace” and called both for the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol building and for a remedy to “the mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation.”

There may have been some political risk involved for Booker in delivering his speech from a place so freighted with history. Some Democrats believe he has suffered in the 2020 campaign, fairly or not, from voters’ instinct to measure him in their minds against the example of Obama.

But this week of national pain has developed into a vitally important one for Booker, who after months of toiling away in relative obscurity has begun to show signs of breaking through. He had a standout performance in the second round of Democratic debates last week, besting Biden in a series of exchanges on race and criminal justice and displaying for a national audience the kind of sunny pugilism that has made him a force in New Jersey and in the Senate.

Booker earned several bursts of applause and murmurs of appreciation throughout his speech in Charleston, including with a prominent quotation from “our beloved Toni Morrison,” the Nobel laureate who died this week. Borrowing her words, before a modest audience of six or seven dozen people clustered at the front of the church, Booker said: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

Deirdre McClain, who watched Booker speak from the pews Wednesday morning, said she found his remarks moving and persuasive in their linkage of the American past with the bloodshed of the present, including with his invocation of Morrison and a recitation of the names of the nine people murdered in the church four years ago.

“I was surprised at how he made the past come to the present, how he knew the names of those who had passed in this very church and that he connected it to freedom,” said McClain, 53, a database administrator. “That resonated with me.”

Biden continues to hold the lead in national polls and has maintained a strong advantage with African Americans, most importantly in South Carolina, the first Southern state to cast its votes for the Democratic nomination. Biden has spent much of the summer relitigating his decades-long record, but he is often at his strongest when casting the race as a choice between himself and Trump, something he sought to do in his speech in Iowa.

Trump has done little to blunt criticism from Democrats and even some conservatives since the weekend. On Monday morning, he delivered a statement from the White House deploring the violence and denouncing white supremacy. But he has also continued to batter his political rivals in divisive terms, railing on Twitter on Wednesday morning against former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who hails from El Paso and has described Trump this week as an obvious racist. Trump mocked O’Rourke for taking “Beto” as a nickname — his birth name is Robert — tweeting that it was a “phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage.”

Trump has long attacked Latin American migrants as dangerous criminals and his campaign has run thousands of digital advertisements describing illegal immigration as an invasion. The president has spent much of the last month insulting prominent black and Hispanic Democrats on Twitter, deriding the predominantly black city of Baltimore and addressing a rally where his supporters engaged in a chant of “send her back” directed at a Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who is a naturalized citizen who came to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia.

Biden and Booker have had plenty of company in their condemnations of Trump this week. The Democratic presidential candidates have been all but unanimous in their descriptions of the president as a racist or as bearing some personal responsibility for the violence in El Paso.

Several candidates, including Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington state, have unveiled new policy proposals for addressing white nationalist extremism. Others, like Harris and Warren, have been trumpeting pledges they have made in the past to crack down on dangerous firearms and take on the gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association.

2020 Democrats Say Trump Is Fostering Hatred, Not Fighting It

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Democratic presidential candidates lashed President Donald Trump on Wednesday with their sternest denunciations yet of his exploitation of racism for political purposes and his resistance to gun control, in a day of biting criticism that also highlighted differences between Democrats over how best to understand the recent rise of hate crimes in America.

The two candidates have seemed to be on a collision course for much of the last few months: Biden as the Democratic front-runner and de facto leader of the party’s moderate wing, with a steady but hardly dominant lead in polls, and Warren as his rising challenger, slowly trimming his lead and perhaps surpassing Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont as the focal point of progressive energy in the race.

Despite some pre-debate chest-thumping by Biden’s camp, no great clash occurred in Thursday’s debate in Houston, the first time he and Warren have been onstage together during the primary.

It is almost inevitable that the race will grow more combative, and in the wake of the debate there were signs that some of the leading candidates were ready for conflict. Biden, who only challenged Warren in a single exchange on health care Thursday, delivered a veiled swipe at her policy-heavy campaign at a fundraiser on Friday, saying that the country needed not just plans but also “someone who can execute a plan.” And Sanders sought to reignite his own clash with Biden, releasing a statement from his campaign manager that accused Biden of “echoing the deceptions and falsehoods of the health care industry.”

Warren, for her part, ignored the back-and-forth, seemingly content with a debate performance that her campaign said had presented her “like a president.”

Supporters of Biden claimed encouragement from what they called the best of his three debates, but his tendency to garble his words, and his dated instincts on sensitive matters of culture and race, are sure to be tested even more strenuously in the coming months.

Warren, the Massachusetts senator, and Sanders are plainly unintimidated by Biden’s lead in the polls. While he has a solid electoral base, made up chiefly of moderates, older voters and African Americans, he has not gained new support since he entered the race, and now appears vulnerable to defeat in at least three of the four early primary and caucus states — Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

“The question is, who is trying to play a long game, against Biden and for the nomination,” said Dan Sena, a strategist who helped oversee the Democratic takeover of the House last year.

Sena, who is now advising Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, a presidential candidate who failed to qualify for the Houston debate, suggested that Warren appeared satisfied with pursuing her own gradual and disciplined strategy.

“My suspicion,” he said, “is that the Warren campaign in particular is looking at a much, much longer runway.”

Among Warren’s goals in the near term are to consolidate her backing from liberals and expand her appeal to lower-income voters and minorities. Attacking Biden might not serve either goal. In the debate, Warren spent far more time highlighting her upbringing in a working-class Oklahoma family than engaging on any level with Biden. She must also still navigate the enduring presence of Sanders on the left.

And Biden may have more immediate challenges. On Thursday night, he repeatedly expressed himself imprecisely — saying at one point that no nonviolent criminals should be in jail, when he meant to refer only to nonviolent drug offenders. He also referred to himself as the vice president of the United States, without appending the modifier “former.”

In a moment that drew criticism after the debate, Biden responded to a question about the legacy of slavery with a meandering answer that wound up involving a recommendation to place social workers in the homes of parents who “don’t quite know what to do.” Those parents, he suggested, might do well to “make sure you have the record player on at night” so that young children grow up hearing more words — a suggestion he has made more broadly at other times, though he does not typically allude to that particular technology.

Biden’s obvious unsteadiness at certain moments opened the way for other candidates to question his strength as a challenger to President Donald Trump. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, appearing on CNN after the debate, noted that Biden “tends to go on sometimes,” and depicted him as out of touch.

“At one point, he’s talking about people in communities like mine listening to record players — I don’t remember the last time I saw a record player,” Booker said, adding, “There are definitely moments when you’re listening to Joe Biden and you just wonder.”

Biden and his campaign surrogates have taken umbrage at suggestions that he has slipped in his political acuity, and on Friday they pushed back particularly hard on Julián Castro, the former federal housing secretary, for having bitingly questioned Biden’s recall of his own policies in the debate. Castro, who is polling near the bottom of the field, was the only candidate to attack Biden in such strong terms, drawing backlash that illustrated why other candidates had shunned that approach.

Asked by a reporter Friday whether he would release his medical records to address “concerns,” Biden, 76, said he would do so before votes are cast.

“What the hell concerns, man, you want to wrestle?” he said lightheartedly. He continued, “When I get the next physical. Look, I’ll release my — before there’s a first vote, that’s — I’ll release my medical records. There’s no, I mean there’s no reason for me not to release my medical records.’’

In Biden’s camp, there is a persistent sense that his rivals and the news media are underestimating him and giving him too little credit for the blocs of support he has already claimed. Whatever the flaws in Biden’s performance in Houston, there was no exchange in which an opponent obviously routed him, as Sen. Kamala Harris of California did in the first debate and Booker did in the second.

He has faced many controversies throughout the campaign, his allies note, and he is still in the lead — a reflection, they argue, of the good will he enjoys from rank-and-file Democrats who feel that they already know him and who see him as best positioned to defeat Trump.

Still, Biden may have exposed his anxieties about Warren in the one debate exchange that pitted him against her. He used his very first answer of the night to chide Warren for calling for the replacement of the Affordable Care Act with a “Medicare for All”-style system. Warren declined to swipe back; instead, she praised the ACA but said it could be improved upon.

Biden never went after Warren again. It was a more restrained performance than what several of his campaign surrogates had seemed to forecast, suggesting that he would question the pragmatism of Warren’s policies.

Instead, the differences that emerged between Biden and Warren arose largely by implication: the side-by-side contrasts between Biden’s manner of speech and Warren’s crisp, detailed answers; or between his proud ownership of the ideological middle and her refusal to be outflanked by other liberals.

Allies of Biden pointed to the exchange over health care as an example of how he would draw contrasts with Warren and other candidates without becoming venomous.

“He made clear that everybody knew about the differences in their two health care plans,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., who is Biden’s campaign co-chairman. Asked about Biden’s aversion to making personal attacks onstage, Richmond said: “It’s not his style, he would never do that.”

Indeed, Biden, who served for decades as a senator from Delaware, at times acted more like a man on the Senate floor than someone in a crowded presidential field, referring to Warren as his “distinguished friend” as he raised questions about her plan to pay for single-payer health care.

“There’s no pressure at this point for either one of them to go on the attack,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “The potential downside is, frankly, much more likely than the upside.”

The relative lack of engagement between Biden and Warren may carry risks, too. For Biden, there is the chance that holding back against Warren could allow her to amass momentum that would make her harder to overcome later on. And for Warren, there is the possibility that her status as the challenger who is creating the most buzz could pass to a rival candidate — perhaps someone more eager to make the case against Biden directly.

Kathy Sullivan, a former head of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said it would be a mistake to write off the rest of the field in favor of the top two or three candidates.

“I know people still want to focus on Sanders and Biden and Warren and say it’s a three-person race,” she said. “I don’t think that’s accurate. I think it’s a mistake and it would be unfortunate if people didn’t give all of these other candidates a good look, too.”

Biden and Warren Avoid Direct Conflict -- But for How Long?

If Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are headed for a showdown, neither of them appears in a hurry to get there.

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